There is a rumor floating about that Kevin Lynch (previously from Adobe) is leading a team of engineers that include several Apple engineers that worked on iPods previously. Mobile devices with touch-screens. No one knows for sure what this team is actually working on, but given the rumor of who is on the team one might be deduct that the rumored wearable watch/device would be a likely candidate.
People are still wondering about Kevin’s past and his heralding Flash and ribbing Apple a bit in regards to it’s standoff attitude towards it in regards to mobile. Personally I think that’s water under the bridge. Steve Jobs and Apple were correct about the plugin and it’s effects on mobile devices – power consuming with security vulnerabilities and silly-puttied to try and make it touch-capable for such devices. Steve gave Adobe chances to deliver something that would be acceptable and they could not do so. Again, it’s water under the bridge now.
Kevin does have experience with mobile devices and cloud services, etc. He has management experience with large teams of engineers and designers. It fits. If this is indeed true that:
- There is even an Apple watch/device being developed
- Kevin is actually leading a team of engineers on this task
This could be make it or break it opportunity for Kevin. A lot of pressure to deliver on something the world is eagerly anticipating and will scrutinize as a potential game-changing device paired with first class services. I’m a little surprised that Kevin would lead such a publicly visible project as his first work for Apple. One might assume he’d help with some aspect of new iCloud offerings or revamping – or something that’s a bit more in the shadows of the PR machine at first.
Whatever Kevin is doing we all wish him luck and hope he hits one out of the park. Mr. Mansfield, keep up the good work here and develop some sick semiconductor for whatever Kevin is working on.
Update [Fri Apr 12 12:05 PM]
While it might not be hardware directly (it could be framework activity for an iWatch/wearable ecosystem – Kevin doesn’t have a hardware background) – it could be a refresh of the iPod line to somehow play in the cloud system and connectivity of hardware with software. So leaning more towards backend or some software component to make extensible a system moving forward to allow hardware to communicate with some type of service or suite of services that make available the ability to author, deploy and use experiences on mobile devices.