Apple's Wall-E Future
Mark Gurman
I feel the need. The need to keep growing revenue. That's the quote, right? Well, it must be within Apple these days. With the car project having crashed if not exactly burned (there will undoubtedly be some good tech that comes out of it), and the Vision Pro looking to be a pretty small business for the company for quite some time, and Services now under assault from all sides, Apple needs a "what's next". Not right now. Not tomorrow. But soon.
The problem is there are no obvious prospects. Yes, yes, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. All they need there is the infamous step two of "?" to reach that elusive third step. We'll see. Banking could work, and it already is to some extent with Apple Pay/Card, but banking is also highly regulated. And not that cool. You know what's cool? Robots.
Apple Inc. has teams investigating a push into personal robotics, a field with the potential to become one of the company’s ever-shifting “next big things,” according to people familiar with the situation.
Engineers at Apple have been exploring a mobile robot that can follow users around their homes, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the skunk-works project is private. The iPhone maker also has developed an advanced table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around, they said.
Jokes aside, this does seem like the type of project Apple should be working on. When you hear the word "robot" you probably immediately think of a humanoid robot like Ava in Ex Machina or, you know, The Terminator.1 But there's no reason you can't think smaller, quite literally. Like a robot dog. Or even just a fun little thing that follows you around.2 Eventually, you create Wall-E. And then Eve.3
Perhaps this was always Apple's destiny...
But again, baby steps:
The table-top robotics project first excited senior Apple executives a few years ago, including hardware engineering chief John Ternus and members of the industrial design team. The idea was to have the display mimic the head movements — such as nodding — of a person on a FaceTime session. It would also have features to precisely lock on to a single person among a crowd during a video call.
But the company has been concerned about whether consumers would be willing to pay top dollar for such a device. There have also been technical challenges related to balancing the weight of a robotic motor on a small stand. The primary obstacle has been disagreement among Apple executives over whether to move forward with the product at all, according to the people.
While Gurman notes Amazon's Astro project (and their attempted purchase of Roomba-maker iRobot, which pointed to this future), they also, of course, have a version of their Echo Show smart display which moves its screen with you. Apple is already late to the game for a HomePod with a screen, so you could see this being a part of that (though perhaps not v1).
The original concept for the robot was a device that could navigate entirely on its own without human intervention — like the car — and serve as a videoconferencing tool. One pie-in-the-sky idea within Apple was having it be able to handle chores, like cleaning dishes in a sink. But that would require overcoming extraordinarily difficult engineering challenges — something that’s unlikely this decade.
Okay, forget Eve, maybe Apple is creating Rosey.
1 Not to mention whatever Tesla is working on, if that ever actually ships.
2 A dozen years ago, there was a startup called Romotive, which created an iPhone-controlled cute little robot called Romo. That tech led both CrunchFund (where I was at the time) and GV (where I am now) to invest in the company. It was too early for that product, but that company eventually became Zipline.
3 Sound familiar?