“‘Later this year, we’ve got the best product pipeline that I’ve seen in my 25 years at Apple,’ Apple’s VP of Internet, software, and services said at the Code Conference last month,” Daniel Sparks writes for The Motley Fool. “‘Wait,’ some may protest, ‘Twenty five years? That includes the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad — the products that define Apple’s greatest years under the iconic Steve Jobs. How can Eddy Cue say that?'”
“For Apple to make such a bold statement, the company should be readying an entirely new product for a 2014 launch. Even more, the new product — or products — should be revolutionary. That’s about the only way the company could live up to such a statement,” Sparks writes. “Such a task won’t be easy. But Apple seems more willing than ever to bend the possibilities of tomorrow — even if it requires entirely new materials and new areas.”
“Enter Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jonathan Ive, arguably the company’s most important executive after CEO Tim Cook,” Sparks writes. “In a full transcript of an interview with Ive (made available yesterday) used for an in-depth profile of Cook by The New York Times that was published last weekend, Ive said Apple is making big moves into new areas and new materials. ‘I’ve worked for the last 15 or 20 years on the most challenging, creative parts of what we do. I would love to talk about future stuff — they’re materials we haven’t worked in before. I’ve been working on this stuff for a few years now. Tim is fundamentally involved in pushing into these new areas and into these materials.'”
“One new material that Apple is rumored to be making a big bet on is sapphire crystal,” Sparks writes. “Further, as MacRumors‘ Juli Clover explains, Apple may also be experimenting with Liquidmetal alloys and grapheme [sic graphene] (a new manufacturing material).”
Read more in the full article here.
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