Whatever Happened With Apple’s PrimeSense Acquisition?

Interesting piece by Matt Sayward on where Apple might be heading as the world’s leading camera company:

In November 2013, Apple acquired an Israeli 3D-sensor company named PrimeSense for somewhere in between a reported 350,000,000 and 360,000,000 dollars. As Apple acquisitions go, that’s a biggie. Only Beats (the foundation of Apple Music at $3bn), NeXT (the deal that brought Steve Jobs back for $400m), and AuthenTec ($390m that manifested itself in Touch ID) were certifiably bigger buys.

And yet, two years on, we still can’t really say what happened with PrimeSense’s technology with any sense of fortitude.

On this point:

Last November, on another episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber dropped a unusually heavy hint about what he’d heard about the upcoming set of iPhones that will debut in Q3 of this year:

The specific thing I heard is that next year’s camera might be the biggest camera jump ever. I don’t even know what sense this makes, but I’ve heard that it’s some kind of weird two-lens system where the back camera uses two lenses and it somehow takes it up into DSLR quality imagery.

Well, I had a think about this. And I might have something feasible.

For what it’s worth, I think I might have been wrong about the timing on this. If Apple sticks with the tick-tock schedule and unveils iPhone 6S and 6S Plus updates in September, the new dual-lens camera is probably a 2016 iPhone thing, not a 2015 iPhone thing. I should have realized this all along.

Anyway, rumors aside, Sayward has some interesting speculation on why Apple might go this route.

★ Tuesday, 30 June 2015