Something hot is brewing in Apple’s hardware department.
Apple has been busy hiring a record number of engineers over the last few months. The move comes after the company also went on a designer hiring spree, indicating a major new product or two could be in the works.
Job openings for engineering jobs at Apple rose 80% from the period starting in September until just last week. The company’s listings went from 665 open hardware engineering positions to 1,198 last week.

Photo: Thinknum
What exactly Apple is working on is anyone’s best guess right now. We know the company is interested in expanding the Apple Watch’s capabilities. It also has augmented reality and virtual reality headset research projects in the works to go with it’s long rumored self-driving car project. Plus, the Mac lineup needs a lot of love still too.
As first spoted by ThinkNum, job listings include titles like Analog Layout Designer, Advanced Material Scientist (Electrolyte Development), 3D Perception/Computer Vision Algorithm Engineer, Sensor Design Engineer, Motion Sensing Hardware Engineer: Magnetics, and even a Flexible Display Technologist.
There are hundreds of other titles up for grabs though so probably only a few people at Apple really know the full picture. Now that Apple is bringing back all of its foreign cash it certainly has enough funds to explore some new ideas, even if they never result in publicly released products.