3 ms·

True story: in the mid-2000s I was in the audience at an Apple recruiting talk for H1Bs at a European university (including one fairly-well-known then-Apple dev

by leoc 10y ago

True story: in the mid-2000s I was in the audience at an Apple recruiting talk for H1Bs at a European university (including one fairly-well-known then-Apple dev/manager). It didn't go very well: the audience was oblivious and largely uninterested, the Appleers were tetchy, I asked an impertinent question involving HyperCard. At one stage the rambling audience Q&A turned to a long discussion of the hypothetical possibility of Apple opening a European office at some point in the future. Now granted these were SW dev types rather than QAs or whatever, but ... I didn't quite have the heart to tell them about Cork. I'm not so sure about this bit, but IIRC at this time (and a long time afterwards) Apple wasn't investing much effort in the pretence that Cork was a serious operation, to the extent that the access road to the site wasn't in good repair and hadn't seen attention in ages, possibly since it was built. [EDIT: I am duly corrected on this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12390072 below.]

jads 10y ago
To say Apple's Cork presence is just a pretense is largely inaccurate. I've been to the Cork campus numerous times while I worked for the company for seven years (2005-2011). The campus was, and is, still a huge base of operations for Apple. The majority of their AppleCare international support is based there (both support personnel and management/exec), as are many other departments. There are, literally, hundreds of people there from all across Europe who have relocated to Cork. Beyond the main Holyhill campus, Apple has a large amount of office space within Cork's city centre. Additionally, Apple also has a pretty big assembly line there. Many of their products have also been (and still are) assembled there. For many of the PowerPC and earlier Intel machines, if the serial number started "CK", it was assembled in Cork (it's been a while since I've memorized Apple's serial number structure, but they used to be much easier to parse). However, the area of Cork that Apple's campus is located isn't very affluent and suffers like many inner-city boroughs in Ireland and Europe. Ultimately, the state of the roads isn't Apple's responsibility. You'd hope that a company like Apple could lean on the local government to improve it, but Apple wasn't the company it is today, back in the early 2000s. It was getting there, but it was still coming out of the near-bankrupcy 90s.
- leoc 10y ago
  Thanks. I think my anecdote still illustrates how fully removed Cork was from any of the high-value development or R&D work that Apple seems to have been accounting to Ireland though.
  - jads 10y ago
    Definitely agree with you on the development / R&D. Cork is more a logistical base that's more about the day to day workings of the company, as opposed to coming up with the next big thing.

by leoc 10y ago

jads 10y ago

To say Apple's Cork presence is just a pretense is largely inaccurate. I've been to the Cork campus numerous times while I worked for the company for seven years (2005-2011). The campus was, and is, still a huge base of operations for Apple. The majority of their AppleCare international support is based there (both support personnel and management/exec), as are many other departments. There are, literally, hundreds of people there from all across Europe who have relocated to Cork. Beyond the main Holyhill campus, Apple has a large amount of office space within Cork's city centre. Additionally, Apple also has a pretty big assembly line there. Many of their products have also been (and still are) assembled there. For many of the PowerPC and earlier Intel machines, if the serial number started "CK", it was assembled in Cork (it's been a while since I've memorized Apple's serial number structure, but they used to be much easier to parse). However, the area of Cork that Apple's campus is located isn't very affluent and suffers like many inner-city boroughs in Ireland and Europe. Ultimately, the state of the roads isn't Apple's responsibility. You'd hope that a company like Apple could lean on the local government to improve it, but Apple wasn't the company it is today, back in the early 2000s. It was getting there, but it was still coming out of the near-bankrupcy 90s.

leoc 10y ago
Thanks. I think my anecdote still illustrates how fully removed Cork was from any of the high-value development or R&D work that Apple seems to have been accounting to Ireland though.
- jads 10y ago
  Definitely agree with you on the development / R&D. Cork is more a logistical base that's more about the day to day workings of the company, as opposed to coming up with the next big thing.