- Apple is putting the finishing touches on its new $5 billion campus.
- It can take 10 minutes to walk from the parking garage to the main building, so Apple will provide 1,000 free bikes to its employees.
- The bikes are logo-free and are painted “Apple Gray.”
Apple Park – Apple’s new $5 billion campus – is huge.
The “ring” building is situated on 175 acres, so it can take a lucky Apple employee as long as 10 minutes to walk from the parking garage to their office.
So Apple will provide 1,000 free bikes and 2,000 bike parking spots on its campus for employees to get from place to place.
Most Silicon Valley tech giants provide free bicycles for their employees, but given Apple’s corporate preferences, its bikes are minimally designed, compared to Google’s rainbow-colored two-wheelers.
It seems Apple settled on a completely chrome, minimalist bicycle design, and ordered a whole lot.
Check the Apple bikes out, courtesy of someone who uploaded footage to Snapchat last Tuesday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWMTHOijtD4
Here's a screenshot from the video:
Wired has been aggressively covering Apple's bikes for years. In 2011, it published a photo of a silver Apple bike used at the company's old headquarters, One Infinite Loop.
Back then, the bikes had exactly zero logos on them - even the tires were free of brand names.
The bikes are made by Public Bikes, a Northern California bike company that has also sold bikes to Facebook, Mozilla, and Square. But Public does not list Apple under brands it's worked with on its website.
The bikes are custom-built and painted "Apple Gray," according to The Wall Street Journal. That's a sharp contrast to Google's more famous bikes, which are painted rainbow colors, like the search engine's logo.
However, Apple is unlikely to emulate some parts of Google's bike program, such as the fact that hundreds of its bikes go missing from its Mountain View campus every week, and that people who live around the campus feel entitled to use them - even if they don't work for Google.
Given Apple's emphasis on security, you can be sure that it won't be letting Cupertino kids ride on these "Apple Gray" bikes.
And don't worry: For Apple employees who don't like biking, there will be an electric golf cart to take them from the parking garages to the ring.
Took a better picture of the Apple bikes? Email the author at [email protected].
