Apple has a secret team
working to bring noninvasive glucose monitoring to its smartwatch, but that’s not all it’s pursuing. Also: The company’s
upcoming headset likely won’t need an iPhone and
follow-up models are already in the works, plus schedule
changes are in store for Apple retail employees.
Last week in
Power On: Apple’s upcoming
mixed-reality headset and WWDC are a perfect match.
The Starters
The Apple Park campus.
Photographer: Sam Hall/Bloomberg
Apple Inc. is famous for keeping its future products under wraps, but even by those standards the company’s Exploratory Design Group is secretive.
As I
first revealed last week, this covert team is the brains behind future no-prick glucose tracking technology for the Apple Watch. And that’s not all it’s working on. The group is akin to X, Alphabet Inc.’s “moonshot factory,” which helped develop Waymo self-driving car technology, Google Glass and Loon internet balloons.
Though the Apple team — better known inside the company as XDG — is primarily focused on the glucose work, there are several other projects underway and it’s made key contributions to existing Apple devices.
The team originated several years ago and was long led by Bill Athas, one of the few people to have the title of engineering fellow at Apple, until he passed away unexpectedly at the end of last year. Athas was seen by the late co-founder Steve Jobs and current Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook as one of the brightest engineering minds at the company.
The XDG team sits within Apple’s Hardware Technologies group, led by Senior Vice President
Johny Srouji, and works at a building known as Tantau 9 right outside of the Apple Park spaceship-shaped ring.
The team is now run on a day-to-day basis by a number of Athas lieutenants, including top Apple engineers and scientists Jeff Koller, Dave Simon, Heather Sullens, Bryan Raines and Jared Zerbe. Koller, Simon and Raines are involved in the glucose project, while Sullens and Zerbe manage other groups within the larger team.
Apple’s Johny Srouji, who oversees the XDG team.
Source: Apple
The Exploratory Design Group operates as a startup within Apple and is made up of only a few hundred people, mostly engineers and academic types. That’s a far cry from the many hundreds of people in the Special Projects Group, which is focused on
Apple’s self-driving car, or the more than a thousand engineers in Apple’s Technology Development Group, the team
building the mixed-reality headset.
Beyond the glucose work, XDG is working on next-generation display technology, artificial intelligence and features for AR/VR headsets that help people with eye diseases. The team originally came together under Athas to work on low-power processor technologies and next-generation batteries for smartphones, efforts that continue.
Like Alphabet’s moonshot team — and those at other Silicon Valley companies — the XDG staff is given vast financial resources and headroom to explore countless ideas. The members have a different remit than the engineering teams churning out new iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches annually. Instead, they’re instructed to work on projects until they can determine whether or not an idea is feasible.
The unit is even
more secretive than
Alphabet’s X but it’s not a pie-in-the-sky operation. It has already had breakthroughs that made their way into Apple products. Many of the chip and battery technologies developed by XDG have been shipping for years in iPhones, iPads and Macs.
While the team operates as a startup, it is still compartmentalized like any other Apple division: People working on one project within XDG aren’t allowed to communicate about their work with other members of XDG that are assigned to different projects.
But the team’s members are organized by skill sets rather than individual projects. That means that one engineer could be working on several initiatives that fit their skills, rather than on one specific product.
The Bench
An HTC headset at the Apple WWDC conference in 2017.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
The Apple headset probably won’t require an iPhone, and other new models are in development. The company’s first mixed-reality headset, unlike the original Apple Watch, probably won’t require an iPhone for setup or use. I’m told that the latest test versions of the device and its
onboard xrOS operating system can be set up without an iPhone and can download a user’s content and iCloud data directly from the cloud.
You will, however, be able to transfer your data from an iPhone or iPad, just as you can today when setting up a new device. As
I’ve written previously, the headset doesn’t have a remote control but instead is operated by a user’s eyes and hands.
A key feature for text input — in-air typing — is available on the latest internal prototypes, I’m told. But it’s been finicky in testing. So if you get the first headset, you still may want to pair an iPhone to use its touch-screen keyboard. The hope within Apple is to make rapid improvements after the device is released. The company expects its headset to follow the same path as the original Apple Watch in that respect.
Apple is currently
planning to unveil its first headset, which may be dubbed the Reality Pro, at WWDC in June. The product would then ship toward the end of 2023 at the earliest. But there are already follow-ups in the works, too.
As I wrote in January, Apple is
planning to launch a cheaper headset with lower-end display and processor components at the end of 2024 or in 2025. That will help address users who don’t want to pay around $3,000 for the high-end model. Based on trademark filings, the cheaper version may be dubbed the Reality One. And, unsurprisingly, there’s already a second-generation version of the Reality Pro underway.
I’m told the focus of the second Pro headset is performance. While the first model will have an M2 chip — plus a secondary chip for AR and VR processing — it’s not powerful enough to output graphics at a level Apple would ideally like. For instance, FaceTime
will only support realistic VR representations of two people at a time, not everyone in a conference call.
Apple’s first headset
was initially planned to be even more powerful, featuring a separate hub with additional processing power that could be beamed to the device across a home wirelessly. But former Apple design chief Jony Ive nixed that idea. Now the company is working to add a more powerful processor (perhaps a variant of the M3 or M4) for the second model, helping bridge that gap.
An Apple store employee helps a customer.
Photographer: Alejandro Cegarra/Bloomberg
Apple rolls out scheduling changes to all US and Canada retail employees. Over the past year, some Apple retail employees have voiced concerns about pay, benefits and working hours. To address some of those issues, Apple has revamped its scheduling process, including the number of hours it requires for both full-time and part-time workers. I first wrote about
those changes last June when they were rolled out to some stores as a pilot.
Beginning on April 29, Apple will bring the new policies to all of its roughly 300 stores in the US and Canada, according to a recent memo. The main changes:
- A maximum of five consecutive workdays, down from the prior limit of six.
- More weekend time off for part-time employees.
- A consistent weekend workday or day off for full-time employees.
The caveat is that these new rules could go out the window during peak shopping periods (a new iPhone launch, for instance) or for all-hands meetings. Another change is that time off must be requested at least four weeks in advance, a slight adjustment from a prior requirement of about three weeks in advance.
Still, some part-time Apple retail employees are concerned about another change that they say is being introduced by managers at some stores: a requirement to work on weekends. They fear that they’ll be terminated from the company if they don’t agree to work on those days, despite not having to do so when they joined Apple.
Other part-time employees also have said that their managers are asking them to work at least a few extra hours per week than they were previously required to.
The Schedule
The Steve Jobs Theater, where Apple held its shareholder meetings before the pandemic.
Photographer: Nic Coury/Bloomberg
March 10: Apple’s annual shareholder meeting. Cook and his lieutenants, such as General Counsel Kate Adams, will take the virtual stage to field carefully selected questions from shareholders and give some company updates. Major news rarely breaks at these conferences, but there will be shareholder votes on Apple’s board, executive pay, labor and other matters.
Post-Game Q&A
Q:
Do you think the Apple Card will expand to Europe anytime soon?
Q:
How risky is the Apple glucose initiative to current medical device makers?
Q:
Should we expect new AirPods Pro earbuds this year?
Email me, or you can always send me a tweet or DM @
markgurman.
I’m on Signal at 413-340-6295; Wickr and Telegram at GurmanMark; or ProtonMail at
markgurman@protonmail.com.
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