THE CHALLENGE
The road to innovation is often lined with projects that didn’t work out. Creators, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs don’t know what insight or innovation will lead to breakout success if they don’t try.
That was the case for Hertz Fellow Storrs Hoen, who thought his big thing was going to be micromotors, which in theory could power tiny mirrors for optical communications, miniature desk drives or atomic microscopes.
When that idea didn’t find a commercial market, he didn’t change careers. Instead, he went to Apple and changed the way our computers and devices function, making them work better and more pleasant to use.
THE PATH
At Apple, Hoen was part of a team that worked on the MacBook trackpads. They invented the key sensors and actuators that move the trackpad “so it feels like you are pressing a mechanical button,” he said.
He was also on a team that developed the part of the Apple Pencil that detects how hard a person is pressing. “As you draw, your line quality changes; it becomes thicker or thinner, or lighter or darker, and really captures that sense of using a pencil,” he said.
Most recently, Hoen worked on the haptics in the Apple Watch and iPhone. “The tap that lets you know you’ve got a message on your watch, or that little click when you select something on your phone that says, yes, you’ve selected it — it’s more tactile, more fun to use, and makes a significant difference to people,” he said.
“It was just an incredible gift, to form the fundamentals of the technology, and then throw myself into the factories in Asia with hundreds of engineers and technicians who are solving the thousands of problems necessary to create products on the scale of a hundred million per year, with each one bringing a bit of wonder.”
Storrs Hoen
Master Scientist/Engineer, Apple
THE IMPACT
A bevy of small things make a product more amenable to the general public, including Hoen’s. Each of the projects he’s worked on have helped make Apple and its devices globally popular.
The Apple Watch, for example, is the world’s bestselling wearable device, with an estimated more than 230 million units sold. The Apple Pencil may be a more niche project, but experts estimate more than 42 million have been sold.
“It was just an incredible gift, to form the fundamentals of the technology, and then throw myself into the factories in Asia with hundreds of engineers and technicians who are solving the thousands of problems necessary to create products on the scale of a hundred million per year, with each one bringing a bit of wonder and joy,” he said.
