Apple’s Tim Cook bids farewell to old HQ and signals future events in ‘spaceship’

Apple chief executive Tim Cook said his farewell to the company’s town hall theater at its current headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. The comment came at the close of the company’s event introducing the Apple iPhone SE and a new version of the iPad Pro.

Apple HQ
Apple HQ

As he closed the hour-long event, Cook said he had a lot of fond memories in the town hall room. No doubt he was thinking about Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and all of the events where he invoked the “reality distortion field” (his ability to mesmerize audiences) and said, “One more thing … .”

“This is probably the last product announcement in this town hall,” Cook says. “The iPod was announced in this room.”

Next year, in 2017, Apple will be moving into the new circular headquarters that everyone has dubbed the “spaceship.” Apple has a new facility for gatherings in that building that will replace the 300-seat auditorium at its Infinite Loop campus.

I sat in that old Apple theater many times myself, including the time when I ran out of power on just about every important device I was using to cover an Apple press conference.

Apple's old campus
Apple’s old campus

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.