Fresh from his
trip to Germany, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple VP of Hardware Technology Johny Srugi -- the latter a graduate of Israel's Technion Institute of Technology -- have made their way to Israel for meetings and to attend the opening of a new set of
Apple R&D offices in Herzliya. Along with the announcement of a nearly $2 billion investment in
two new data centers to be located in Europe, Cook and Srugi met with various Israeli officials, including President Rueven Rivlin and former president Shimon Peres.
In addition to a visit to newspaper
Bild in Berlin, chatting with some German Apple retail workers, and a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss privacy and security issues, Cook also visited a glass factory in Augsburg where the large curved glass panels for Apple's Campus 2 are being made. Cook revealed in a tweet that the last of the 2,400 such panels needed for the exterior of the building was completed during his visit.
The new 12,500-square-foot research center in Israel, located about 20 minutes north of Tel Aviv, is not the first of Apple's real estate holdings in Israel: there are also R&D centers in Hafia, and Ra'anana. The new offices will become a home for many employees Apple acquired through buyouts of Israeli technology firms. It will employ some 800 to 1,000 workers, including many former members of Anobit, the flash memory firm Apple
bought in late 2010, along with employees formerly of motion-sensing firm Primesense, which Apple
acquired in late 2013.
VP of Hardware Johny Srugi and President Rivlen
While in Israel, Cook and Srugi met with current Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and also former President Shimon Peres. Israel is a leading country for the development of technology: the USB thumb drive, Windows XP and NT, the modern commercial firewall, early messaging program ICQ, the Centrino and Sandy Bridge processors for Intel, the earliest modern-style cell phones for Motorola, the Kindle Java platform for Amazon, were all invented or primarily developed there.
Top