Is Silicon Valley not the “in” place to be anymore? As more tech companies set up shop in San Francisco, Wired wonders whether Apple’s proposed “spaceship” headquarters could be a boondoggle. The circular, 2.8-million-square-foot glass showplace received final approval from the Cupertino City Council in November and should open in mid-2016. Expected to house up to 14,200 employees, the project’s original estimated cost of $3 billion has nearly doubled. But, notes the magazine’s Marcus Wohlsen, Silicon Valley’s talent is heading north.

Increasingly, young tech talent wants to live and work in cities. As a result, the hottest tech companies, from Google to Twitter to Uber, are setting up shop in San Francisco … In the cutthroat world of tech recruiting, catering to the demands of the talent is everything, and even Apple isn’t immune to the first rule of real estate: location, location, location.

Consumer technology dominates the tech scene in San Francisco, while companies in Silicon Valley are more focused on enterprise hardware and software, Wohlsen observes. In 2010, the Brookings Institution noted more than 43 percent of Americans with bachelor's degrees lived in 20 metropolitan areas, including Seattle, San Francisco and Raleigh, N.C. – all tech hubs, perhaps by no coincidence. “To be sure, Silicon Valley will remain a tech hub, but the point remains: The balance is shifting. And Apple is putting all its eggs in a mile-wide spaceship-like basket,” Wohlsen says. On the other hand, Apple has one big advantage: It’s Apple. In the end, the question will be whether that’s enough.