Apple Considers Even Larger iPads, Shakes Up Car Team: Gurman

In the inaugural edition of his weekly newsletter, Power On, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman touched upon some of the happenings in the tech space (as well as the NBA) that piqued his interest.

The highlights? Apple is exploring even bigger screen sizes for the iPad down the line, and has reshuffled the team working on the Apple Car project (code-named ‘Project Titan‘) yet again (via Bloomberg).

After the massive success that was this year’s Apple M1-equipped 12.9-inch iPad Pro (especially after the iPadOS 15 beta rolled out and took productivity and sheer usability to the next level), Gurman says Apple engineers and designers are currently looking into the viability of even larger iPads.

While these iPads wouldn’t hit shelves until at least 2 years from the earliest, 16-inch or even 14-inch screens on an iPad would further close the gap between iPads and MacBooks — a gap that has already become pretty minuscule with the Apple M1 making its way to the iPad.

Apple has also decided to shake up its Apple Car team yet again. After bringing on former Tesla Inc. big shot Doug Field to spearhead the project in 2018, Apple has now brought auto industry veteran Ulrich Kranz into the fray as well.

Benjamin Lyon, Jaime Waydo, and Dave Scott, three members of the team who held leadership roles, decided to part ways this year. Consequently, Apple pulled up a number of executives to leadership roles for the project:

• Hanns Tappeiner, co-founder and ex-President of the now-defunct robotic toy car startup Anki.
• Tim Cheng, who ran the car Operating System team for Drive.ai — a self-driving startup acquired by Apple two years ago.
• Hans Lee, who left Freedom Robotics, a company he co-founded that develops software to control robot fleets, for Apple in March.
• Martin Levihn, who is at the helm of a group working with Artificial Intelligence-based decision making for self-driving cars.
• Paul Costa, a veteran hardware engineering manager at Apple.