While it is not entirely clear what the initiative of Apple for testing cars with automatic control will result in, but on the roads of California three prototypes of "robots" will appear already this year. The corporation continues to seek new market niches, and Bloomberg agency this week announced the move to work in a new division of Apple two Google specialists who previously specialized in the development of satellites and related technologies.
Last year it became known that Apple could become a co-investor of the Boeing program to create a group of suborbital telecommunications satellites that would help provide access to wireless networks to residents of those regions of the planet where the development of terrestrial telecommunications infrastructure leaves much to be desired. Facebook in its time also acted with a similar initiative, but preferred to place telecommunications equipment on unmanned aerial vehicles. Google itself within the Loon project proved that the equipment can be lifted to the height and using balloons that can fly without stopping for up to six months.
While there is no way to determine for what purposes Apple is going to use suborbital satellites. This may be not so much the goal of organizing wireless networks, as the task of aerial photography. At least, the people who came to Google from the Google team in the last decade founded Skybox Imaging, which specialized specifically in the creation of equipment for aerial photography. In 2014, it was bought by Google, and to this day the founders of Skybox Imaging worked in the state of the search giant. Perhaps Apple is trying to develop its own cartographic services using aerial photography, carried out with the help of satellites.