Apple’s vice president Steve Hotelling, who oversaw the company’s touch screen technologies, health indicators sensors, Touch ID and Face ID scanners, and many other solutions, is leaving Apple. This is reported by Bloomberg after gathering information from anonymous sources.
Hotelling led the development of Apple’s most complex and important technologies used in the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and the Vision Pro mixed reality headset. His name appears on hundreds of patents, including those related to the iPhone and iPad multi-touch screen, and he is one of the inventors of the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, the most important user authentication feature on Apple devices.
Hotelling led the camera development team and participated in the creation of Apple’s sensors. The company increasingly points to the quality of shooting as one of the main advantages of its devices. He led the creation of scene depth detection technologies in augmented reality systems and worked on solutions in the field of tactile feedback and ProMotion displays with a high frame rate. Colleagues call Hotelling the biggest initiator of innovation at Apple if we do not take into account the developers of processors.
At the company, his immediate superior was Johnny Srouji, senior vice president of hardware technology. The direction of cameras and depth sensors will now be overseen by Alan Gilchrist, and Wei Chen will be responsible for display technologies.
During his 20-year career, Hotelling has represented the interests of Apple many times in court proceedings – it was a long-term patent dispute with Samsung and a dispute with Masimo. He leaves the company at a crucial moment for it, when many critical product components are being replaced by proprietary solutions. Apple M3 chips, which are manufactured using 3 nm technology, have recently appeared, followed by their cellular modem, a chip for connecting to local wireless networks, as well as microLED displays – in the development of all these projects, Apple faced difficulties. Hotelling’s former team is also developing a non-invasive blood sugar sensor.
Read also:
- Apple iMessage might not be forced to be interoperable by the EU
- The iPhone SE 4 battery will be the same on the iPhone 14