“When John Morrell left his post at Yale University last year and decamped to Apple, some members of the robotics community were perplexed,” Ashlee Vance reports for Businessweek. “Morrell, a robotics whiz and one of the leading engineers behind the Segway, had been tapped as director for Yale’s newly opening Center for Engineering Innovation & Design… Morrell had been overseeing research around how robots climb stairs and open doors, and how humans generally interact with machines. And then—poof—the superstar director bailed on the project.”
“Since Apple discloses very little about upcoming projects, it’s anyone’s guess what Morrell is actually working on,” Vance reports. “My roboticist friends think he must be working on something pretty fantastic to have quit the Yale post. My great hope is that he is indeed building a robot that transforms health care, or crafting the first mind-bending consumer 3D printer, or devising something far more spectacular.”
Vance reports, “It’s quite possible, though, that Morrell has become just another member of a giant consumer electronics company… As Apple’s share price plummeted, people have been grousing that the company saturated its core markets and failed to come up with the next big thing. For the most part, they seem to be awaiting some new consumer electronics gizmo that will blow everyone’s minds—and carry Apple into an untapped market in which it can hoover up all the profits. That’s fair enough. But at this point, it seems as if Apple could benefit from something even more daring: what Silicon Valley folks call a moonshot.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Patience, padawan. Always in motion the future is.