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.
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
3 responses to “Apple hiring spree means something big is on the way”
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How about upgrading the Mac Mini? Just leave the case as it is and do some basic upgrades? It’s not like Apple has to borrow money to get something like that done. Just some basic upgrades until whatever new Mini they supposedly have in the works comes out? How about SOMETHING where I don’t have to spend on a Pro or an iMac with a screen I don’t need (I have two Apple Cinema Displays) or a laptop whos screen I’ll be bypassing. Unbeliveable that they don’t have the resources to do something that simple. At least leave a door in the thing so we can upgrade the RAM while we wait forever for a new model to come out. I’ll bet Jonny Ive and Tim Cook can’t relate to needing more RAM or waiting for a three-four year-old design to be updated by one of the biggest, most profitable companies in the world. “Just wait, you’ll like what we have coming”. That doesn’t help me right now.
Maybe they will figure out how to fit a battery in a laptop without glue.