Before he passed away, one of the bigger projects that Steve Jobs was involved with was the new Apple campus in Cupertino, California. The 2.8 million square foot campus was first presented by Jobs to the Cupertino City Council in 2011 and was originally scheduled to open in 2015. However, the opening of the new “spaceship” campus is reportedly being delayed until 2016.
Apple filed a revised timetable to to the City of Cupertino on November 14 due to delays that the company has seen affecting the city’s environmental impact report, which could be set back from a late-2012 completion to June 2013. As a result, Apple would not be able to start work until 2014, which also pushes back the opening date.
David Brandt, Cupertino’s city manager, said: “They could conceivably break ground in 2013, but only if everything goes smoothly.” All this depends on the city council approving the project quickly and on residents not filing legal challenges. Brandt said the project is moving a little slowly.
Apple notified the city in August about its plans to update the proposal in September, but filing it in November made an early 2013 approval unrealistic. The new document doesn’t have any major changes from the plan that Jobs had first presented to the council in June 2011, just four months before his death. The revisions included a plan to complete the project without having to truck out any dirt and the company wants a free-standing, 1,000-seat auditorium farther away from one of the nearby roads than in the original plan.
The city is planning to post the new plan online after Thanksgiving. By then it is hoping to have added enough servers to handle the influx of traffic expected from Apple fans.
