A recent report that Apple has a skunkworks team doing research on robotics has sort of set the internet on fire. But the context here really matters; the report is probably true (Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is the gold standard of Apple leaks and scuttlebutt) but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be swiping your credit card to take home an Apple Bot anytime soon. Maybe never.
I know this is the Internet in 2024 and that means we all just read a headline, maybe even look at an image, and immediately form and share fiercely-held opinions on the matter. But it’s important to Gurman’s report actually talked about.
First, there were two products described. One was a “table-top home device that uses robotics to move a display around.” That sounds a lot like this Belkin auto-tracking iPhone stand (and there are plenty of others). Except more of a HomePod with its own display and not an iPhone stand. That’s not really a big deal, and the report says the project is a few years old and has been on-again and off-again since. This is not going to be Apple’s Next Big Thing.
The other one is “a mobile robot that can follow users around their homes.” You might be thinking of something humanoid like Tesla’s Optimus bot or something like SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper. But it really sounds more like Amazon’s Astro, a little three-wheeled “pet” of sorts with a screen for a head. Of note: the report describes sophisticated human-like chores like doing dishes as “pie-in-the-sky” and says they were “unlikely this decade” due to the technical challenges involved.
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
The Next Big Thing often isn’t
While robotics work within Apple has been described as a potential “next big thing,” it’s worth noting that these sorts of secret projects often aren’t. Apple just poured billions of dollars and a decade of work into making a car that never materialized, after all. And that was a car. There’s definitely a substantial market for an Apple Car!
We don’t even know yet if people really want home robots, humanoid or not. Efforts to make mass-market affordable robots have been ongoing for ages and they’ve never caught on. The new age of generative AI and new AI techniques may breathe new life into home robots, so to speak, but challenges around nuts-and-bolts physical stuff like actuators and energy use are still big challenges and you can’t just wave a transformer model at them.
These projects have benefits beyond the potential products they’re designed for. The car project, for example, led to the Neural Engine hardware that has been in every iPhone processor for the last few years. Some of what makes Vision Pro work apparently came out of the work on using VR while driving, too. Gurman’s report says the robot project sprang out of the car R&D, too, and who knows what new capabilities will come from the work done here. One could easily imagine a successor to the R1 coprocessor inside the Vision Pro that does sensor fusion and environment mapping, built into a chip as part of the requirements for making a robot smoothly navigate virtually any home or office.
Is Apple working on a robot (or multiple robot concepts)? Yes, the job postings alone make that clear. But any project more sophisticated than a HomePod with a display that always faces you is likely years away, and there’s a decent chance it will never see the light of day at all, but that we’ll see technology developed for the project in various other Apple products.
