Apple campus progress coming along beautifully

There are certain things you can rely on. Every day, tide goes in, tide goes out. Every year, the swallows return to Capistrano. And every month, aerial looky-loos upload a fresh course of material showcasing the state of the emerging Apple Campus 2.

As we noted last time, the project is scarcely what you could call near to completion, but it has been in a distinct home stretch for a while. Apple plans to move into the 2.8 million square foot, ring-shaped building and/or interdimensional gateway (the company has not technically denied this possibility) sometime in 2017.

Its present condition, as observed by the silent and seemingly omnipresent mechanical eyes of local drone enthusiast Matthew Roberts’ hovering go-betweens, must be like watching a toddler growing up before our eyes for those who kept tabs on the building since 2014. Back then it was just a ring of dirt, looking like nothing so much as the world’s most poorly planned bull ring.

In the four minutes of footage you can spot the rudiments of landscaping beginning inside the ring, forming the basis of what will one day be a small park, complete with a pond. Nearby, rows of separate office and R&D buildings are lined up in different states of construction, looking like a timeline of each other.

Some of the underground structures have (of course) disappeared, while others are in the process of vanishing beneath the earth. (Perhaps disappointingly, this means subtracting from the several stories-high mountain of dirt built up over the last year and a half.) And, as always, it looks like Tim Cook is keeping California’s solar panel industry in business all by himself.

• Apple Campus, August 2016 [YouTube]
• Drone Footage Shows Homestretch [Curbed SF]