Apple Said to Cut Jobs After Scrapping In-House Effort to Make Apple Watch Displays

Apple Inc. is winding down a long-running project to design and develop its own smartwatch displays, putting an end to another pricey research and development initiative.

In recent weeks, the company has ceased an in-house effort to create screens with microLED technology, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The displays, which featured brighter and more vibrant visuals, would have been added to a future version of the Apple Watch — before potentially going into other products.

But the cost and complexity of the effort ultimately proved too great. So Apple is now reorganizing the teams that handle display engineering and eliminating several dozen roles in the US and Asia, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

The move to shutter the project came around the same time as the company's decision to cancel work on a self-driving car. In both cases, Apple is giving at least some affected employees the opportunity to find other roles within the company. If they can't get new jobs — a likely scenario for some of them — the workers will be laid off and provided severance. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

The display project was part of a broader push by Apple to design more of its technology in-house. Though the company already customizes the displays in its products, they are heavily based on designs from partners like LG Display Co. and Samsung SDI Co. By bringing more of that process inside Apple, the company hoped to gain an edge over competitors.

It also saw promise in microLED, which is made from millions of microscopic light-emitting diodes, and wanted to take a key role in developing it. The technology uses less power, reproduces colors more accurately and allows for thinner devices.

The effort kicked off about seven years ago within Apple's hardware engineering organization. It was later shifted to Wei Chen, who runs Apple's display group. The project — codenamed T159 — was relocated to Apple's hardware technologies division a few years ago.

Apple even built its own screen manufacturing facility in Santa Clara, California, near its Cupertino headquarters, where hundreds of employees could test the production of microLED screens. Many of the job cuts involve people at that site — along with Apple display engineering centers in Asia near the company's supply-chain hubs.

A visit to the Santa Clara facility this week showed that the building was still operational, with cars in the parking lot and a small number of employees entering and exiting the building.

When Apple hatched the microLED plan years ago, it saw the technology as a successor to the current standard: organic LED screens, or OLEDs. It expected to eventually push microLEDs into all of its products, from Apple Watches to iPhones to Macs.

In 2018, the company believed it was capable of bringing the screens to the Apple Watch as early as 2020. That timeline ended up getting delayed until 2024, and then 2025 and beyond. The situation was similar to Apple's work on the electric car, whose release was postponed several times.

For all their benefits, microLED screens were difficult to produce in sufficient quantities. Manufacturing them required cutting-edge technology and a complicated process called LED transfers — the placing of pixels in the display. Though Apple owned the design and manufacturing process for the microLED screens, it enlisted a number of partners to handle mass production and tasks like LED transfers.

News of a shift in the project first emerged in recent weeks, when suppliers announced that they were losing microLED-related contracts. That included AMS-Osram AG, which said the cancellation would force it to cut jobs, potentially sell a manufacturing plant and record a writedown that could approach $1 billion.

For now, Apple believes that OLED is the best current solution for its smartwatch. But it's still eyeing microLED for other projects down the road, the people said. The company is identifying potential new suppliers and processes that could make the technology a reality in its devices, though that won't likely happen anytime soon.

© 2024 Bloomberg LP

Is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 the best foldable phone you can buy in India right now? We discuss the company's new clamshell-style foldable handset on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.


from Gadgets 360 https://ift.tt/KjGhWiU

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

COVID-19 origins: Should we pay more attention to the lab leak theory and formally investigate it?

Image
A year and a half into the pandemic, we still do not know exactly where the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, came from. The prevailing view so far has been that the virus “spilled over” from bats into humans. But there are increasing calls to investigate the possibility that it emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where Covid first appeared at the end of 2019. So what do we know for sure, and what do we need still to find out? We know the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is close to that of bat coronaviruses . Several decades ago its “ancestor” was circulating in bat populations in southern Asia. But there are still many unanswered questions: we don’t know how the virus arrived in Wuhan, how its sequence evolved to allow human infection, and under what conditions it infected the first people who crossed its path. And for each of these stages, we don’t know whether there was a human contribution (direct or indirect). Zoonotic transmission pathways, in other words the pas
Read more

Menstrual cups are cheaper, more sustainable than pads and tampons for women

Image
Every year in America, women spend at least US$2.8 billion on sanitary pads and tampons that can take hundreds of years to decompose . Is there a more economical and environmentally friendly way? To find out, we asked Susan Powers , a professor of sustainable environmental systems at Clarkson University about her work comparing the environmental impact of tampons, sanitary pads and menstrual cups. What is a menstrual cup? A menstrual cup is a type of reusable feminine hygiene product. It’s a small, flexible bell-shaped cup made of rubber or silicone that a woman inserts into her vagina to catch and collect menstrual fluid. It can be used for up to 12 hours, after which it is removed to dispose of the fluid and cleaned. The cup is rinsed with hot water and soap between each insertion and sterilized in boiling water at least once per period. A cup can last up to 10 years . Although menstrual cups have been around for decades, they historically have been less popular than pads or ta
Read more

Human bodies respond to infections differently depending on the time of day

Image
When microorganisms – such as bacteria or viruses – infect us, our immune system jumps into action. It’s highly trained to sense and eliminate infections and clear up any damage caused by them. It’s typically assumed our immune systems work the exact same way regardless of whether an infection occurs during the day or at night. But research spanning over half a century now shows our bodies actually respond differently at day and night. The reason for this is our body clock, and the fact that each cell in the body, including our immune cells, can tell what time of day it is. Our body clock has evolved over millions of years to help us survive. Every cell in the body has a collection of proteins that indicate the time depending on their levels. Knowing whether it’s day or night means our body can adjust its functions and behaviours (such as when we want to eat) to the correct time. Our body clock does this by generating 24 hour rhythms (also termed circadian rhythms ) in how cells f
Read more