I think a lot of people in Cork would have had a stint in Apple at some point.
It’s a massive employer in the area.
I worked shifts there for a few months, responsible for installing the motherboards into the G4’s being made. There was a problem with some where the motherboard would seem to be seated correctly, but actually wasn’t and so the audio jack would pop out. I did my best, honest.
I also remember someone in Switzerland spending something like $15k for a 32GB machine.
Ireland is Apple's European Headquarters (also in Cork). Yet Apple cares so little about Ireland that they don't even bother to make a real apple store available.
The only thing they care about Ireland for is tax avoidance.
Ye gods, the usual racism and xenophobia from the peanut gallery across the Atlantic.
Apple cared so much about Ireland that they had several licenses grandfathered in for the likes of CompuB, eLara and Mactivate as Apple Resellers. There's also Select Ireland chain which act as the premium reseller equivalent @ https://ie.selectonline.com/
They're running a business.. it's not like you can't buy any Apple products in Ireland, running a retail store is likely not worth the hassle.
As for taxes that's on the EU and member countries for having such a complexity that only massive corporates can benefit, rather than simplifying and making it worthwhile to operate for businesses of all sizes.
What a lovely memory, and I think my first mac, a PB 180, was Irish, but if not, the accessories certainly were. And I wonder if the doorstop of a Powermac 8100 still at my childhood home was Irish too.
A different world, though. You couldn't find an Apple Mac most places, and I think I possessed the only Mac laptop in the whole of my university.
I wonder what Apple Ireland do now, apart from make nefarious plans to avoid tax and make orphans cry.
Walk onto the UCD and Trinity Campuses tomorrow morning, go into the Newman or Phil buildings. Count the Macbook Airs and iPads in lectures, generally coupled with both an iPhone Pro model and an iWatch. Only the grant students are using DELL Laptops through the University schemes.
Then go down the docklands, walk into any incubator or start up lab. Hell, anywhere with a good load of contractors. It will all be Macbook Pro for IDE and Terminal work - the odd Thinkpad for the greybeards.
This takes me back to my days in college. I studied Electrical Engineering in Dublin, and in 1983, we organised a tour of the facility. My hazy memories of it were it being just another factory. The real purpose of the trip to Cork was much more alcohol related.
I was in Cork with the wife on a personal vacation but got to pop up to the place because I was working with a few engineers from Apple, Cork at the time.
Ha ha, the thing that sticks with me though was that when I got up there, there was an encampment of "gypsies" that were on the next hill over. Or at least when I asked my host I was told that that was what they were.
> Among the functions the facility houses are customer care, finance, localisation, logistics, manufacturing, finance, sales support and transport management. In more recent times, it has also taken responsibility for iTunes after the business relocated from Luxembourg.
> Apple organises the supply of products to more than 147 countries through Cork, either through online, retail or resellers. The company supplies more than 110 physical stores and 24 online stores, which typically chalk up more than a billion visits a year, as well as a large number of direct and indirect resellers.
> [...]
> Apple has been based in Cork since 1980, when it first opened a manufacturing facility with 60 staff. It now employs more than 5,500 people across sales, distribution, manufacturing and technical support across four buildings. Work on a new four-storey office block, which will accommodate 1,000 employees, commenced recently and is expected to be completed in early 2018.
> In addition to the main campus, the company also employs more than 500 other people at an office on Lavitts Quay in Cork city centre, which does work in a number of areas including customer services, finance, and operations. A further 1,000 people work remotely for Apple in Ireland, 700 of whom are working for AppleCare technical support.
> He said Apple’s job targets had not been “remotely approached”, research and development facilities had not been located in Ireland and the skill levels of the workplace were “not particularly high”.
> He added: “The parent company has shown a lack of commitment to its Irish operation by opening a facility in Singapore [in 1981] which had a direct effect on performance in Cork.
The bottom line seems to be that Apple is going to get its manufacturing done where the serious mass-manufacturing capability is, and since the '90s that's been in China and/or South-East Asia. It wasn't always that way: back when the Cork plant opened, a meaningful amount of manufacturing which now would happen in Asia was taking place in Ireland (or in Scotland, in fact). As late as 1989 when Intel opened its first fab in Leixlip there was, IIRC, some kind of assembly plant there as well. But that's the way it is now. And on the other hand Apple seems more determined than ever never to let any of the Willy Wonka sh*t leave Cupertino, let alone for Cork specifically. So that leaves a mixed bag of "boring" functions, some of which are well served to be in a European branch office anyway.
> 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.
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I worked shifts there for a few months, responsible for installing the motherboards into the G4’s being made. There was a problem with some where the motherboard would seem to be seated correctly, but actually wasn’t and so the audio jack would pop out. I did my best, honest.
I also remember someone in Switzerland spending something like $15k for a 32GB machine.
The only thing they care about Ireland for is tax avoidance.
Apple cared so much about Ireland that they had several licenses grandfathered in for the likes of CompuB, eLara and Mactivate as Apple Resellers. There's also Select Ireland chain which act as the premium reseller equivalent @ https://ie.selectonline.com/
There's also an Apple store in Belfast fwiw.
Saying that, the new Apple store in Belfast is nice, much bigger than its previous spot in Victoria Square
As for taxes that's on the EU and member countries for having such a complexity that only massive corporates can benefit, rather than simplifying and making it worthwhile to operate for businesses of all sizes.
But the tax dodging should be eliminated completely, not expanded to smaller businesses :)
Isn't Apple a massive corporation? I don't think I understand your argument here.
The reasons to hire in a locality are almost entirely detached from the reasons to sell a product there.
And we can complain about tax avoidance we want, Ireland is getting exactly what they wanted out of their tax policy.
A different world, though. You couldn't find an Apple Mac most places, and I think I possessed the only Mac laptop in the whole of my university.
I wonder what Apple Ireland do now, apart from make nefarious plans to avoid tax and make orphans cry.
Then go down the docklands, walk into any incubator or start up lab. Hell, anywhere with a good load of contractors. It will all be Macbook Pro for IDE and Terminal work - the odd Thinkpad for the greybeards.
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=8nLMTmm08o8 -- title is "Steve Jobs opens Apple in Cork City, Ireland 1980", on a channel called CR's Video Vaults.
One claim in the video from the presenter is that Ireland had the highest density of Apple users in Europe at the time!
The unlucky ones had very dated Acorn RISC computers from the 'computers for schools' voucher promotions run by Supermarket Retailers like Tesco.
Ha ha, the thing that sticks with me though was that when I got up there, there was an encampment of "gypsies" that were on the next hill over. Or at least when I asked my host I was told that that was what they were.
Apple's corporate structure in Ireland is designed around leveraging tax law to its advantage.
It's unclear how much the former depends on the latter.
Conor McCabe has done a lot of work on the history:
https://www.rundale.org/2024/09/26/colonial-mutations-irelan...
If the anonymised wordpress site doesn't convince you, have a quick look at his bedfellows in Connolly and you'll get the picture very quickly.
https://www.connollybooks.org/product/sins-of-the-father
The car parks alone seem massive!
> Among the functions the facility houses are customer care, finance, localisation, logistics, manufacturing, finance, sales support and transport management. In more recent times, it has also taken responsibility for iTunes after the business relocated from Luxembourg.
> Apple organises the supply of products to more than 147 countries through Cork, either through online, retail or resellers. The company supplies more than 110 physical stores and 24 online stores, which typically chalk up more than a billion visits a year, as well as a large number of direct and indirect resellers.
> [...]
> Apple has been based in Cork since 1980, when it first opened a manufacturing facility with 60 staff. It now employs more than 5,500 people across sales, distribution, manufacturing and technical support across four buildings. Work on a new four-storey office block, which will accommodate 1,000 employees, commenced recently and is expected to be completed in early 2018.
> In addition to the main campus, the company also employs more than 500 other people at an office on Lavitts Quay in Cork city centre, which does work in a number of areas including customer services, finance, and operations. A further 1,000 people work remotely for Apple in Ireland, 700 of whom are working for AppleCare technical support.
Note that 'finance' is listed twice. ;) (That expansion was formally announced in 2022, now with a capacity target of 1,300 employees: https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/ida-ire... .)
Apple's PR piece marking the 40th anniversary of the Cork campus https://www.apple.com/ie/newsroom/2020/11/apples-cork-campus... also makes sure to mention the "team of 20 to 30 manufacturing trainers". (Earlier there was also the famously snotty August 2016 "letter to customers" provoked by the tax controversy https://www.apple.com/ie/customer-letter/ .)
It's worth noting that even in 1988 the then Irish Minister for Finance wasn't very happy with the level of Apple's commitment to Cork https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-... :
> He said Apple’s job targets had not been “remotely approached”, research and development facilities had not been located in Ireland and the skill levels of the workplace were “not particularly high”.
> He added: “The parent company has shown a lack of commitment to its Irish operation by opening a facility in Singapore [in 1981] which had a direct effect on performance in Cork.
The bottom line seems to be that Apple is going to get its manufacturing done where the serious mass-manufacturing capability is, and since the '90s that's been in China and/or South-East Asia. It wasn't always that way: back when the Cork plant opened, a meaningful amount of manufacturing which now would happen in Asia was taking place in Ireland (or in Scotland, in fact). As late as 1989 when Intel opened its first fab in Leixlip there was, IIRC, some kind of assembly plant there as well. But that's the way it is now. And on the other hand Apple seems more determined than ever never to let any of the Willy Wonka sh*t leave Cupertino, let alone for Cork specifically. So that leaves a mixed bag of "boring" functions, some of which are well served to be in a European branch office anyway.
But if you don't know what goes on in Apple Cork, don't worry, you aren't alone! Reposting part of an old comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12389869 :
> 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.
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