Inside Apple Exploratory Design Group, which works on a glucose monitor, other advanced tech, and was behind some of the chip and battery tech in iPhones, Macs
Apple has a secret team working to bring noninvasive glucose monitoring to its smartwatch, but that's not all it's pursuing.
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile closes a six-year loop that CNBC opened in 2017, when it reported Apple had hired a small team of biomedical engineers for noninvasive glucose sensing and was running feasibility trials at Bay Area clinical sites. Cook's prototype glucose-tracker on his own Apple Watch later signaled the effort had executive sponsorship.
Bloomberg's new reporting names the vehicle behind it: the Exploratory Design Group, an Alphabet X-style unit that also produced chip and battery technology shipped in iPhones and Macs, and which reportedly hit major milestones on the Jobs-era glucose project just days before this piece ran.
First-order effects
- Apple's smartwatch roadmap now has a named internal owner for its most ambitious health feature — noninvasive, continuous glucose monitoring — with the same group credited for silicon and battery advances already shipping in iPhones and Macs.
- The group's existence reframes Apple's hardware pipeline: sensor, chip, and battery work is centralized in one exploratory unit rather than spread across product teams.
Second-order effects
- A six-year runway from the 2017 hiring reports to today's milestone claims shows Apple funding health-hardware R&D on a horizon most wearable rivals' product cycles can't match, pressuring them to either buy sensor capability or concede the medical-grade tier.
- Because XDG's chip and battery work feeds iPhones and Macs, progress on the watch sensor compounds across Apple's device line — integration advantages a single-product competitor cannot replicate.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Apple's structure points toward centralized moonshot labs that seed flagship features across the whole hardware portfolio, making multi-year sensor and silicon bets a core competitive moat in wearables.
- Noninvasive glucose monitoring, if it ships, would push consumer wearables further into regulated medical territory, a shift regulators and incumbent medical-device makers would have to respond to — though timing and regulatory path remain unconfirmed in the reporting.
The trend: Apple is institutionalizing long-horizon hardware moonshots inside a single Alphabet X-like group whose output — glucose sensing, chips, batteries — feeds its entire device line.