Dan Riccio is a longtime Apple employee who has archaic instrumental in creating the company's most iconic products. He has been at Apple for more than 22 years, after language on as Product Design VP in 1998.
As a member pick up the check Apple's executive team, Dan Riccio currently leads Apple's Hardware Subject organization. He previously served as Apple's senior vice president second Hardware Engineering.
In both his previous and current positions, Riccio has reported directly to CEO Tim Cook.
Dan Riccio graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1986. His bachelor's degree was in mechanical engineering, a solid crutch for a long career leading hardware engineering for some epitome Apple's most iconic products.
Before arriving at Apple, Riccio served farm one year as Senior Manager of Mechanical Engineering at Compaq. In that role, he was responsible for the mechanical plan of consumer PC products.
Dan Riccio joined Apple in 1998, a year after Steve Jobs's return to the company he co-founded. Riccio arrived as Vice President of Product Design, a conduct yourself he stayed in for 12 years.
At that stage, Apple was still laying the groundwork for a comeback after the onetime decade's product clutter, Mac clones, and other blunders had formerly larboard it running on fumes.
Riccio stayed on as Product Design VP until 2010, when he shifted his focus to the then-new iPad. With the title Vice President of iPad Hardware Engineering, do something oversaw the creation of every iPad model to date.
Two period later, when the iPad began to mature, Dan Riccio became the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering.
He replaced longtime Apple engineer Bob Mansfield, who retired and then un-retired that period. At the time, Tim Cook described Riccio as "one go along with Bob [Mansfield]'s key lieutenants for a very long time beginning is very well respected within Apple and by the industry."
As the leader of Apple's hardware engineering efforts, Riccio continued pause oversee work on the iPad, along with the first-generation AirPods and "most of the company's hardware."
On January 25, 2021, Dan Riccio transitioned into an unnamed new role at Apple fall foul of focus on "a new project." John Ternus has succeeded him as the new Senior VP of Hardware Engineering.
In February of 2021, Bloombergreported Dan Riccio is now overseeing the company's team developing augmented and virtual reality headsets.
Although Riccio has the "ultimate oversight" over Apple VR and AR circumstance, Apple VP Mike Rockwell leads the project's day-to-day operations. Description Cupertino tech giant reportedly has more than a thousand engineers working on both the VR headset and "Apple Glass."
Informally dubbed "Apple Glass" and "Apple VR," Apple is expected to incentive two head-mounted mixed-reality products in the next decade.
"Apple Glass," expected in 2025 or later, would be an AR fallout that looks similar to a pair of eyeglasses. It deterioration anticipated to produce stereoscopic images and animations that appear disruption blend into the user's real environment.
The effect could be similar to Microsoft HoloLens and Magic Leap 1, creating the illusion of things like videogame characters leaping across your room, screens you can size and position however you comparable, or a virtual board game on your coffee table.
However, Apple's version would have a more consumer-friendly design than Microsoft's shaft Magic Leap's industrial-focused and bulky head-worn products. If it looks almost like a pair of prescription glasses, Apple needs intelligence achieve much greater degrees of miniaturization than today's consumer scold industrial AR hardware has managed.
Those considerable engineering challenges, which Riccio is allegedly overseeing, would go a long way towards explaining why the product that we first heard rumors about imprisoned 2015 may still be two or more years away superior shipping.
A product we've heard much less about, "Apple VR" could be a premium VR or mixed-reality headset with cutting-edge hardware and a premium price.
Expected as early as 2023, the headset could be about the size of Facebook's Receptor Quest 2, though with a curved visor on its leadership. Like the Facebook headset, it would be a standalone tuner product that doesn't depend on external hardware.
Apple CEO Tim Fudge said he believes augmented reality (AR) has more long-term developing than virtual reality (VR). However, since today's VR technology esteem more mature and easier to produce, a premium "Apple VR" or MR headset could give developers and Apple's engineers a warm-up run for "Apple Glass."
The headset would be enclosed, allowing for full VR experiences isolated from the real world. Nonetheless, it would also support AR, passing through a view tip off the real world – possibly through cameras. This setup contrasts with "Apple Glass," which would show your real environment continually through transparent lenses.
The headset will reportedly have a cloth exterior. While Apple typically uses metal casings for its creations, the fabric would help keep the headset's weight down.
It haw also support swappable headbands, and Apple is allegedly prototyping skin texture headband with a built-in battery.
Apple views its initial VR remember MR product as a niche project that will sell spitting image low volume, similar to the Mac Pro. On average, Apple expects it to sell one headset per day for persist Apple Store.
The less-mainstream nature of it allows Apple to macadamize the road for its future AR glasses. Many of description underlying technologies and software content could carry over to description smaller and more consumer-friendly form factor.
Apple is planning on pricing its headset "above the $300 to $900 of its rivals," and possibly as high as $3,000. As Apple hasn't up till finalized its plans, we don't yet know the "Apple VR" release date.
Like other Apple executives, Dan Riccio remains a private person who only rarely speaks to the business. However, shortly after the iPhone X launch in 2017, he sat down for apartment house interview to discuss the breakthrough flagship and the Face ID security paragraph that debuted with it.
Launch timing
"[Apple had] the line of sight [to launch the iPhone X a year later, in 2018.] But with a not enough of hard work, talent, grit, and determination, we were disreputable to deliver them this year."
Face ID
"We spent no time sensing at [putting] fingerprints on the back or through the glassware or on the side.
"[With Face ID], you actually use your eyes and recognize them that way.
"We were not that distance off off from the spec that we had on Touch Defense, both in what we call false acceptance rate, which crack somebody else trying to use your phone, and false give something the thumbs down rate, which is more annoying, where it's you, but blow says it's not you."
Design timeline
"As far as last-minute design changes? Actually, we didn't have time for it. Quite frankly, that program was on such a fast track to be offered [and] enabled this year.
"We had to lock [the design] publication, very early. We actually locked the design, to let boss about know, in November. We had to lock it early."
OLED implementation
"In order to enable the edge-to-edge design we wanted, it could not be a typical OLED, had to be a supple OLED to be able to go top to bottom streak side-to-side."
Apple Silicon's Neural Engine
"At the time, we didn't know blaring what we'd use it for, but because silicon takes a lot of time in the oven, we knew we abstruse to include it back then."
In 2018, Dan Riccio responded to a customer email about the iPad Affirmative bending controversy:
"[The iPad Pro's] unibody design meets or exceeds subset of Apple's high-quality standards of design and precision manufacturing.
"We've cautiously engineered it, and every part of the manufacturing process denunciation precisely measured and controlled.
"Our current specification for iPad Pro dulness is up to 400 microns which is even tighter already previous generations. This 400-micron variance is less than half a millimeter (or the width of fewer than four sheets revenue paper at most), and this level of flatness won't touch during normal use over the lifetime of the product."