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New Apple HQ's glass walls a literal headache for walking workers

Commentary: The company's glass-filled Apple Park headquarters may be design-sexy, but there appears to be a practical issue: Staffers are smacking into walls.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.


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Beautiful, but dangerous?

James Martin/CNET

Beautiful design can have its drawbacks.

Some things can be so gorgeous that practicalities don't get their fair share of forethought. 

Naturally, this doesn't often happen with Apple products. 

Yes, there was that instance when holding an iPhone 4 wrong could cause conniptions, but Apple has a reputation for its products just working. 

Now, however, there seems to be an especially troubling instance of imperfect design function, one that's making Apple employees suffer. 

As Bloomberg magazine reports, Apple's new, stunning spaceship HQ building, officially called Apple Park, is giving staff a headache. 

It seems, you see, that the spaceship is garlanded with so much glass -- around the outside of the building and also walling off offices inside -- that employees don't always see the panes. 

They end up banging their heads straight into glass, as if they were descendants of Mr. Bean.

Worse, Bloomberg intimates that it isn't just the glass that's to blame. It's the darned iPhone. 

Some staff members are apparently buried so deeply in the phone that they don't even stop to think they might be heading for a glass wall. 

Which seems odd, given that there's apparently little else around but glass walls.

Apple didn't respond to a request for comment. 

The spaceship HQ was designed to house 12,000 people, and the company began moving employees there in April. 

I could find no public record of a spate of injuries emanating from Apple's new building. Marketwatch, however, says it found evidence of two incidents in which employees suffered cuts.

Bloomberg says some people have tried to stick Post-It notes on the glass, to warn potential headbangers -- only to be told by powers-that-be this was not an appropriate remedy.

The aesthetics of that aren't optimum, are they? It would be akin to putting a nasty green case around your iPhone. 

Which surely no self-respecting Apple employee would ever contemplate.

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