By Dan Moren

February 28, 2023 12:00 PM PT

The Back Page: Inside Apple’s most secret secret research & development group

Apple is a notoriously secretive company. A company so secretive that, in the past, when information has leaked out, it has stridently told its employees that it’s doubling down on its already secret secrecy but secretly it’s quadrupled down on its secrecy. (You haven’t heard about that because, well, it’s secret.) Of course, two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead. And the other is Tim Cook, because he is very good at keeping secrets. And doing away with people who leak secrets. Secretly.

So, when a reporter gets ahold of a story about a secret Apple design group working on secret projects—and no, not that secret group or that secret group, yes literally, a more secretive third secret group—you can draw two important conclusions: first, that whoever disclosed said secret has already been entombed within Jony Ive’s featureless white cell to live out their days in perpetual oblivion. And second, that there is clearly an even more secretive group inside Apple working on secrets that you still haven’t heard of.

Which is how I can now exclusively confirm the existence of an ultra-secret Apple R&D group dubbed the Secret Exploratory Design Research Engineering Team, or SEDRET.¹

If you thought that Apple’s AR headset, electric car, or blood glucose monitoring technology were the acme of the company’s secret projects, think again. SEDRET is involved in no less than three super secret projects in various stages of development, all of which have the potential to shake up the entire technology market—if not the world—as we know it. Let’s do a quick rundown.

• Edible screens: Forget foldables. Forget rollables. Meet munchables. Thanks to advances in 3D printing and revolutionary display technology, these new screens put the “organic” in “Organic Light Emitting Diodes.” You can have a display of whatever size and shape you want just by nibbling away at the corners until you’re happy. Plus, with 19 essential vitamins and 8 grams of fiber, it’s part of a balanced breakfast.

• Self-driving ebike: Electric cars may have the attention of the world at present, but electric bikes are far more practical. Only who wants to pedal? Or steer? Or avoid the odd squirrel darting across the road? The Apple Bike will take care of all most of that for you², letting you spend that pesky commute time working on today’s Wordle, immersing yourself in the virtual reality of the Apple headset, or I guess talking to your kids or something. These are priced to be a steal at under $100,000.

• Artificially intelligent virtual reality meetings: We all have way too many meetings, especially remote ones, and with the coming wave of augmented/virtual reality, that’s only about to increase. But Apple’s devised a clever workaround for the digital avatars we’re all sure to soon be sporting: artificial intelligence. Yes, you can get photorealistic digital representations of yourself to converse in the metaverse, but what if we took that a step further so you didn’t have to go to meetings at all? Leveraging Apple’s machine learning technology, AI voice synthesis, and the conversational skills of ChatGPT, you can skip out on those meetings and let virtual you handle them instead, totally seamlessly. Overbooked? No problem: digital avatar lets you attend up to three meetings at the same time.³ Just a caveat: There is a slight possibility that your digital avatar may tell your coworkers you love them and try to convince them to leave their partners for you. But what new technology doesn’t have some kinks to work out?

I’m told that this is just a sampling of the super secret projects that SEDRET is hard at work on, and while none are expected to ship in even the next ten to twenty years, Apple is clearly well poised for the next generation of technological evolution. Now, if you’ll excuse me, that’s the doorbell, and I just need to…Tim Cook?! What are you doing he——

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]