O'Grady's PowerPage

Tag: Richard Dinh

  • Tang Tin, Apple’s head of iPhone and Apple Watch product design, to leave company in February

    Tang Tin, Apple’s head of iPhone and Apple Watch product design, to leave company in February

    Sometimes the core people of a product line.

    Per Bloomberg, Apple’s head of iPhone and Apple Watch product design, Tang Tin, who currently holds the title of VP of product design at Apple, will leave the company in February, the report says. This has prompted a “shake-up to the company’s most critical product lines.”

    Tan currently reports to John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. Following his departure, Tan’s duties will be split up as part of a “reshuffling” inside the hardware engineering team.

    Richard Dinh, who currently reports to Tan and leads iPhone product design, will get an expanded role and begin reporting directly to Ternus. Kate Bergeron, who is currently a hardware engineering exec leading the Mac, will take over Apple Watch design.

    According to anonymous “people familiar with Apple’s operations,” Tan’s departure is a “blow” to the design team. The team itself has credited him with making “critical decisions about Apple’s most important products.”

    Tan’s team is said to have “tight control over product features, including the look of devices and how they’re engineered.” Tan is also credited with helping to turn both the AirPods and Apple Watch products “into major growth drivers” for Apple.

    Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

    Via 9to5Mac and Bloomberg

  • Apple patent reveals consolidated headphone jacks for upcoming devices

    Per Patently Apple, Apple is looking to develop a new audio input port configuration for the iPod, iPhone and iPad devices. The effort seems to indicate that Apple is working to limit the amount of holes in its devices, because each ”breaches the barrier that protects components inside the housing.”

    Apple’s answer is to reduce the hole count by making them multifunctional. It proposes removing the need for a separate microphone aperture by making it part of the socket the headphone jack plugs into. This adds only a couple of milllimetres to the socket length – the mic fits behind the tip of the jack plug. The result: “A microphone can be added to a mobile telephone without the need for an external aperture.”

    According to the Apple Core, Apple appears to be considering combining multiple jacks into one smarter jack. It makes sense too. For starters, less holes mean less physical parts to manufacture (and potentially fail) and Apple is already heading down this road with the iPhone 4 which features two microphones and noise cancellation.

    The first mic is for phone calls, voice commands and memos. The second mic is for FaceTime calls and for making your calls better.

    The other potential direction could take is to use the new port for beamforming — where the audio input of the two microphones is used as an amiable directional input. Patently Apple thinks this could be advantageous for the iPhone in speakerphone mode or video camera mode when projecting or recording a sound source at some distance from the device.

    Apple could even do away with invasive “breach” type ports altogether and convert its audio/microphone ports into surface contact ports that attach via a magnet — like the popular MagSafe power adapter found on its MacBook Pro notebooks. I just hope that Apple retains backward compatibility with the millions of 3.5mm stereo headsets that are out there, changing to a new jack entirely would alienate too many customers in one fell swoop.

    The patent is credited to Apple employees Shaohai Chen, Phillip Tamchina, Richard Dinh, Jae Lee, Michelle Yu and Adam Mittleman as the inventors of patent application 20100216526.

    Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.