Apple hires designer Andrew Kim away from Tesla

“Andrew Kim, the designer who first rose to prominence with a fan-made reimagining of Microsoft’s design language, has left his role as a senior designer at Tesla to join Apple,” Jon Porter reports for The Verge. “His LinkedIn profile says that he joined the company in December of this year, while his Instagram confirms that his first day working at Apple Park was last Tuesday.”
“Along with the recent news of Tesla’s chief vehicle engineer returning to Apple, Kim’s move will certainly stoke speculation that Apple is once again working on an actual car,” Porter reports. “[At Tesla] he contributed to the designs of several vehicles, including the Model 3, S, X, and Y as well as the Roadster V2 and the Semi, according to his LinkedIn profile. In an interview published in 2017, Kim said that his focus at Tesla was on designing the cabin space inside the Model 3, a challenge that had to balance the needs of a car that could be driven by both a human and, eventually, a computer.”
Apple Car as per Richard Scarry“Apple has reportedly had an interest in self-driving cars going back years, but it reportedly shuttered the teams working on physical car hardware back in 2016 in order to focus on just the self-driving software that could be deployed in partnership with existing automakers,” Porter reports. “Nevertheless, the timing of Kim’s hire, just months after Tesla’s chief vehicle engineer, Doug Field, returned to Apple, suggests that the company’s car ambitions might have changed once again.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Project Titan is shifting into overdrive.
Apple is working on actual vehicles, not just some “vehicleOS” they’d license out to others (which was always a stupid proposition, as anyone who’s studied how Apple works for more than 3 minutes knows implicitly). — MacDailyNews, August 28, 2018
• I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do. — Steve Jobs, October 12, 2004
• In order to build the best products, you have to own the primary technologies. Steve felt that if Apple could do that — make great products and great tools for people — they in turn would do great things. He felt strongly that this would be his contribution to the world at large. We still very much believe that. That’s still the core of this company. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, March 18, 2015
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