Apple's Memoji Executive Team Headshots Get An Emoji Twist

It's World Emoji Day, and Apple is marking the occasion by swapping its executive team for a Memoji line-up. Gone are the usual faces for Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, and Angela Ahrendts, with Apple's custom animated emoji faces slapped over the top.

Memoji are Apple's latest custom emojis, announced earlier this year. They build on Animoji, the animated emojis that Apple released with the iPhone X in late 2017, but where Animoji only allowed you to pick from a selection of pre-designed animated emojis, Memojis can be customized. In fact, they're intended for users to recreate themselves in emoji form.

After that, the TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X – and which is expected to be rolled out to all of Apple's 2018 iPhone update, and then after that to the iPad Pro and, at some point in the future, the MacBook too – can be used to animate the DIY characters. Using mouth and eye tracking, along with tracking of other facial characteristics, the Memojis can sing along to songs, deliver witty quips (as long as you have some witty quips to actually record), and create custom messages. Those can then be sent by iMessage among other routes.

Apple's Memoji executive team isn't animated, which might have been a little too creepy to be honest. It does, though, demonstrate the range of customization you can expect from the new emojis. Some are certainly more convincing than others, though whether you'd necessarily recognize every single person from their Memoji if they didn't also have their name and job title printed underneath, we're not so sure.

The switch is to mark World Emoji Day, and comes on the heels of Apple confirming the 70+ new emoji that will be added later in the year. They're based on the Unicode 11.0 guidelines, which include new options like red and gray hair, bald characters, new animals such as parrots, peacocks, and lobster, and new food such as cupcakes and mangoes.

However, because it's up to each company implementing the Unicode 11.0 guidelines to settle on a final design, the iOS and macOS emoji will look different to, say, those you'd get on an Android phone or on a Samsung Galaxy. There's no word on when, exactly, the new Apple emoji designs will be added to your iPhone, but we're expecting the Memoji to debut alongside iOS 12 in the fall.