Steve Hotelling worked on multi-touch, being unveiled here by Steve Jobs in 2007
If Hotelling had worked on multi-touch and nothing else, he could have left Apple knowing that he helped create an important technology used on all smartphones today. But he also helped create Touch ID which was the first dependable fingerprint scanner on a phone. Motorola’s Atrix 4G was the first smartphone in the touchscreen era to include a fingerprint scanner; the phone was released in 2011 and it set back smartphone-based fingerprint scanners by two years.
A longtime colleague told Bloomberg that “No one was more brilliant than Steve.” He worked his way up to vice president at Apple where he reported to Johny Srouji, the company’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, and he leaves Apple as the executive responsible for touchscreen technologies, health sensors, and Face ID. Several veteran Apple executives on Srouji’s team will take up where Hotelling left off.
