We’re going to go from carrying Apple products to having them carry us. With a self-driving electric car, the technology company is preparing to land in the automotive industry. Despite the company’s secrecy, its project is an open secret. This is how it is interpreted that, according to Bloomberg, the technology group just hired a top manager from Lamborghini two weeks ago. This is Luigi Taraborrelli, who has been responsible for the chassis and aerodynamics of the models developed by the Italian brand for the past two decades. The leap into this new sector comes among other surprises that the Cupertino-based company is preparing. His commitment to health is also growing, and he has very advanced mixed reality goggles that he intends to use to break into the metaverse. Apple is determined to be more than just the brand behind the iPhone, iPad and iMac.
The iPhone on wheels
Taraborrelli isn’t the only signature the company has made in the automotive industry. Apple earlier this year acquired the services of a veteran Ford executive tasked with overseeing vehicle safety. In 2021, he recruited Ulrich Kranz, former head of electric cars at BMW, and Stuart Bowers, director of Tesla’s autopilot systems. According to sources cited by Bloomberg, the Apple project already has hundreds of engineers from Mercedes, Volvo, Aston Martin, McLaren, Porsche or Waymo, the autonomous car brand of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. When asked by EL PAÍS about the recent hires, a company spokeswoman points out that they have a policy of not commenting on signings beyond those who sit on the executive committee and that they have nothing to say about the Apple Car project , which is classified as “Rumor”.
This is the multinational’s official position. It is unofficially known that Apple executives have been considering entering the automotive market for years. The project was paused precisely because the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, and other senior executives didn’t see the product very clearly. Recent movements seem to indicate that doubts about its viability have been dispelled. According to sources cited by Bloomberg, it should be ready by 2025. An investigation by Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei and Intellectual Property Landscape published last week found that between 2000 and 2021 Apple applied for at least 248 patents related to the automotive industry, including autonomous driving systems, car sensorization, cell phone connectivity, augmented reality or electric battery management.
The Lamborghini Aventador is one of the star models that Luigi Taraborrelli has overseen during his time at the Italian brand.
Why would Apple get into the automotive business? One of the answers is that the car is the last environment to be digitized. And if the promise of autonomous driving is fulfilled, the weight of artificial intelligence in cars will increase. Vehicles are computers on wheels. Indian-Canadian entrepreneur Salim Ismail, one of the founders of Singularity University, actually describes cars as “app carriers on wheels”. And that’s what Apple makes: devices on which to use its apps.
Apple isn’t the only tech company interested in the industry. Since 2009, Google has had a company called Waymo dedicated to developing autonomous driving systems. Xiaomi and Oppo, two of the world’s largest smartphone makers, also have projects underway to launch their own electric vehicles.
Little is known about what the vehicle Apple is working on will look like. According to some media reports, the tech company wants to launch a car that will be radically different from what is currently being marketed. Hence the doubts about the right time for the market launch. The company’s intention is said to be for it to be fully autonomous, not even including a steering wheel or pedals. Its interior would be designed to make passengers feel confronted, face to face. Screens and other entertainment elements would play a central role in the vehicle, as would augmented reality.
A doctor in a bracelet
Health is another field that Apple has been seeding for nearly a decade in its quest for future business. The launch of the Health app in 2014, and most notably the Apple Watch in 2015, opened up a new field of data processing and collection for the company that had been uncharted until then. The Apple company’s smartwatch has several sensors that periodically take measurements such as heart rate or, since the appearance of Covid-19, blood oxygen levels. You can also estimate the hours of sleep, the energy expenditure or the physical activities performed.
Promotional image of the Apple Watch Series 7, the company’s latest available smartwatch model.APPLE (Europa Press)
Apple engineers are working on developing sensors so that the watch can also measure other vital signs such as body temperature, blood sugar or blood pressure. They were pioneers in detecting atrial fibrillation with this device. The basic idea is to centralize all users’ medical information. Or, in the company’s own words, “helping people to actively take care of their health by acting as intelligent guardians of their health and safety.” It even offers the possibility to upload clinical documents and to enter almost all kinds of data manually , which the clock has not yet recorded.
“Apple’s strict privacy policy makes them very good for the healthcare environment, and their commitment to having access to medical records has had a major impact in the US,” said Frederic Llordachs, co-founder of Doctoralia, a portal for medical referrals. Apple’s approach so far has been: collect and organize all kinds of data so that the user can dispose of it as he wants. “Your moves to make the Apple Watch a health monitoring tool are very scientific, but they cannot scale outside of rich markets. That limits their expansion, but they serve as mirrors to give way to healthcare technology,” says Llordachs.
Apple is not alone in the race to colonize health. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are also active in this area, which will gain in importance in the coming years. The aging of the population in rich countries and the transition from medical care to predictive medicine models based on individualized measurements of medical parameters through wearables to minimize doctor visits offer a large market for those who position themselves there. “Amazon is winning the game in telemedicine because they are better at surgery. Google relies on medical artificial intelligence and Microsoft is represented in all hospitals in the world with Office and now with Azure. They are all scalable models. Apple is hardware,” analyzes Llordachs.
Waiting for the Metaverse
The secrecy surrounding the new Apple projects is total. Still, there’s a growing excitement in the burgeoning Metaverse-related industry: the Apple company wants to get into the business. And it plans to do so again by providing hardware. In this case, indoor mixed reality glasses capable of overlaying digital images with reality, allowing the user to see, for example, a digital figure on the table to interact with. The industry is aware that this will be the first stage in the evolution of the metaverse: the pure virtual reality environment will be reserved for very specific experiences such as video games.
“Apple is expected to release its viewer in the middle of next year,” said Víctor Javier Pérez, coordinator of the Metaverse program for executives at ISDI Business School. The company doesn’t confirm or deny anything, but “there have been leaks on the assembly lines and even hints of a new operating system called RealityOS, which is believed to be used in reality glasses, have wormed their way into some of its software. mixed,” adds the teacher. In May this year, according to Bloomberg, a prototype of the glasses was shown to the company’s top executives during a board meeting, meaning the product is well advanced.
Again, little is known about the characteristics of the viewer. It’s said to be priced at around $2,000, nearly double what the new Quest goggles that Meta will launch later this year will cost. “I think Apple, despite all the work behind chips and sensors and ergonomics, will still perform and come up with a lighter and more comfortable device. It will be interesting to see the connectivity with other Apple products and if it sets new usability standards like the Apple Watch did,” says Pérez.
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