Is Apple Planning New iPhone OS Devices?

Ed Sutherland ()

Is Apple Planning New iPhone OS Devices?

Is Apple considering its iPhone OS for products other than the iPhone and iPad? A new job ad by the Cupertino, Calif. electronics maker seeking an Engineering Manager suggests such an expansion could be in the works. The manager would be tasked with leading “a team focused on bring-up of iPhone OS on new platforms.”

Such a team would be responsible for “low-level platform architecture, firmware, core drivers and bring-up of new hardware platforms,” according to the job listing posted last week and first spotted by Computerworld.

Potential candidates for migrating to the ARM-based iPhone OS may be AppleTV, the MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini. Already, ARM chips made by the Apple-owned PA Semiconductor makes chips for the yet-to-ship iPad tablet, the iPhone and iPods.

[Via MacRumors and Computerworld]

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About the author

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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  • http://ihbs.co.uk Ben

    perhaps a new interface for front row, where you can run iphone apps from your mac, rather than just your pad or phone

  • Bart Kela

    Ben,

    This team would be about bringing the iPhone OS to new products. Most likely Apple thinks it is better to have a well-knit specialized team to do this every time they introduce a new platform, rather than call engineers from other projects to stop what they’re doing. That is, they don’t want to steal iPhone engineers working on the next generation phone to make them write device drivers for the iPad. Stuff like that.

    It has nothing to do with new interfaces for Front Row or writing emulation software.

  • Jacob

    I wonder if this means that the Apple TV will seem some A4/iPhone OS lovin’. There hobby product hasn’t had a hardware upgrade yet and the Hardware in the iPad can support 720P as it is. So maybe the Apple TV will be the next product to run the iPhone OS. This way you could download games and apps from the app store to run on your TV as well as your iPhone/iPod and iPad.

  • http://ihbs.co.uk Ben