From Apple Spaceship to Apple Park: Steve Jobs’s final vision of the future to open in April

IT is the final vision of the future from Apple founder Steve Jobs and it is now ready to launch.

THE Apple Spaceship is ready for launch.

In his final public event on June 7, 2011, Steve Jobs pitching his vision for his “one more thing” to a meeting of the Cupertino council — an enormous new headquarters for the company he built.

It would be, he said, the “best office building in the world”.

With the distinctive doughnut-shaped building, it’s been known as the spaceship. Now it has a proper name and, a few years later than originally planned, an opening date.

Apple today announced 70 hectare Apple Park will be ready for employees to move in from April, although it will take more than six months to shift 12,000 employees to the new Cupertino campus.

Like with everything to do with Apple, the building is all about the minute details of design.

The outside walls are glass, which is not unusual for an office building. But in this case, Apple says, the walls are made from the world’s largest panels of curved glass.

Then there is the 17-megawatt solar rooftop, which will make it one of the largest on-site solar energy installations in the world and the building will be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy.

Apple as a company has increasingly had a fitness focus through the Apple Watch, and that is being reflected in the campus which will have a 9000 sq m fitness centre for staff and 3km of running and walking track around the campus.

The campus will have an Apple Store open to the public but perhaps the closest most people will get to it is footage of future Apple events which will be held in the 1000-seat auditorium named in honour of Jobs.

Jobs, who died four months after that council meeting, would have been 62 tomorrow.

The Steve Jobs Theatre has an entrance that is a 6m high glass cylinder that is 50m wide and is built on one of the high points of the campus overlooking the headquarters that Steve Jobs envisioned.