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How about a Secretive 'Startup' team to work on providing improvements and stability on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS? It's the software that needs love and attention.
So, pull people from R&D to fix software bugs, then watch the product line dry up and the company fail due to lack of new products? That's a sound way to run a company.
 
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That’s nothing.

I have a secret R&D lab with the following under development and PATENTED:

- Flying horse shoes to make horses fly

- Catranslator to help dogs understand why cats beat them up

- Self walking legs for people who are too lazy to walk

- Leg sharing app so you can share your self walking legs when you are too lazy to use them

VCs can DM now and send me $10 billion, thanks.
 
In his most recent newsletter, Gurman revealed new information about Apple's Exploratory Design Group, known as "XDG" inside the company. The team is apparently highly secretive, even by Apple's notoriously high standards. People working on one project within the group are not permitted to communicate about their work with other members of XDG that are tasked with a different project. Individuals are also organized by skill set rather than specific projects, meaning that XDG members often work on several different projects simultaneously.
Is this Mark Grumman trying to make news? It's not anything that isn't well known. Apple has always maintained high security over unannounced hardware that is far from commercial release. As others have said, every company has a R&D group. :rolleyes:
 
It's so secretive that as they leave work for the day, halfway up the elevator ride they forget what they've been doing for the last eight hours and only remember their non-secrtive life.
 
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If only they a team that tested products for bugs instead of having user be beta testers.
 
People working on one project within the group are not permitted to communicate about their work with other members of XDG that are tasked with a different project. Individuals are also organized by skill set rather than specific projects, meaning that XDG members often work on several different projects simultaneously.
Don’t these two claims conflict? If many XDG members work on multiple projects, then someone working on projects A and B is highly likely to be communicating with people working on project C, because those people are also working on project B.
 
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I wish their secret R&D group can figure out how to stop my AirPod Pros from disconnecting from my iPhone every time it's near my MBP, despite me telling it not to do that. So many things "Just don't work" anymore, I'm no longer excited about buying future products. But hey - we just got new emoticons!!
 
Hopefully the iRack will be coming out soon.
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I absolutely need to meet someone from this team! I've had an idea for the past couple of years for an iphone feature that I truly believe could be worth millions. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that can be implemented through a third party app, otherwise I would have already developed it. It's something that has to be added to iOS.
 
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This all reeks of Apple doing damage control.

Leak a tiny hardware update and fat phone, then leak that it's not THAT thick and they really are working on some exciting stuff.
 
I absolutely need to meet someone from this team! I've had an idea for the past couple of years for an iphone feature that I truly believe could be worth millions. Unfortunately, it's not an idea that can be implemented through a third party app, otherwise I would have already developed it. It's something that has to be added to iOS.
Um....this team don't just work on iPhone. Submit your suggestion via the feedback form.
 
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Sounds like my job when I worked in the military. Never keep anything out on your desk and the running joke greeting when you met someone in the division not working on the same project was “How you doing today?” Response “Can’t tell you that. How is it going with you?” Response “Can’t tell you that.”
 
I really wish Apple would poor a few hundred million (the loose change in Tim's couch) into getting deep into a REAL AI rather than the personal assistant crap that is Siri and most other takes on the tech. I want something that works better than the crappy human intelligence we're currently saddled with.
If all it took was "a few hundred million" then this would have been done years ago.

What is needed van not be bought with money. We need a fundimenta breakthrough in cognitive science.

Most people not working in the ield seem to think AI is much further advanced than it realy is. A good analogy is that AI is in the same state was was physics in the the ealy 1600s They have any good observations, they could design building that did not fall down and predict the motion of planets but there was not over arching theory. It was just rulles of thoumb and smart people doing what seemd to work.

Then in the 1680s Issac Newton published "Prinicpia" and change all of science overnight. He had one simple theory that could tell you way we need t lean into corners when running and why the Moon does not fall from the sky. He invented a new branch of mathematics to explain it. It was revolutionary and changedthe way we look at the universe. We now see it as an orderly place with basic laws of nature. While beore the universe as arbitary with hundreds of special case rules.

Someday there will be a Newton who shows as the intelligent minds are like the universe. they have ony a few simply laws that follow. here might be some new branch of math to describe these laws

Money can't buy this kind of scientific revolution, certainly such a small amount of money as "a few hundred million".

This is really true. We will never get our current kind of AI technology to perform at human level. It is like asking an engineer from te 1870s if his steem train wil ever move fast enough to fly to the Moon. No, steam technology will not get you to the Moon. You need something completely different that could not be imagined n 1870.

We need something VERY different to get human-level performance. And money can't buy it. We must wait for another Newton to wake up one day with a vision and publish it. This will change our view of ourselves. We will have the answer to questions about freewill vs determinism, and we will finally understand the nature and origin of self-aware behavior. Until we understand these thing at a deep level we wil not be able to build a machine that has them.


So we wait, 50 year or maybe 500 years, we don't know.
 
A company that is supposed to innovate has a R&D department?! Say it isn't so!

After all, Jobs in an interview said he would go to his R&D team and tell them how he wanted certain products made.

Unless...when Cook came in, he dismantled the unit which would make sense considering how his innovations revolve around faster processors and higher mega pixels for the cameras.
 
Nothing new here. Tim has always said they are working on a lot of stuff that may never come to fruition.
Exactly. Several years ago at the shareholders meeting Tim Cook said that they are aggressively funding R&D projects. Many wouldn’t see the light of day but they have to work them out to see which ones would pan out.
 
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