Oh cmon, this is minutes from the rest of the Apple buildings in the area, they aren't moving to a suburban campus, they are consolidating their suburban campuses.
I spent a bunch of time in "outlier" Apple buildings (Bubb 5, and something way out near Moffet Field after the Loma Prieta earthquake took out Apple's main engineering building). While being off campus is good for secrecy, it's terrible if you need to cooperate with other parts of the company.
You really need colocation to make things work. I expect two things out of this building:
First, it will improve a bunch of Apple's internal processes.
Second, they will run out of room sooner than they think, and I'd put money on them not even releasing leases on many outlier buildings.
I worked in the main Apple complex (R&D5 on Infinite Loop) and it seems like they're just doubling down on what worked well before. It was really nice in there to have a little private park interior space to lie on the grass or have parties and it was really practical to be able to park underneath (when there was space) and to be able to subdivide slices (at some level of granularity) to let members of different groups have a floor or a building to themselves. So this will be just like that but on a bigger scale and with more parkland to relax in and on, a more size-appropriate meeting space and not so much located in the middle of a vast sea of parking lot.
This will take a long time to build and move into, but once they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually manage to buy out that "missing piece" and incorporate it into the plan. One step at a time...
You really need colocation to make things work. I expect two things out of this building:
First, it will improve a bunch of Apple's internal processes.
Second, they will run out of room sooner than they think, and I'd put money on them not even releasing leases on many outlier buildings.