Following his widely-publicized keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave another presentation this week, this time at a Cupertino, California, city counsel meeting, reports TechCrunch. There, the celebrity chief executive pitched plans to build a massive new Apple campus that Jobs says resembles a “spaceship.”
“Apple is growing like a weed,” Jobs told the panel. And because of this, the company has far outgrown its original campus on 1 Infinite Loop. To solve their space problem, Jobs proposes the construction of a striking circular building that is capable of providing work space to 12,000 Apple employees. Jobs says that Apple has hired “some great architects … some of the best in the world” to design the building, which will be relatively short, and mostly covered in giant panes of curved glass (something Jobs says they’ve learned how to make through the construction of the company’s retail operations).
The site of the additional planned campus is 150-acre lot, 100 of which Apple purchased from Hewlett Packard in 2010. The land is currently used primarily for apricot orchards, but also has a lot of ugly parking lots, says Jobs. About 20 percent of the land is landscaped. But because Apple plans to put the most of the parking lots required by 12,000 people underground, the property will be 80 percent landscaped, with about 6,000 trees.
Rather than use publicly available electricity, the new Apple campus will be powered by its own electricity plant, and use the standard electrical grid for backup power, in the event of an outage.
Jobs also revealed that Apple plans to increase its workforce from about 9,500 employees to 13,000 employees by 2015, the year Apple hopes to complete construction of the new building.
Watch Jobs pitch the awe-struck Cupertino city counsel here:
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
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The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.