back to article Apple to splash $10bn raisin' American bit barns

Apple has said it will spend $10bn on data centres in the US over the next five years, and will set up a new $1bn campus in Texas. The iGiant announced the plans for the US expansion today, buttering up the administration with promises of 20,000 new jobs in the country by 2023. It comes after president Donald Trump criticised …

  1. Jove Bronze badge

    New Austin Campus

    "The new campus, in North Austin, will be 133 acres and create jobs in engineering, R&D, operations, finance, sales and customer support."

    I wonder; Has Apple set it's sights on the pool of Dell Engineers?

  2. LordHighFixer

    The new paradigm

    It used to be (most recently) personal computers connecting to remote servers in data centers. With all the hype hype to go all cloudy cloudy, will the new paradigm be personal data centers connecting to remote clouds. I am just asking for a friend.

    1. Teiwaz

      Re: The new paradigm

      will the new paradigm be personal data centers connecting to remote clouds. I am just asking for a friend.

      I think the new paradigm will dumb personal devices connecting to remote cloud.

      Google Facebook and the like will like it as they get to keep everyones info and mine it to their hearts content, apple for the subs and they can charge the same for a simpler cheaper device and MS for both the mining opportunities, the sub and surface devices that aren't much more than a screen connected to a net(sometimes)work chip.

      1. JohnFen

        Re: The new paradigm

        "I think the new paradigm will dumb personal devices connecting to remote cloud."

        Which is hilarious, because that's the OLD paradigm that personal computers freed us all from. How soon people forget why fleeing the client/server paradigm was considered to be such an awesome thing.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          "Which is hilarious, because that's the OLD paradigm that personal computers freed us all from"

          Exactly, but the whole web+cloud business mirrors the mainframe one. Just on "clustered" cheaper servers instead of monolithic behemoths. And it's hilarious when personal computers have much more processing power than a lot of users need - which is mostly used to process and execute some javacript.

          I was laughing yesterday at a cloud ad when a poor company executive was complaining the servers in the room were to slow and had too little power for his workloads and the solution was the cloud. The cloud business model works exactly because they can put a lot of workloads on the same server, as processing power greatly outpaced most users needs, and many servers actually run near to idle most of the time.

          Moreover, if the speed of your internet connection to the cloud doesn't become quickly a bottleneck, it often means you servers aren't really that taxed.

          Sure, some business may have temporary spikes that doesn't justify adding more hardware, and the processing-power renting model is a solution, but those business are rarely those SMBs the ad was aimed to. They should tell the real truth "you can fire most of your IT people, and let us manage your all of you data..."

          Does anyone know what happens if a company goes bankrupt? Assets stored in the cloud may have a value - is the cloud provider bounded to keep them (one day they may not exist but there), or if payments are stopped it can delete everything, wiping out those value?

  3. Mayday
    Flame

    Green Credentials

    "Apple makes much of its green credentials; all of its data centres have run on 100 per cent renewable energy since 2013."

    That's lovely.

    How about we make some products that are reusable and upgradable and not filled with glue and are essentially single use throwaway items?

    1. David 132 Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: Green Credentials

      Well they'll need all that energy for the new barns they're raisin' (according to the sub-head)... I hear those have high currant requirements.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Green Credentials

      Apple takes back all its products for recycling, and even designed robots to pick apart the phones so everything within can be recycled. Can you find another phone OEM that does a better job?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Trollface

        Re: Green Credentials

        I thought they just swapped the model number and sold them as new for £1300 ???

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Green Credentials

        On a more serious note; this must be costing them a fortune in China; been here nearly a week, and the lack of iPhone use amongst family and friends is very noticeable.

        When we were out here 4 years ago, nearly everyone was sporting some version of the iphone, so far I havent seen one; most are sporting Huawei phones, and Xiaomi is no longer an unknown brand.

      3. HolySchmoley

        Re: Green Credentials

        >robots to pick apart the phones so everything within can be recycled

        How do they recycle the glue, which is well on its way to becoming the dominant component in recent years?

      4. JohnFen

        Re: Green Credentials

        "Can you find another phone OEM that does a better job?"

        Yes, there are quite a lot of them. Making a phone that is easy to disassemble is far superior to Apple's recycling method. In the first place, it makes the phones more repairable, which makes it possible for them to be refurbished and reused -- and that is always better than recycling. In the second place, it makes it possible for pretty much anyone to recycle phones, which means that (for example) my local electronics reuse/recycling center could do the job. That is far superior to having to return it to Apple because it makes recycling easier and more accessible, and removes the need to transport the things to some remote recycling facility.

        Apple's approach is better than nothing at all, but that's about all that can be said for it.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Green Credentials

          Go check out itfixit.com's repairability ratings. Apple phones don't have the highest repairability ratings to be sure, but they are quite a bit higher than Samsung flagships and those of several other big name Android OEMs.

          The only thing replaceable in just about ANY phones these days is the battery and display. No one is fixing a phone if one of the chips goes bad, because even if they can figure out which chip went bad no one is soldering that finely by hand unless their day job is as a brain surgeon.

          1. JohnFen

            Re: Green Credentials

            "No one is fixing a phone if one of the chips goes bad, because even if they can figure out which chip went bad no one is soldering that finely by hand unless their day job is as a brain surgeon."

            This is simply incorrect. Soldering those SMDs is not that difficult. I do it by hand regularly, and in many parts of the world there are street vendors who make those sorts of repairs right there while you watch.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Green Credentials

      Industrial scale device recycling is ambivalent to glue, and AFAIK there's been no proper analysis to compare the whole life impact of glue versus nominal repairability.

      Don't overlook the additional impact of after market supply chain, which can be considerable.

    4. Jove Bronze badge

      Re: Green Credentials

      Stay green - don't buy one.

  4. JohnFen

    One of the things Apple does best

    Patting itself on the back has always been one of the thing Apple does best.

  5. -tim
    Black Helicopters

    $42? What is it doing?

    I seems to me that is about $42 per American worth of data processing capability. In my industry it cost about $.02 per record with security and audit process in addition to typical IT capex and opex expenses. So is Apple keeping 88,000 records of data on every American and if so, what and why?

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