(DailyVantage.com) – Apple has reportedly streamlined its priorities on the development of new technologies, opting to focus on artificial intelligence and its new Vision Pro headset and scrapping a plan to develop an electric vehicle of its own.
Apple had around 2,000 employees working on the initiative, known as “Project Titan,” all of whom were informed of the decision by Jeff Williams, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, and Kevin Lynch, who headed the project. Project Titan members were then reassigned to other projects, with the majority reportedly going to the company’s AI development efforts. Lynch himself will be now working under John Giannandrea, who heads Apple’s artificial intelligence strategy division, according to a source for The New York Times.
Project Titan has reportedly been in the works for around ten years, but operated under immense secrecy – as the company is wont to do with any new technologies it is developing. Even the restructuring was only internally – and not publicly – announced.
Still, prototypes of Apple’s supposed electric vehicle have been seen in the wild, with the company reportedly testing autonomous driving technologies in an attempt to compete with Tesla’s popularity and profitability. The company allegedly took on a number of executives and experts from the automotive industry since 2014, including an executive from BMW who was supposedly an integral part of BMW’s EV initiatives and secured permission from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving cars. Apple also acquired self-driving startup Drive.ai in 2019.
Apple has reportedly been looking for additional sources of revenue in the face of iPhone sales hitting a plateau in recent years, as significant updates to phones slow down and consumers upgrade devices much less frequently compared to previous years. Its Apple Watch leads the market in smartwatch sales, but has experienced nowhere near the frenzied consumerism that surrounded iPhone launches at their peak. Their Vision Pro augmented reality goggles also had a successful launch, but the current $3,500 price for each unit is still too high for the device to be taken up by a large number of consumers.
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