Apple has spent a fortune on creating a huge expensive data centre which is actually just an empty building.
For a while now Apple has been touting the new $1 billion Apple data center in Carolina as its bid to enter cloud computing and a key component in its iCloud strategy.
Stories, which have been leaked to the tame Apple press, emphase how much Apple paid for the land and the amount of electricity it will go through.
However according to Robert X. Cringely's bog, the place has no equipment in it and is mostly empty.
It is difficult to find that out. Apple has built a tall earthen wall around the entire site and planted trees atop that. But if you steal your way from the Baptist cemetery next door you can see the top of a huge white building and a couple of big tanks. Only one truck visited the site.
What is odd is that the new data centre is supposed to be the centre of iCloud and iTunes activity, updating all those Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
More to the point, Apple has been telling the world+dog that its data centre has 500 times more space than IBM's equivalent.
Cringely has done some adding up and worked out that even if Apple's iCloud really was talking off, there is no way it needs that sort of space to keep operating. Apparently even Google, which keeps updating the whole Internet does not need that much. Apple could get by with a tenth of the space.
If it is trying to future proof the centre then it has wasted its money because every one knows that computers will get smaller.
"I think it's a joke. The building is a near-empty facility built primarily to intimidate Apple competitors. And so far it seems to be working," he wrote.
Apple, whatever you may think of them, is one of the most focussed, efficient and profitable tech companies in the world. Its supply chain is legendary in the industry for being lean and mean and totally fat-free. The thought of them making a huge, expensive building for nothing, just to "intimidate" someone (who? why?) is just silly. Link bait.
Ah I wish I could go back to the 80s when Pros were the only ones allowed to distribute info.
Having read both stories it is fairly obvious that Apple is not using its data centre. You have to ask why. The fact it is that it does not need it. Instead of wading into reporters who point out that Job's has no clothes you should be mindlessly speculating on what Jobs really has planned for the site. That is what Apple fanboys usually do.
A facility that size, even filled to capacity and working 24/7, can be staffed by 50 people, and that is not a skeleton crew, that is a full boats with all hands. Facilities this size even have sleeping quarters- its not a factory, the workers don't come and go at the noon whistle
Cringely is retarded. This article is extra double special retarded for not doing some basic reporting on how data centers run or Apple's facility. Tis has noting to do with fanboy-ism, because MAcs are retarded too, and iCloud has its own special shortbus.
You have incorrectly weighted Cringley's opinion in the balance of objective truth, and that has led you astray. I just feel sorry for the reporter here, who swallowed the hook, line and sinker on this complete nonsense.