Inside Apple's New Vision Products Group and Shift from Jobs Era

Apple’s new Vision Products Group reflects a shift away from its famed product-development process. Also: The company prepares for its fall devices, new software betas roll out, and Apple is?accused of negotiating in bad faith?by its first unionized retail store.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s, he threw away the company’s product-development playbook and shifted to a “functional” management structure.

That’s why the company has no iPhone or iPad division, no AirPods group and no dedicated Mac organization. Instead, Apple is organized by departments like software engineering, hardware development, machine learning, design and services. Contributions from all those groups are then funneled into new features and products.?

But Apple’s most recent new product categories, including the Vision Pro headset, show that its strategy is evolving.

The Vision Pro has its own dedicated division inside of the company. The unit,?run by Mike Rockwell, was dubbed the Technology Development Group, or TDG, from its inception around 2015 until the name changed in recent weeks. It’s now internally known as the Vision Products Group, or VPG.

The group doesn’t depend on Apple’s main software and hardware engineering and other departments. It has its own versions of those teams, reporting to Rockwell, in addition to ones for strategy, computer vision, content, app development and project management.

If the Vision products were developed in standard Apple fashion, the software engineering for the headset would have been led by Craig Federighi and his software engineering organization. The hardware would have been developed alongside Apple’s other devices under?John Ternus, and the content arm would be tucked within Eddy Cue’s services empire...

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Q:?Does a 30-inch-plus iMac mean the end of new 27-inch models?

Q:?How will the Apple Watch and Vision Pro interact?

Q:?What’s the status of the latest CarPlay version?