Life at Apple headquarters

Nestled within Cupertino Valley–one of Silicon Valley’s many self-proclaimed “hearts”–is a street known officially as Infinite Loop. The name comes from the fact the road encircles a business campus (Infinite Loop is actually a crescent, with the other end of the loop provided by Mariani Street). Located on that campus are the six buildings of Apple’s Headquarters. If you ever need to get in touch with Apple, all mail should be sent to 1 Infinite Loop, but employees and those in the know simply refer to the buildings as IL1 through IL6. Taken all together, those six buildings total 850,000 square feet. The name infinite loop is also a programming pun, referring to a set of instructions which loops endlessly and which were the downfall of earlier computers. On modern machines, they normally result in a frozen screen.Apple has always been the cool kid among the Silicon Valley IT companies. Steve Jobs made a name for himself walking barefoot around the office, even after his company hit the Fortune 500. The “1984″ TV ad, directed by Ridley Scott and based off of George Orwell’s classic novel, also revealed a sense of excitement and innovation that set Apple apartone which is encapsulated in its products, from the film-making ease of Final Cut Studio to the wireless internet service-accessible iPhone and iPad.Employees at Apple are eligible for the Apple Fellowship, awarded to those who made great technical or leadership contributions to personal computing while at the company. Recipients include Bill Atkinson, who was part of the Macintosh development team and creator or MacPaint; Alan Kay, whose work at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center was later used in the Lisa and Macintosh models; Allan Alcorn, the creator of the video game Pong and involved with the presentation of the Apple I prototype; and Steve Wozniak.Those who have applied for jobs at Apple have described both casual and intensely technical interviews, mainly based on the position they’re applying for. If you plan on being the next Apple programmer, you’d better be prepared for a lot of technical exercises, sometimes with multiple solutions. However, there may be more job openings soon. Apple has had a second campus in development since 2006, located just one mile east of the current location. This new campus is composed of contiguous plots and totals 50 acres.You might be wondering about Apple’s distinctive logo. The apple was actually the second design for the companythe first was an image of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. Designer Rob Janoff came up with the new logo in 1976, and included a bite to differentiate the apple from a cherry. Originally, the apple was rainbow-colored, on Steve Jobs’s command. However, in 1998 the rainbow theme was replaced with a monochrome black. While the logo has remained monochrome since then, the colors have shifted twice, resulting in the current “Glass” theme.