Software engineering positions have outnumbered hardware engineering positions in Apple job listings for the first time since at least the first quarter of 2016, according to data-driven website Thinknum.
The website claims Apple's "software and services" job listings have topped its hardware engineering listings since the third quarter of 2018.
Thinknum's Joshua Fruhlinger told us that the data is sourced exclusively from Apple's jobs portal and does not include listings on third-party websites. His website began tracking the listings in the first quarter of 2016, so it's unclear if software job listings have ever topped hardware ones before.
Apple has also been increasing its emphasis on machine learning and Siriunder new AI chief John Giannandrea, with those areas falling under the software engineering category as well.
There are now over 1.4 billion active Apple devices around the world. That saturation coupled with rising prices has led to lower demand for some products. Last quarter, for example, Apple issued its first revenue warning in 16 years due to "fewer iPhone upgrades" than it anticipated.
With hundreds of millions of iPhones now sold, Apple is focused on building out its ecosystem of services and software features surrounding the device, and it obviously needs plenty of software engineers to accomplish that goal.
Friday January 9, 2026 8:17 am PST by Tim Hardwick
2026 could be a bumper year for Apple's Mac lineup, with the company expected to announce as many as four separate MacBook launches. Rumors suggest Apple will court both ends of the consumer spectrum, with more affordable options for students and feature-rich premium lines for users that seek the highest specifications from a laptop.
Below is a breakdown of what we're expecting over the next ...
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Apple's iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models at the same time, which is why we often get rumored features months ahead of launch. The iPhone 18 series is no different, and we already have a good idea of what to expect for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max.
One thing worth...
Friday January 9, 2026 4:24 am PST by Tim Hardwick
The Unicode Consortium has published a draft list of emoji that could come to smartphones and other devices in the future. The list shared by Emojipedia outlines 19 emoji candidates under consideration for Emoji 18.0, which is expected to be finalized in September 2026.
Among the proposed additions are a squinting face emoji, left- and right-pointing thumb gestures, a pickle, a lighthouse, a ...
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Back in late 2022 and early 2023, Apple rolled out a new architecture for its Apple Home platform to deliver improved performance and compatibility, although the rollout came with some hiccups that forced Apple to pull and later re-release the upgrade.
Three years later, Apple is now on the verge of ending support for the old version of the Home architecture, which may result in access to...
In a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, U.S. Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Lujan, and Edward Markey have requested that Apple and Google remove X Corp's X and Grok apps from their app stores over recent incidents of "mass generation of nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children."
X has come under fire over the past week amid reports of Grok's AI image...
iOS 26 is showing unusually slow adoption among iPhone users months after release, according to third-party analytics.
Usage data published by StatCounter (via Cult of Mac) for January 2026 indicates that only around 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running any version of iOS 26. The breakdown shows iOS 26.1 accounting for approximately 10.6% of devices, iOS 26.2 for about 4.6%, and ...
Friday January 9, 2026 3:37 am PST by Tim Hardwick
The iPhone Fold will be the first Apple device to adopt a Samsung-made OLED technology called CoE (Color Filter on Encapsulation), which could make the display brighter and thinner than previous panels, reports The Elec.
In a traditional OLED panel, a polarizing film sits above the display to cut reflections and improve contrast. The drawback is that this film also absorbs some of the OLED's ...
This is very misleading. People do not work only on software and not hardware, and visa verse. The line between two gets very blurry when you write code for personal devices, or create a device and need to write code to test it in real world use cases.
This is very misleading. People do not work only on software and not hardware, and visa verse. The line between two gets very blurry when you write code for personal devices, or create a device and need to write code to test it in real world use cases.
Generally you're considered a hardware engineer if you write drivers or anything lower. [doublepost=1551460673][/doublepost]
Good. I think their software quality has been a lot less than the hardware quality.
I'd maybe say this if it weren't for the MBP keyboard.
Good! Been using iOS since v1.1 on my 1G iTouch and have to say that for typical user it has gotten a bit complicated and unintuitive. You would be surprised how often people are surprised when I show them the flashlight in Control Center, swipe to backspace in Calculator, 3D Touch shortcuts even. Further, with the A11 and A12 there is plenty of amazing hardware groundwork that needs good software to make the most of it. Cause an iPad is a computer, right?
