God hires assistant

The job posting from the Cupertino, CA, company specifically calls for an engineering manager to handle “platform bring-up.” In the job description, Apple states that it’s looking for a manager “to lead a team focused on bring-up of iPhone OS on new platforms.” It seems like Apple wants some outside talent with very strong technical experience, especially when it comes to bringing software onto multiple hardware devices.

Whatever a “bring-up” is, this job posting is weird because Apple is supposed to have the next decade specked out already, if not in product testing. We (consumers) learn about the future of computing at Apple events, when they decide to tell us. Our 2015 portable computers will be descendants of Apple’s “iPad” invention, like those copy-cat props in Avatar and Minority Report.

But this job posting would imply that Apple is in a competitive marketplace where other companies have ideas, too. That open mobile platforms may be on the verge of a cambrian explosion of unexpected, unplanned, useful devices that will be difficult to fight off with a platform that is locked down in both hardware (old news!) and software (evil news!). That the world hasn’t been standing still in the two years that the iPhone has … grown. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)