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Apple puts a new emoji face on its executive team

Apple's leadership goes Memoji to celebrate World Emoji Day.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Steven Musil
apple-execs-memoji

Apple's leadership team transformed into emoji.

Apple

World Emoji Day is Tuesday, and Apple is getting into the spirit by recasting the photos on its executive team page as emojis.

Personal avatars are hot. Nintendo kicked off the craze in 2006 on the Wii console, and everyone from Samsung to Snap have followed suit, allowing users to create personalized images. The avatars that took over Apple's exec page are part of the company's new Memoji, make-your-own avatar expanding off Apple's Animoji.

The feature works by scanning your face and letting your chosen 3D character mimic your facial movements and expressions. Instead of unicorns or robots, Apple's new Memoji are meant to look like you.

World Emoji Day is an unofficial global holiday that has been observed each July 17 since 2014. The day celebrates all things emoji with events and product releases.

Apple got the celebration off to an early start Monday by unveiling of some of the 70 new emojis coming to iOS later this year. One of the big developments is pretty hairy: as in gray hair, curly hair, and options for redheads and bald heads too.

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