i agree with your general sentiment but for Apple I do believe it makes sense to focus on AGI as they could incorporate it within their OSes and products to make them more productive for the users.
Apple has a reputation to uphold, of being bleeding edge and having the best, latest, greatest tech. Their "AI" is a not-so-great scripted bot over a decade old at this point.
They are laughably behind the curve. Android should see widespread deployment of Gemini baked into the next generation of phones, and this could have a significant impact on Apple.
> Apple has a reputation to uphold, of being bleeding edge and having the best, latest, greatest tech
Their reputation is of being the best. The most polished. The most accessible.
It’s never been to be on the bleeding edge. Apple’s brand is that of the perfectionists. Even in their hackiest 80s lore, the elements that rise to myth are those about resourcefulness and design.
> Apple has a reputation to uphold, of being bleeding edge and having the best, latest, greatest tech.
Quite the opposite.
The iPod was panned by tech commentators; famously, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
The iPhone saw similar reactions; https://www.fastcompany.com/40436054/10-of-the-most-interest.... "There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies."; "The real elephant in the room is the fact that I just spent $600 on my iPhone and it can’t do some crucial functions that even $50 handsets can."; "That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone."
I can't imagine how apoplectic Gates was over the iPad's success after a decade of trying to make a Windows tablet sell.
I think because if they don't, they'll be in the position of depending on someone else's platform to provide AI features for their products. This is just an analogy, but it would be like if you were an app developer, and instead of being able to control your distribution, you had to use someone's centralized store to sell everything, and then pay whatever they demanded, or be cut off at any time. Very dangerous!
They actually did but mainly with Google play. So far it feels like Microsoft is moving faster in that regard and getting partnerships with various automakers with AI at least.
I would rather they focus obscene amounts of effort to making the keyboard text “correction” not utter trash. Ridiculous how frequently it will completely change the intention of my writing.
Weird thing to say about the company that will be the definitive LLM once Pro 1.5 is available with its million tokens. I can’t even imagine what ultra 1.5 will bring.
As a former google fanboy (and current genAI enthusiast that keeps being disappointed at all the models that claim to rival gpt4 and then don't even beat gpt3.5), I'll believe it when I see it.
You're kind of contradicting yourself. If a high token count tells you all you need to know about how smart a model is Ultra 1.5 would be just as good as Pro 1.5.
The fact of the matter is it remains to be seen how smart either model will be.
Could you point me to evidence what you just wrote is true?
I just asked mistral 7b to provide 5 sentences that end with Apple. It couldn't do it. I then provided 5 examples generated from ChatGPT 4 and asked it to generate 5 more. It still couldn't do it. 10 ChatGPT examples- still couldn't do it.
You seem to be saying the models can generalize on the entire context size, that I should keep provided examples up to the token limit because this will make the model smarter. Is there evidence of that?
With the clusterfuck that has been generative AI (from OpenAI’s corporate drama to Google renaming and reörganizing their products every fifteen minutes) this seems prescient, with the only savvy player so far being Microsoft.
Possibly. On the consumer side, they’re in their own niches. What will get interesting is how Apple lets developers hook into the on-device AI, or one that’s running on its own metal.
I agree. The only two examples I've seen of embedded AI that "works" is Bard in search results, and generative AI in Adobe's. Everything else feels tacked on.
Edit: And on my iPhone, the offline photo categorization and image OCR
Microsoft haven't really taken any deep interest into the (say) Office suite in decades so now they have no intuition at all for where its value is, thus the "umm copilot?"-ing everywhere.
This is true, but most big AI companies are the ones selling shovels, and tons of money is pouring into the field because everyone wants to get in on shovel selling... but I don't know if it's yet determined that there are enough motivated shovel buyers.
MSFT's main benefit their chokehold on corporate software. They can provide high priced software, deals etc. due to sheer force of Office and Azure. Even Amazon does not have that.
They are oversaturating their products with internet-based LLMs. It is a desperate attempt to milk all possible potential value from their smart investment.
A careful plan for a product would be less hamfisted and include more flexibility to deal with the backlash.
> Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space.
I would say that only one of the examples you gave was unambiguously the first mover in a brand new space. I will give you "category defining", though.
For example, the iPod had tons of competitors already in the field when it launched.
Airpods were not even close to the first wireless earbuds.
One of the Apple Watch's major competitors (fitbit) launched 8 years prior. The first smartwatch that could sync with a computer came out in the 80s.
The iPad came like a decade after Microsoft's first major tablet push. ATT and Sony/Magicap and Apple all released "smart tablets" in the early 90s.
The iPhone was not the first capacitive touch screen smartphone, and certainly not the first smartphone - over a decade late to that game.
The Macintosh was (sort of) a sequel to Apple's own Lisa, which itself was also not a first mover. The Mac was incredibly innovative and successful, but was preceded by the LISA, PERQ, Alto, various Lisp Machines.
> In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.
iPhone has basically defined a category of mutli-touch screen devices. It essentially created the whole foundation how all the mobile phones went. It was a completely new consumer category of devices.
Apple Watch was a success because it used iPhone as a moat. iPad was built upon iPhone's foundation.
Back in 2007 it was not seen as a completely new category or truly original. It was a variation within an existing category. At the time we did not think it was revolutionary, but of course it became the new standard.
Before they became an "iPhone company" they were an "iPod company", and that was also an existing category when it launched.
you think when the iPhone came out the space was not crowded? You think they defined the category? Jobs himself have put up a number of smartphones in his 2007 presentation. Yes, the iPhone was far, very far better but it was definitely not a first.
Same thing with the iPod vs Diamond Rio MP3 layers.
As for the Watch, gosh, I do not even know where to start. Pebble Kickstarter two years before that? Two generations of the Samsung Galaxy Gear came out well before the Apple Watch.
Look at a picture of what the top 10 smartphones looked like the day before iPhone launched and then again a few years later. That is what category defining means.
They didn't take whatever was out there in the market and copy it/make it incrementally better. They started from scratch and built something drastically different and better than the rest. Same for iPod (yes there were plenty of cheap MP3 players out there, but none of them were comparable), Airpods and all the rest.
"No handset polarised opinions during 2007 more than the Apple iPhone. Although it has many good points, the list of bad points is equally impressive. The iPhone lacks 3G, the camera is only two megapixels and lacks autofocus and flash, you cannot send MMS messages, third party applications are not allowed, the battery is not replaceable and it is absurdly expensive."
These are all classes of device where existing options hashed out many of the growing pains before Apple released something more polished or attractive to buyers - the definition of second-mover.
Literally EVERY single example you listed were markets that already existed before Apple entered them (except maybe the Mac but that was so long ago who cares). MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. Wireless earbuds existed before Airpods. Tablets existed before the iPad. Smartwatches existed before the Apple Watch. VR goggles existed before Vision. Smartrings existed before the Apple Ring (just wait, its coming).
Their skill isn't in being a first mover. Their skill is being a second, or even last, mover into a space that has untapped potential, and unlocking that potential (for both their benefit and competitors).
The issue here, although easier due to moving second, is that Apple don't seem to really have a software culture, and this is pure software in multiple limits.
Yeah its kind of insane how many times Apple can pull this trick yet we still get people saying "they're late, they look like morons, Apple is finished".
Apple can arrive last to a product market. They can take six years of iterative releases to refine their vision on a product market. They will still dominate that market. Cue the "they can't keep getting away with this" meme, because this happens with EVERY PRODUCT THEY RELEASE and these people still keep thinking this time will be different.
The whole "Siri sucks" thing is also hilarious, because you have to ask: So? So what? Apple, Google, and Amazon invested billions upon billions into these systems (Amazon especially). Then LLMs came around and are absolutely eating their same lunch ten times faster. Apple, again, looks like a genius (intentionally, or far more likely, not). They didn't over-invest. They're not laying off a thousand people from the Alexa division [1], or removing a ton of Google Assistant features [2], or releasing hardware no one is buying. They built exactly enough of a voice assistant to be competitive throughout the 2010s, and now its time for the next generation of all these things anyway.
But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you?
EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and discovers "AGI".. then what? Is that worth money, somehow?
That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.
Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace?
EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
Do you understand the concept of individual productivity? If you have 5 people working for you, and a new technology makes each 25% more productive, you can fire one of them.
The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do.
The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
Has anyone been made measurably more productive with this stuff? Is even 25% achievable? I'm a software engineer, and I spend less than 25% of my time typing out code. So even if copilot could write every single line of code for me it could not improve my productivity by 25%. In order to make me 25% more productive it would also have to somehow speed up everything else I do at work as well. Has this been demonstrated?
Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
Yes, I wrote a small app in kotlin to scratch an itch. Chat gpt 3.5 gave me code that in the past would have taken me weeks to figure out from the mountain of verbiage in Google docs for the ever changing APIs. Normally googling for this stuff just leads to loads of things that don't work and I have to figure out why. With chat gpt I just pasted whatever error and it gave me the right answer the second or third time. I now have my (private) app that does what I need. Without gpt it would have taken me several weeks (real time, it's a hobby).
I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
This comment is really odd to see on HN. It’s like if a group of computer enthusiasts (in person) had a guy saying “I don’t understand what the big deal is with this so-called internet.”
The Internet was (is) a totally transformative technology which has changed how people work, play, shop, and interact worldwide. Your claim is that generative AI will do this? How? I recall a few months ago the Web 3.0 people saying a similar thing. Is it different this time?
Even if all it did was improve Siri’s capability to understand requests and add the ability to ask clarifying questions with no other functional improvements, it’d make Siri vastly more useful.
This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there".
Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.
I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work
I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard.
But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.
I haven't owned an iPhone since the iPhone 4, I lean really heavily on autocorrect on my Pixel (is that using Gboard?). It's just an infuriating experience to me compared to physical buttons. I probably hit the backspace key at least three times as often and often when I try to type a backspace instead it comes out as an "l", "m", ".", or enter.
Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into the phone, that would fix it completely most of the time (except, obviously, when I'm not near my desk).
An ideal compromise would be physical buttons on the device for when it's necessary and the ability to easily use my workstation's external keyboard (dock + switch maybe?) the rest of the time.
EDIT: Now that I think of it.. let me plug in a mouse too and give me a real OS (maybe in a container like you get on a Chromebook) and i can just replace my workstation with the docked phone. But then I would buy only half as many computers and wouldn't need all that GPU compute to train a bunch of statistical models so I guess that doesn't work for the computer companies.
I knew halfway through your comment that I was going to end up agreeing with where you were going. We're so close to having a decent Android tablet, with maybe a new Firefox for tablets, with USB-C DP out. 90% of the time I also would rather just be on a better device.
I'm sad there isn't more built around Android's AVF. I thought for sure, by now, we were going to have "Linux on Android" ala Crostini.
You can indeed just plug in your full size keyboard into your phone! You may need a USB A to C adapter, but your phone will happily support an external keyboard
Does a computer understanding me make it better? I find that attempts the computer makes to understand me, "delight" me, etc. just end up pissing me off. It's a tool. All I ever want a tool to do is be completely invisible and become an extension of my body, which enables me to get a task done. Computer software which does anything other than exactly what I tell it to fails at this, because it instantly breaks my connection to the task I'm trying to do and refocuses my attention on the software itself.
I wouldn't dream of trying to use a Siri, it sounds absolutely maddening. All I expect is that when I press a key on the keyboard the character I commanded with my key press shows up on the screen before I can blink, and does so exactly once.
I love watching my friends and family use Siri. Maybe 20% of the time it does what they want first try. 40% of the time they end up unlocking the phone and tapping the screen.
Sounds infuriating to me. (To be clear, I don't have any always-(maybe)-on mics in my life, I doubt Hey Google or Bard or whatever is much better.)
But none of those things are Generative AI, which is a big part of WHY they're infuriating to use.
I use Siri to add stuff to my grocery list and set timers. That's it. It's useful when I'm in the kitchen to just say what needs to go on this list instead of remembering to write it down later.
The day when Siri or Google or whatever can make the corrections I mentioned in my higher post will improve it vastly.
That's great, and I don't begrudge you, but most people want to be able to tell their computer what to do and not need to understand the discrete steps it took to get there.
Taking a completely different type of example, image editing. Let's say you ask your computer to remove a blemish in a photo. A professional could remove it, maybe better even, without AI. They know the tools to use, the keys to press, and effect change. Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
It's not here yet, so yes you're right that Siri IS maddening to use.
> Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
This feels dangerously close to a lack of empathy for the user. I understand that's not your intention, in fact the opposite. But in order to accept the notion that users actually want an intelligent employee instead of a tool I have to believe that everyone truly wants to be a manager instead of an individual contributor. I don't believe it.
Take a simpler case, hammering in a nail. What I want from my hammer is for it to disappear and become an extension of my arm. I just want to hammer in the nail. I don't want to negotiate with the hammer about how it's going to strike the nail, all I want is to hit the nail. There's no amount of "clever" the hammer can be which will help. Cleverness can only hurt my user experience.
In your example, what recourse does the user have if the AI didn't do the job the way they wanted? Removing something from an image implies (probably? or maybe not?) that the void is "backfilled" somehow. What if they're not happy with the backfill job? Do they have to argue with the tool about it? Will the tool take their feedback well or will it become a fight?
I think, generally, giving users tools that scale like hammers is the way to go. A hammer in the hands of a skilled carpenter, blacksmith, or cobbler with 30yr experience is no different than the same hammer in the hands of a 2yo child learning to drive their first nail. But that hammer's utility will scale with that child's skill for their entire lifetime. There's no "beginner" vs "advanced" distinction. What makes us (as computer hammer builders) believe that we can distinguish between "beginner" or "advanced" computer hammers? Or "regular" vs "special" users?
EDIT: or maybe we're not building hammers, instead we're building dishwashers. Dishwasher users aren't supposed to be skilled beyond loading and unloading the dishwasher, and hitting the start button. Do "regular users" really want an appliance, or do they want a tool?
EDIT: another way to phrase it -- are computers "bicycles for the mind" or are they just a bus?
That's very true, I dislike how Apple, etc. don't uncover the manual controls for things. So when the smart tools stop working it gets frustrating because there's no manual way to continue.
> But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you?
It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.
I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.
If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.
There are two possibilities- one is what the PC largely did. Nobody really lost their jobs even though one accountant can do the work of 40 that just had calculators. We can just do “more” now.
On the other hand there’s what the washing machine, mechanized farm equipment, etc. did. A slow shift in how many people are required to do a job. There were no absolute jobs lost, just a shift in the economy.
They haven't released anything yet it's unfair to say how far behind they are. I don't expect them to catch up with Open AI but perhaps they could be on par with Google.
Apple's advantage is always been superior hardware and processing. My guess is that they try to do some on device LLM. It's currently possible to run Mistral 7B on your phone (MLCChat app), which is quite decent for a small model but is pretty terrible compared to the largest / best models.
Do we actually know if they're far behind or if they just haven't released something publicly because it's not perfect?
I mean looking at Google and the various daily AI dramas they get, it seems like everyone else has rushed to market and is dealing with the negative fallout of that.
I wonder if this is connected to the Vision Pro release. That’s another giant hardware fishing project that failed to meet the “vision” of an all-day wearable iPhone. Perhaps it became obvious that the car was in even murkier waters.
And to dump some of the employees on image and text generators off whatever self driving computer vision work they were presumably doing before? Interesting choice.
Honestly, a car made more sense than a VR headset if the vision behind the VR headset is "an all-day wearable iPhone". Though I doubt it is, nor was it for the forseeable future. Despite it's outward appearance, I expect Apple's management to consist mostly of engineering type realists, otherwise it becomes hard to explain how they keep being the #1 in Lifestyle products.
I think the VR goggles were always a stab at what's supposed to become Meta's core business.
Regardless, I would have really like to see a car from Apple. Tesla is still too small to get the attention of EU regulators when it comes to their stupid warranty and serviceability. Apple is large enough and already known to not play nice when it comes to repair - I'm sure we would've gotten some amazing legislature about electric vehicle repairability out of it!
I mean the hype around the iPhone was huge. There was obvious need for a phone that "runs OS X" and was part of the already massive iPod ecosystem. It sold itself.
I still don't get the case for a screen you can wear. My phone screen is big enough for most use cases (like posting this comment). If I need to get work done, my laptop is realistically not much larger than the keyboard I'd need to use anyway. The laptop is also cheaper, and I can show what I'm working on to other people without jumping through hoops.
I understand it, or at least what it could be. Picture something in eyeglasses or even invisible contacts or neural implant. It adds an AR layer on everything. There are no devices, no screens, no buttons. You look and think and the world responds. The Vision Pro is a clunky preview, but decently feature complete.
Utopian or dystopian, this is exactly the future that Apple, Meta and NeuraLink are chasing.
Not that it failed per se, but there were lots of reports that they ended up at a very bulky and compromised headset that was not much different than what Meta was selling when they really wanted AR glasses. Reports also said the executives were unhappy with the final design and that there was political debate if they should launch or fold.
Maybe in a few versions they will have something that could sell a billion units, but they have a lot of work to do to get there.
Yeah but didn't the first iPhone sell pretty well? I tried a demo of AVP in NYC the week after release. The staff casually mentioned that they had units in stock if I'd like one.
I think apple is having a difficult time selling these things. I had a harder time getting a hold of an iPad pro over a month after launch.
While some may have doubted the iPhone, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhones in the year it launched, and cell phones had already been established as an enormous and growing market.
VR seems very different from that. Most people simply don’t want what companies are trying to sell them, and I think multiple major technical breakthroughs would be necessary to change that.
While there were absolutely people who thought the iPhone would fail, the idea that most people were skeptical about the iPhone is simply ahistorical. The iPhone had a huge amount of hype from the moment it was announced, and it was pretty clear from the outset that this was the direction cell phones were headed.
The Vision Pro just doesn't have that. Apple was able to clearly articulate what the iPhone allowed you to do that you couldn't do before. But the use cases presented for the Vision Pro just are a lot more niche, and a lot less compelling. Some people will certainly find uses for it, but right now the Vision Pro feels like a solution in search of a problem.
Vision Pro was never designed to replace the iPhone from day one.
People seem to have this revisionist history where every Apple product is an instant hit. But the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch etc all took years to reach that product-market-fit stage.
All Apple has done is establish a baseline for what they want the category to be.
Correct. All of those products were pretty crappy when they were first released and then got very good. In the case of the iPhone, I think it was like the third revision when it got good. The iPad comes to mind as one of their only somewhat recent products that was really good right from the start. That one still benefited from being more or less a giant iPhone and it was years before it really came into its own. For at least the past 25 years, their initial forays into a new category have been marked by potential that isn't realized for several more years. I think the Vision Pro will be fine.
I'm extremley sceptical on Vision Pro or AR/VR headsets in general, but I think it's too early to call it failed. I think it met exactly the vision it was supposed to - it just needs years and years of iterating to get to the final goal.
And there'd be a hell of a lot more demand if we priced the negative externality of the CO2 emitted and damage ICE vehicles do to the environment but sadly we don't.
Cook's best trait is being reactive very well. What he lacks in the Jobs "magic", he has in the ability to react to industry incredibly well and do better than most.
I have little doubt Apple is going to be a major player in AI, especially in the non-Nvidia hardware space after playing around with MLX
I disagree. They had a leading edge with Siri but failed to invest in AI over a car. This move is just correcting a vital mistake in time past. They’re playing catch up.
I really hope Apple continues its privacy-first ethos and offers an on-device LLM. It would also be great if they could use Handoff-like technology to let my (almost always nearby, almost always plugged-in) laptop do the thinking, instead of depleting the battery of my phone. I'd surely buy a bunch of HomePod minis if I could tie them into a local LLM.
For all Apple's flaws, I trust that they could disrupt the AI industry once they enter it. Their decisions are all highly calculated, and they employee vast swaths of researchers. I would not be surprised if they entered the market with a well functioning local LLM
Have you actually used Siri? They are absolutely garbage at anything even remotely resembling the basics of AI/LLM related after spending a decade on it.
Obviously, they haven't invested any money into it (well, apparently they will for iOS 17). When Apple does invest money, however, which they seem to be doing now, there are usually impressive results. Take the M1, for instance.
Im not debating the mechanics of why it’s so shit, I’m saying that they are many years behind everyone else and that it’s not obvious that simply throwing money at the problem is going to fix that for them or that they actually have much of a track record of making good software again despite unlimited budgets and many years of opportunity to prove otherwise.
It's pretty clear they made a conscious choice to keep Siri simple (as frustrating as that is). But this does not reveal anything about their capabilities with LLM based systems.
It feels like it's too late. Microsoft, Meta and Google all beat Apple to the punch with highly usable and competitive local inferencing frameworks. Apple could release a Tensorflow-style library with full-fat CUDA and Linux support tomorrow, but they would just be Another Competing Solution next to ONNX and Pytorch.
The hardware side doesn't look much better. Apple's biggest userbase is located on iPhone, which poses hardware constraints on what kinds of model you can realistically deploy. The Mac has a deeply-ingrained audience, but it's unlikely that the AI will be a selling point to commercial customers (who have Nvidia) or PC users (that have other models).
Honestly, I believe AI research would be a wasted investment relative to supporting third-party libraries upstream and welcoming Nvidia back onto their platform.
And I hope the reverse. Most of my data I am happy to entrust to Apple, and I don't want them to release substandard not-very-smart products just because they're limited to AI models that only take a few gigs of RAM and can run on a single phone processor.
Please just use some huge models to make actually smart products and run them in the cloud if it isn't feasible to run them on-device. Perhaps have an 'offline mode', which runs small models (the google assistant already does that - and it's very noticeable that the online mode has very accurate speech recognition, whereas offline mode can only recognise basic words reliably).
There are lots and lots of rumors suggesting an LLM-driven Siri 2.0, as well as broad integration of minor LLM-driven functionality like locally creating smart playlists.
That's not true you can have complete end to end encryption. By default. iCloud is not encrypted, but you can encrypt it and nobody but you can get access access your data.
It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.
Can and do are two vastly different things. The assumption that data privacy can only be accomplished by no one having any access to data is ridiculous.
Of all the companies that exist right now, apple does a fair bit of work regarding data anonymization and access restriction.
This is not true at all. I would recommend reading a bit on Apple’s privacy practices and how they differ from other players in the space to arrive at a more informed understanding here.
From Apple’s legal page [0] for e.g. maps: “Individual usage metrics are associated with an identifier that rotates multiple times per hour, and is not tied to your Apple ID. This means Maps cannot search for information about you based on an identifier linked to you or your device.”
I am sure Apple leadership agrees with your overall idea of on-device, but don’t see how this could compete with big GPUs in a data center for “actually doing a good job.” Apple is a distant last place in everything to do with AI today, so I’m skeptical that they can suddenly make an impact with both hands tied around their back (in other words 1/100th the TDP, one iPhone chip on battery vs farms of GPUs).
I’d honestly more appreciate the ability to choose “best quality with theoretical decrease in ‘privacy’” over “best that you can do without hurting the tiny iPhone battery but perfect privacy.” I’d always pick the first one if given the choice.
I think the way they could compete is by having on-device handle a limit universe of queries, and then use some souped-up Siri for the rest. Currently iPhones can do some Siri commands even when offline, for example.
Hell even the most recent Apple Watch does some Siri commands, including voice to text, on device. Apple is certainly pushing low power on device processing with their own custom chips (S9 on the watch I believe).
Yep, I could totally see them enabling this only on Pro-level iPhones, for example. This would presumably be because Pro devices could have different chips that are designed to handle these specific tasks, as well as having larger batteries.
I expect there will be a lot of iPhone upgrades this fall, as buyers will finally see a difference between their 1-3 year old device and a new iPhone.
Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.
It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especially when you could just have a higher-margin business selling software for other people’s cars.
What surprises me is that it took this long to kill the product. And while I feel bad for the engineers and researchers who worked on this project, this really does seem like the best outcome.
> requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business
I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.
I was going to say. If anyone knows how to quickly create and expand a network of dealerships and post-sales support, it's Apple. They literally wrote the book on this with computers and phones and all their accessories.
They didn’t though. They piggybacked off of the existing network of phone carriers. They did slowly build out Apple Stores. But they aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as resellers and carriers for selling devices
Cars are different both for sales and more importantly for support. Apple is best in class for a turnkey consumer experience. But if you’ve ever had to deal with Apple Care Enterprise, which is a lot more similar to the sort of support you have to do for luxury cars, in my experience it just isn’t the same. It is fine, but it isn’t the same experience that a consumer gets (I’m unsure of what the experience is like for people that shell out the money for the on-site support from IBM or whoever the contractor is now).
And that’s the thing. Apple does really well at attainable luxury consumer goods. I think it does less well the higher the price point and market segmentation. Hence why the $10,000 Apple Watch didn’t work (and that was for lots and lots of reasons, first and foremost I think a misunderstanding of why watch enthusiasts spend so much on watches).
But putting that aside, partnerships (dealers) make up the car market for everyone with the exception of Tesla, and although with enough time and money, Apple could absolutely build out their own network, unlike Apple Stores, where they had a solid 5 years to a decade to really grow (coincidentally timed to Apple’s rise as a consumer giant) into that infrastructure, they’d need to have that basically day one for a car. Which is my whole point about it being overhead/capital intensive. Even Tesla had a chance to grow over time as it was a new company and not expected to sell and service cars everywhere. Apple would have a difficult time, I think, releasing a car and saying it could only be bought and serviced in select cities. The stakes are higher the bigger you are.
It isn’t that I don’t think Apple could do these things. It’s that I don’t think Apple could do them at the scale and margins at which it has based its business on. Especially if the net result is growing $100b in market cap. Apple added $1T to its market cap in 2 years (2018 to 2020) and another briefly in 2023 (current is $2.82T). I think there are far less intensive ways to add $100b to the bottom line than to become a car company.
Or they could launch some much lower hanging fruit and wait for stock price to appreciate by that much or more. A car company, no matter how small, is very, very hard.
It's in opposition to the brand. Apple products range from affordable to aspirational. But every line is carefully segmented so there's a somewhat affordable option - certainly not cheap, but relatively accessible.
And all mass-produced in incredible numbers.
A low volume $250k car would be pure luxury for the sake of it. That's not Apple's market.
Apple's market would be a $50k Tesla killer with far better styling and build quality and some attempt at a game-changing killer feature, all bundled with cross-marketing for other walled-garden products.
I'm not surprised that turned out to be impossible - for now.
A common way to break into the car market is to start with the very expensive cars. You just barely break even at best, but you learn enough in those early cars so that in 5 years you can build the next cheaper model, and so on down the line.
It isn't the only way to break in, but it is common.
Ferrari's value is driven more by merchandising than by car sales. Even if a hypothetical Apple car did well, that wouldn't drive billions in sales of Apple branded jackets, hats, luggage, shot glasses, etc.
Ironically this was something Apple used to be good at but they killed off all the fun things with apple branding on them, now all you get is two campus exclusive shirt designs.
I'd love some retro apple "lifestyle" gear, throwback porsche racing jacket would be clutch right now with the yoots
I never understood why each of the flagship Apple stores don’t have custom merch.
I’ll admit that I’ve stopped at plenty of Apple stores while traveling, simply because they’re nearby. They’re usually in very nice locations for tourists (5th av, grand central station, etc) and I can totally see them dramatically improving brand appeal and catering to fanboys with localized tee shirts or Apple Watch bands or polishing cloths or any number of other gimmicks.
Oh and their retro stuff would sell out in an instant. Their 80s stuff was cool.
I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP. Apple is just not that elite of a brand, I don’t see how selling million-dollar vehicles would significantly change their brand (assuming an Apple logo hood ornament).
Aren't they? Their entire business is pretty much based on brand. Apple products aren't actually better than the competition (often they are worse, like the iPhone not letting you install apps outside the app store). But it doesn't matter because people think Apple is cool. I don't see why that wouldn't translate to cars.
61% marketshare for phones in the US doesn't sound like a luxury brand to me.
They might position themselves as an aspirational brand outside the US, and by keeping retail prices close to the same as in the US, no matter the local purchasing power, I can see how they can be perceived as an upscale brand in some markets.
I love how Apple haters don’t understand the phenomenon. Look, I bought Sony headphones, some reference like xixikxixkklkxwx. I now have tinitus. Everyone tells me it’s because I didn’t buy the xixikxixkklkxwii, which were obviously better. The entire PC market is like this. Intel sells i7, but it’s not the same as the i7 of 20 years ago. LG sells screens where you have 90% chances of buying shit and get told “Well they do make good screens, you should have bought the other reference. What did you expect. You noob.” The entire Android market is like this. You buy Samsung and you get OEM preinstalled shit. “Yeah everyone knows you should gave bought the Pixel, not the Samsung.”
So now, instead of buying things twice because the one was shit, I just buy Apple. I don’t buy “the iPhone”. I buy “iPhone”. It could be 99% more expensive, it’s still less than buying things twice.
I don't know why you think one needs to buy Apple in order to get good products. I research and find out what products are good, buy them, and am happy. If you're happy with Apple then good for you, but don't kid yourself that it's because they are just better. They aren't.
> I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP
See what Rimac did, it is a good example that starting a luxury sports car company and be successful is possible nowadays, and talking from the ignorance it seems to me easier than the past. If that is what apple wants or needs is a different story.
Building supercars has always been a cottage industry that anyone can get involved in but nobody can dominate in the way Apple has certain classes of electronic product. There's a lot of choice, few buyers and it's not high margin compared with mass produced electronics at industry-leading markup even if engineers at the popular companies aren't more obsessed with beauty and speed than the bottom line.
What Rimac did was partner with big automotive OEMs for research joint ventures and sell a tiny number of cars and a relatively large amount of battery and drivetrain tech to other OEMs. Difficult to imagine anything less like Apple's business model than that.
Most of your cottage automotive manufactures are partners with a big brand. You can do many things on your own, but you want the large partner to supply engines (it is basically impossible for a small industry to build an emissions compliant engine from scratch - expect to spend over a billion $ in the R&D if you try - and you can only get that cheap if a lot of the engineering is done in places like India). You also buy your airbags from their supplier.
But I guess my question is, why would you bother with only making 4,000 cars a year, if you’re Apple? Especially if the initial cost of making that $100b market cap (which a solid iPhone quarter alone will net you) is more than $100b (not accounting for R&D tax rules fuckery because I’m not versed enough in how all that works and what the current rules are) on development work.
I have similar concerns about the Apple Vision Pro, given its small yields and current high ASP/muted demand, but at least there you can see the vision (pun unavoidable) of how it could eventually be an iPad-sized business or greater. A car only works if you do go after Tesla and Mercedes and BMW, etc.
I just don’t see any reason Apple would enter any business if not to take it on as a mass market player. Selling a $10,000 variant of a $500 watch is one thing (and that strategy failed, for what it’s worth), selling a low quantity machine that you still have to maintain and support that isn’t part of your core competency as a company is something else entirely.
But Apple's M.O. is Toyota volume with Ferrari margins. No way would they be happy selling 4k of anything. And Apple's required margins is why I never thought they would release a car - there isn't enough money in it.
The only time it made sense to me was the idea they had some proprietary or trade secret 10x battery efficiency breakthrough from their work on computers and had a massive opportunity to utilize it in electric car space. Otherwise struck me as as a "tesla is doing this so we should too" move.
Apple started work on this car when vehicles were still reasonably priced.
I’d wager this cancellation is purely due to there being no chance in hell Apple could get the Apple premium for it when vehicle sales are stagnating due to massive price increases.
The much-overstated “Apple premium” largely reflects that they don’t compete in the lowest end of the PC/phone market. They’d be competing with BMW, not charging even more.
As a current owner of a BMW 5 series, buying anything non-electric for the price of an EV sounds ludicrous to me. The moment your warranty expires, BMW takes ownership of your wallet and never lets go, and there’s _a lot_ of expensive maintenance and repairs you need to do. I know they also make EVs, but just based on my current experience with their dealers buying anything from BMW would be insanity. Whoever overhauls the ownership experience will make a ton of money. In the meanwhile my next car will be a Tesla. My wife already has a Model Y, and in 3 years we paid $0 for maintenance and the car has been in the shop 0 times.
IOW Apple could easily charge their customary 20-30% margin and create fierce brand loyalty by just looking at whatever it is BMW is doing and doing the opposite in nearly every situation.
Agree, repairing a recent-gen out of warranty MacBook at Apple is nearly as expensive as servicing a car. Why wouldn't Apple want those margins from premium cars as well?
You probably haven’t had your car serviced in a while. My BMW is currently is at the dealer, to replace water pump and thermostat. The invoice is $4.5K. The winning strategy for a newcomer is not to charge for repairs, but to create a car that doesn’t need repairs or maintenance.
>>> Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.
Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc.
The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed to avoid more anti trust issues is often forgotten. Apples products are built on legacies. "Resting on the shoulders of giants" is probably true in this case.
Apple is now an AT&T, its now a Xerox, it is now the company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS). Apple, unlike google, knows how to make a consumer product, and one of these moonshots could make it even bigger...
I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.
Yeah, I absolutely believe that Apple can bring something to car industry - I remember Elon once said that Teslas hidden strength that no other car manufacturer caught on to was treating the car as technology akin to an iPhone with incremental updates and improvements pushed over the air. I've owned a Model X for a few years and I see that approach but don't think Tesla has perfected it. Apple has the potential to innovate there. Cars, even ones that look like "traditional" cars, have been computers on wheels for a long time - for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes. I have no idea what that would look like, and as someone who thought the iPhone was a worse version of an iPod and that the iPad filled a non-existant need I don't think I can speculate. But it just feels like an area that lags behind in terms of UX, which Apple often excels at.
Edit: I'm a dumb dumb and the brakes example was bad. I don't edit my mistakes in forums so peoples replies make sense. I still think the rest of the point is valid.
With power brakes, there's a brake booster (usually vacuum powered) which applies most of the force. When the engine is off (or if you have a broken brake booster) braking is entirely on you.
Indeed. The brake boost works one or two times right after engine power down, it's kinda funny - I like to push the brake before getting out just to feel it harden.
>>for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes
I'm sorry but you're getting it completely wrong. Brake by wire isn't legal anywhere in any market of the world and consequently there are zero cars implemented this way - every car currently on sale everywhere has to have a physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes.
Throttle by wire on the other hand - sure. Nearly all new cars only have an electronic throttle.
Steer by wire is making progress, with Lexus making the first road legal car that has a steering wheel that's fully disconnected from the steering rack, with only electronic control.
Lexus has a backup mechanical link it engages when a fault is detected. The Tesla Cybertruck is the first vehicle on the road with no such backup. They rely on redundancy of motors, power, and compute instead
There isn't a mechanical connection of any kind - the car just relies on triple(!) Backup for every component, including three fully independent power sources.
> there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes.
I don't think this is true for most vehicles. Skoda Octavia 2020 for example still has hydraulic brakes. I was going to suggest that no mass-production vehicles use a brake-by-wire system but I would have been wrong, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
I wish more comments were like this.
Misjudging the iPhone etc probably just comes down to a lack of information about broader needs. Its not always a bad take.
I think Apple can provide an emphasis on modularity for the car manufacturers. What if you literally had a place to slip in an iPad as your display? What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets - if not for the drivers, then the passengers. What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements). Another car company could make the shell and the power train. Apple would handle the "experience" and integrate it into its other offerings. Cloud Cars.
> What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets
Or what if the people who wanted that just bought their headset of choice?
> What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements).
Question: when you get into someone else's car, is the first thing you notice the lighting, or is it how clean it is?
The accelerator likely would have been a better example. I'm not sure that any car currently shipping has a direct connection between the accelerator and a throttle.
Embarrassingly, I was eves dropping on a (loud) woman in a coffee shop who worked on the Apple Car project. She did SLAM work. I was evesdropping because that was a core part of my thesis and I was curious. She told her dining partner she was moved to the Vision Pro team to build the inside-out tracking.
Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on R&D but that’s how the game works.
Yes, I also don’t work I computer vision but played with it just a tiny bit—I think somebody saying they worked in SLAM and are moving to a Vision Pro project is not a huge leak or anything. It is like a chemist saying they work in lithium ion batteries and are making the same move. A very broad and fundamental concept.
Maybe the fact that they were moved away from the car project would have been a leak though, depending on what else they said.
I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things.
The density of talent must be amazing.
The benefit of being a part of the actual human world, where real people live. Where not essentially everyone is obsessed with their careers and/or comparative wealth. That sort of thing.
It can be alienating to move through the world in spaces where your work is everywhere you go. It's a thing I appreciated moving from San Francisco back to the midwest. Every once in awhile, I bump into someone with a Github sticker or whatever, and it's a happy surprise, but for the most part the world I inhabit has nothing to do with my work. Everyone has different things to talk about.
I love not having to think or talk about work when I go outside.
If some one asks what I do they'll say "that's neat, must be nice to work from home!" and that's the end of the conversation, we can talk about hobbies or something else instead.
What part of it is confidential? Its existence? Obviously not. The fact that it uses SLAM? Not confidential, of course it does. That a person was transferred from that to the Vision Pro? Probably also on their linkedin page.
Nothing that OP described this person as saying sounds "stupid" or confidential. Sure, maybe they also said something that was confidential in addition to what was described. Maybe they also insulted your mother. We don't know.
Is that an official, Apple-specific policy written down somewhere? That doesn't seem right, and doesn't match other similar companies.
I've known people at Facebook and Microsoft who were working on upcoming not-yet-released products and were free to talk about the products and their roles on them. These people, much like the person we're discussing, worked on upcoming projects which had already been publicly announced.
Of course publicly discussing a confidential project that no one knows about could get someone fired, but that's not the scenario we're talking about.
Apple never announced a project to build a car. Nor did they announce the cancellation of a project to build a car.
Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.
Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.
More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.
I'd argue this is true of a lot of cities where you're likely to bump into anyone, depending on how narrow your scope is of what one considers interesting. Also true of probably most universities if they're doing anything right.
The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram where you actually do bump into and communicate with new and stimulating people.
Everybody is interesting if you get talking to them. You just think the guy who collects your trash is uninteresting and never talk to him (or do you?). Sure not everyone has the same background, and so they are interesting in different ways, but they are all interesting.
Interests must align. People must know common jargon which convey high density information faster. I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.
> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.
Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.
> Interests must align.
That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.
some of my best conversations - that I still remember many many years from them - are from people who have nothing in common to me.
some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have
This is exactly what I meant, but even beyond relatively common jobs, if you're likely enough to bump into open people, there's a good chance some of them will be doing more niche interesting things too
I’m in Philly and about 20 years ago I sat next to an old man at a dinner for something. Neither of us wanted to be there. We talked, found out we both did tech things. I asked him what he worked on and he said “well back in the day I helped build ENIAC.” I was blown away. Had a great talk.
These are the moments in life to cherish. As Ferris Bueller once said "Life moves fast, if you don't stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it".
Incidentally, one of the scariest things about the volatility in the housing market and in my (lack of) career, is that I may at some point be forced to abandon the neighborhood and city in which I've adopted as my home and in which I've befriended many of these random delightful people of all ages, and they might have to too. They're my community, I see them at the gym, the coffee shop, walking down the street, or at the park. A 1 bedroom condo starts at around $650k CAD, and most of the people here who haven't already owned something for a while depend on renting basements.
I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.
South Bay is just like a giant company town, it’s actually pretty boring - 60% of people work at the same handful of giant companies, the other 30% work at a startup, and the last 10% serve the first group fair trade coffee.
The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.
>You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.
Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.
I’m very fond of both New York City, and spending time in nature for the same reason: you just don’t know what you’re gonna see when you walk out your door.
Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?
Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?
For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.
Yeah, but you don't have to "no-life the right hobbies" to be satisfied in NYC because there's SO MUCH to do. You can just be a normal person who isn't hyper obsessed with one particular hobby.
You mean besides drinking and dining and spending outrageous amounts of money on 13$ beer and overpriced bland food? As a european I dont like the city at all. The only thing going for it is the vibe and the energy of the people. If it werent for the high salaries, people wouldnt be moving here.
It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.
NYC is way better than Barcelona, sorry. Let me know when y'all can figure out how to make sidewalks that you can walk straight along to your destination, rather than having to go diagonally along a big asphalt parking lot at every single intersection.
> It's weird. They always travel in groups of five. These programmers, there's always a tall skinny white guy, a short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.
Different strokes I guess. How long have you been…working? The vast vast vast majority of people want a little more variety in lives as opposed to more more more of the stuff they spend 40+ hours a week doing as it is. The exceptions to this rule are almost always unhealthy workaholics / people that’ll learn about the benefits of work / life balance the hard way. It doesn’t make them some higher tier of world-class engineer like some (often including themselves) expect.
People also do that to get insider info to trade on or for industrial espionage/competitor spying. They'll hang out in the lobby of a building, coffee shops nearby, appearing to work while eavesdropping and taking notes.
At my last bigco job, I was advised not to discuss company matters outside of the office.
I know a guy whose job it is to eavesdrop for industrial espionage purposes. Coffee shops and the like are haunts of his, as well as taking commuter flights in and out of SV.
There's always going to be the debate between entrepreneurship vs "intrapreneurship". Whether large companies can successfully develop what amounts of startups in-house with separate R&D labs vs buying startups.
The solution the follow up book to this one ^ was to build isolated teams that are flush with the resources/capital of the parents but aren't at the whims, or constant meddling, of the parent company's management class / stockholders / old ideas.
For all the effort Google/Apple/Meta/Xerox/Bell/etc put into their internal moonshot divisions the whole concept mostly hasn't been very successful.
But at the same time they also haven't been great at buying young up and coming startups either, often ruining them the second they arrive by the same impulses which demands R&D moonshot teams be isolated from the host.
Large companies often are significant investors in small R&D moonshots. Because they own a large part of the startup they can choose to buy it if the product turns out profitable, or they can sell. And since it is a separate investment when things go south they can stop investing and thus save money without appearing to let anyone go.
When Ma Bell existed, Wall Street wasn't as myopic and short-termist. The stock market tolerated private-sector R&D because it mostly consisted of investors rather than speculators. These days, if something doesn't bear immediate fruit, the Masters of the Universe want no part of it.
> unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed
I beg to differ; when I was at AT&T in the late eighties we tried to enter the computer business, on the PC side with Olivetti, and on the UNIX side with the 3B2 minicomputers made with our own chips running System V UNIX. I even had a 3B2-200 in my house for a couple of years.
Entering a new business is hard: although the engineering was solid, we didn't have a saleforce trained in selling computers, and we didn't have a rich ecosystem (Oracle! Ingres! Informix!). AT&T didn't throw UNIX out the window, but found that capitalizing on UNIX was hard.
If anything of !35 years of cyberpunk input - and output building shit that spies on you:
Apple is Ono-Sendai and your iPhone is your deck. - the real battle is going to be how much agency does a Human Being have over all PII - all their data?
Your jack-in is your screen. Your data is your ID. But, who are YOU?
It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good. Bell Labs was part of the public good - and why they employed multiple physicists and materials scientists whose employment involved basically researching whatever they wanted as long as it had some link back. Shannon was hired after his master thesis (which basically created the field of information theory) and, among other things, had a side project involving the application of computers to chess. They constructed the New Jersey lab specifically to encourage watercooler conversations and deliberately had greenhorns to work with the most senior researchers like Shannon. Bell Labs solved engineering problems needed by AT&T and Westinghouse, but they had the financial security to spend money on incredibly theoretical projects like transistors, operating systems (unix), and programming (C). Those pie in the sky projects would both benefit AT&T through automation, and covered the public good requirements of their monopoly.
AT&T (owner of Westinghouse and Bell Labs) then proceeded to take their monopoly and patent factory, and started buying up competitors and new small companies. Eating their golden goose in this way is what caused the government to break them up.
Bell Labs was independent for a few years doing... Stuff. Spent their remaining prestige on falsification scandals because of the publish or perish culture this new profit motive created. They were bought by Nokia a few years ago (now called Nokia Bell Labs) and now only employ a couple theoretical physicists last I read. The lab that put into practice the foundations of modern tech (Unix and C are in almost every non-consumer-facing device) just does some Nokia product development nowadays. What a loss.
> It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good.
It wasn't an unspoken agreement. It was an explict one, the Kingsbury Commitment.[1]
company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS)
I'm curious what makes you say that about MS? Out of three, I'd actually put MS first and Apple last if for nothing else than Microsoft Research which is like a separate entity in its own strong right (judging from the outside). So many things useless to Microsoft business from them, yet so many many things..
The problem is that the companies that can do that are rarely also the company's that are willing to do the hard work of productionizing those moonshots. Lots of people have nice salaries and jobs that depend on pumping out ideas and PoCs, but few have a clear dependence on getting it to market.
But the really big stuff all requires working like your future depends on it. They can't do that, so they usually just end up with laundry lists of fancy PoCs.
Even when they work, the rollouts can be glacial at best (eg, Waymo).
> I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.
I hope so. That would be a great result, even if the consumer product didn’t land. That said, I would argue that sometimes you do just have to call something and move on. You’re right that Apple is one of the few places that can do research for research sake, but this wasn’t a research project. By all accounts this had a real goal of making and manufacturing a car.
It appears this project was in the works for more than a decade, had numerous stops and starts, leadership and focus changes and if your goal isn’t just research for the sake of research (which I do actually think is demonstrably different from Bell Labs or Xerox Parc which are more akin to things like Microsoft Research and Google X and the like), you need to ship at some point.
I think giving ten years to something like this is definitely a gift and I hope we see fruits from some of the work that went into it other places. But at the same time, there are other moonshots you can try if one doesn’t work out and there is arguably a cost if you keep focused on one idea that isn’t going to pan out for too long. Ten years for a project like this seems like a fair amount of time to try and a fair time to pull the plug.
Apple has the data on how many iPhones are being used by drivers, while moving, and how many are involved in accidents. It's almost like if you had a handgun that had a camera on it that knew children where on the other end of the barrel, and had the ability to not fire when the shooter pulled the trigger. Apple knowingly put a tremendous amount of senors on a device that distracts drivers. The class action lawyers haven't figured this one out yet, but give it time.
You mean have the cameras constantly be activated if the device is moving greater than x speed? Wouldn’t that drain the batteries a ton?
And what characteristics does the phone look for? It could just be sitting on someone’s lap or held in a way that cannot see the outside or the steering wheel.
Why? Plenty of companies and products kill loads of people or at least are involved in slave labor and environmental damage and their stocks are through the roof and their products fly off the shelves. See Saudi Aramco, Chevron, BP, H&K, BAE, and Nestle.
Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?
I think this made a lot of sense circa 2011 when it looked like autonomous vehicles were about to rapidly reshape the world around us.
While it may yet happen, the "about to" part of course turned out wrong. There was no AV revolution in the late 2010s, and Apple reportedly pivoting away from self-driving a couple of years ago was probably the actual death knell for the project.
Apple making an AV in the middle of the self-driving revolution makes sense; Apple making just a nice EV in a very crowded market does not.
I just don't see how they can make any more money with "generative ai" than a useful tool that actually can get me around. Seems like chasing after fool's gold.
Seems more like a defensive play rather than one designed to directly open new revenue streams.
In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind.
In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't moved the market much. But the risk is that generative AI is a paradigm shift that will unlock some game changing capability that could catch Apple off guard.
Same story with Microsoft and Copilot on the desktop.
If your two primary competitions are doing similar things then you start paying attention.
For a strictly vibes-based technology bubble, it can be valuable to invest a little in vibes, if not necessarily technology. Claiming you're assigning employees to a buzzword is very affordable.
Apple probably envisioned not a car company but a revolutionary personal transportation industry that highly integrates compute power in the form of self-driving AI. Remember, Steve Jobs famously poopooed the Segway. It doesn't surprise me that they got into it and then took their time. With advances in robotics and more powerful AI on the horizon, I can see a reasonable internal debate on whether to stay the course on R&D or not.
The only way it could possibly work was always as an apple branded model under the umbrella of another manufacturer, with their support and dealership network. Think polestar being its own brand but using Volvo workshops for servicing and support, as well as using a lot of Volvo parts internally. I can imagine an Apple car that's just a really fancy version of an existing car, with their own infotainment.
Oh, this I could also see. Apple hates to partner with others, for the most part, which is why I don’t think that happened. And some of that is for good reason. The awfulness of the Motorola Rokr is what convinced Steve Jobs that Apple had to fully own and control the iPhone.
And Apple is showing off parts of Car Play that could be fully integrated by manufacturers in a much deeper way, assuming they want to give up control (which given GM’s decision to drop Car Play and Android Auto, seems like it’ll be a challenge).
There is certainly a world where Apple could be a modern QNX unencumbered by its parent company baggage and a better business model (ongoing subscription and not 50-cents a car or whatever it is QNX gets) and provide the software for all that stuff, but based on everything that has been reported, that wasn’t what Apple was doing here. They were trying to build a real car. And as challenging and interesting as that might be as an R&D exercise, I just don’t see why that would be a business you’d willingly want to enter when you are so successful in other areas and the margins are so poor.
I think I know why GM and the others fear CarPlay and Android Auto, but it's just so dumb to me.
It makes sense for companies like Netflix to shy away from the Apple "walled garden." They want to deliver a unique experience with exclusive content, not just be another content supplier to the Apple experience. They don't want to wind up like the record companies.
But car manufacturers? There's a whole lot of stuff going on w.r.t. your driving experience. Like driving. Hundreds of physical things. Etc. Unlike the media industry I can't think of a future where the car companies eventually find themselves subsumed by allowing CarPlay integration.
Then again, I can't tell what's the main fear... if car companies are scared of getting iTunes'd, or if they really just want that revenue from 5% of car buyers paying for the Premium GM Infotainment Experience Recurring Subscription or whatever.
From my past discussions with car executives (that are ~10 years old so grain of salt), I really do think it’s as simple as that recurring infotainment subscription revenue.
The small margin GM gets on its cars is buffered by the revenue splits it gets with Sirius XM and the various call for assistance services. Sirius revenue is on the decline because everyone listens to Spotify on their phone. The GPS revenue stream died with Google Maps on phones. So they have to try to lock in those fees where they can. See also: BMW selling a subscription to unlock features like heated seats.
Now, I think this backfires for GM. I think way more people will not buy new cars if they lack Android Auto or Car Play than they think. I also think that it will be harder to maintain the apps and services than GM thinks. When Ford was doing its partnership with Microsoft 15 years ago (and then they took it in-house because Microsoft Connect or whatever it was called was buggy as hell), I think that made a lot of sense. But it was also expensive to do and so you saw the car companies offload a lot of those details to Apple and Google via a QNX or other middleware layer. Tesla built its own software as sort of a foundational part of the car experience, and I think it has worked well for them. I don’t have the same confidence in GM.
The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system. But I bet Apple and Google would insist on 30% of that revenue (at least).
The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car
subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance
or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would
complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second
versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system
Would you pay it, or just avoid GM?
I really can't imagine significant numbers of people paying for it and I don't know that a 5G bundle makes any sense. I don't understand why anybody would want their car to have it's own 5G connection when they already have their 5G phone in their pocket.
Even my elderly borderline-technophobe parents are able to understand (with some effort) the concept of CarPlay since it's more or less the existing phone interface that they're used to.
Maybe the real killer issue is that on one hand, clearly many people value CarPlay enough to pay for it. But it has always been free, and will continue to be free from quite a few other auto makers, and that's a big obstacle to getting anybody to pay for it. That has historically been difficult for any sort of good or service...
I suspect Ioniq 5 and 6 were supposed to be those models, up until Hyundai exec leaked negotiations to media presumably thinking it'll somehow give them advantages. Timelines match up.
>This was an idea that never made any sense to me.
I mean, for Apple, it absolutely makes sense.
Electric vehicles are relatively straightforward to make. Everyone and their mother are producing some sort of electric scooter/dirt bike these days with new companies popping up every month. Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.
Apple could easily outsource most of the functional development and design and certification, and then focus on their core competency which is aesthetics and marketing and integration into iOS ecosystem, which would be a winning combo economically.
>Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.
Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?
Tesla has many faults to it. Poor materials, lack of general reliability (door handles getting stuck, spoilers getting stuck up), NVH issues, and so on. Many people don't really care that much about those issues though, as long as the core use of the car to get from point a to b is there, and being able to top up at home is convenient, and maintenance costs are way lower.
Having worked at a car company, this is categorically false. Cars have thousands of moving parts (even EV's), are expected to operate reliably for a decade, represent the second most expensive thing most people will buy and any mistakes will kill people.
If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.
Thats the list of moving parts. Dunno where you got 1000 moving parts from. Most each one of those has reliable manufacturers that have figured out how to build them correctly.
You also have the cars power steering system, AC unit, tons of additional pumps, doors / locks / handles, relays, etc. Not to mention each of these parts has bearings, joints and brushings within it.
Reliable manufactures? Auto suppliers are notorious for being unreliable - the supply chains are exceedingly complex, there's constant pressure to drive down cost and quality control lapses are a constant issue.
Not to mention each vehicle has hundreds of different suppliers and an issue in any one of them will grind your manufacturing line to a standstill.
An Apple that doesn't attempt something because it's hard is an Apple that is going to fade. There aren't many trillion dollar markets; I think attempting to break into cars was probably the most accessible of the trillion dollar markets to Apple. What were the alternatives? Oil? Real Estate? ...?
A self-driving car is not something that Apple has any relevant expertise at building. They can't even make siri work well. They had zero hope to make a self-driving car.
That's far from true. They have world class expertise in design and supply chain management. That would transfer over to the car market a lot easier than it would to pretty much any other trillion dollar market.
Shipping a billion iPhones and shipping millions of cars only reasonable each other at a surface level. Apple does not have much expertise in maintaining the same supply chain and logistics, and certainly not in design.
They could hire people with the expertise, but Apple is allergic to growing engineering expertise outside of Cupertino.
I doubt that's Magna Steyr's fault though. They've produced 10k cars, but Fisker have only delivered half of those, and from everything I've seen, it seems to be well-built from a hardware standpoint.
They could easily buy Volkswagen sized company from the reserve cash they have and still have quite a good amount of reserve left. I don't think car experience is something that is the limiting factor.
Or let's bet 2% of valuation to create another high margin business in one of the only sector that could give us trillion dollar more. I am just saying that few 10s of billions are enough to get all the tradition car makers talent, so if they are serious about car this is not the blocker.
Healthcare is even more heavily regulated than the auto industry.
Generally, the closer you are to "people will die if this code has a bug," the more regulated the industry.
People that don't work in a heavily regulated space vastly underestimate the constraints. It's hard enough to create a product that's beautiful and works well at a price point that the market will bear, but it's often near-impossible to do all this while also complying with all the regulations of all the markets in which you intend to sell your product.
It takes a tremendous amount of commitment, money, and time, and companies that aren't used to working within snail's pace regulatory environments quickly lose focus and the projects sputter out.
And apple successfully got wearable health monitoring in their watch to be a thing and got 510(k) clearance as a class 2 medical device etc. They're already big players in health even if not marketed that way.
I don't think an apple that works by stack ranking existing high capex low margin markets and ruthlessly focusing on revenue growth is an apple that's not gonna fade. That sounds more like Amazon's vibe. Creating trillion dollar markets is more apples vibe but that's not exactly an easy thing to do - they're trying again with vision so let's see how that goes.
I agree with your entire comment but have some nuance about one point:
> It’s one thing to create a new [lower-margin business], it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins.
While I agree that this plan didn't fit with any of Apple's strengths, as a general principle good companies plan for margin erosion. In fact failure to do this is a classic failure described in The Innovator's Dilemma, where you're leaving room for a disruptor to grow. Or as Sun used to put it: "if someone's going to show up and eat our lunch, it should be us who does that"
> It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.
Probably, but who knows with Apple. I suppose they could have created a cheap Citroen Ami type thing with some cool tech and just doubled the price because it's Apple. I would assume they got into it because they saw a product with good margins.
If you think about it cars are poorly designed for the average journey. They tend to be designed for that one time you actually need to drive 300km, or the one time a year you need to fit 5 people in the car, or the one time you need to load 3 suitcases in the boot. And in America they're also way too big for no good reason.
Apple more than anyone might have been able to experiment with the conventional car design perhaps.
But we don't really know what they were trying to do do we? I think you assuming that they were just trying to create another low margin electric car company to compete the likes of Tesla and Ford is probably wrong though.
> So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen tech startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.
I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build.
Lucky for Apple, generative AI doesn’t need to work for 100% of the cases to be successful, unlike autonomous vehicles, so maybe Apple has a better chance to be successful this time.
I get what you're saying, however I don't think that's true:
> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle
Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.
It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.
Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.
In 2016 the Lyft cofounder predicted that by 2021 the majority of their network would be fully autonomous. The general public was led to believe that the technology was close to fruition. Apple execs having similar aspirations at the time makes sense. But we now know that that prediction isn’t coming true any time soon.
I’m not sure why everyone thinks that Apple only wanted to create an EV to compete with Tesla or BYD. Given that the Apple execs thought that fully autonomous driving was achievable, it’s possible that Apple wanted to introduce a mobile entertainment pod-type product which may have been relatively lucrative as a premium luxury product at first and later could have become a good product for keeping mindshare when the general public used it for their daily two hour commutes.
But after COVID started the work from home movement, Apple pivoting to a product like Apple Vision Pro makes more sense when the importance of commuting lessened. Peering backwards in time the decisions that Apple made look logical. Now whether Apple can monetize generative AI by leveraging their iDevices market share will determine whether they can make it to a 4T market cap. Apple has a tough mountain to climb going forward since none of these products are sure hits like the iPhone was.
There are very few businesses which can add 1+ Trillion to a companies market cap. To grow at pace with the S&P, Apple needs to find a new 1 Trillion dollar business every 2-3 years.
Cars were a good candidate, but it sounds like AAPL now thinks that GenAI is a better bet. ChatGPT is such a basic product, that it sounds reasonable that there will be bigger and better products in the future.
> Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.
Right. The electric car business took a wrong turn when most of the players decided that electric cars were a premium product that could be sold with huge margins. Tesla started there, and it seemed to be working for them. This led to excesses such as the electric Hummer, a 9,000 pound vehicle with sports car acceleration and a price in 6 figures. It's a great engineering achievement but a silly product.
It also led to electric versions of vehicles having a price premium around US$10,000 over the same model with internal combustion.
Then Tesla exhausted the fanboy market. Reality ensued. Price mattered. Tesla had to start offering discounts.
This is a big problem for some major car companies that bought into the high margin myth. Ford should have known better. Stellantis' CEO was running around saying that they were going to get margins like tech companies, partly by adding on aftermarket fees. That didn't work out.
Electric cars are doing just fine, and prices are coming down. That's a good thing. BYD gets this.
I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.
The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment.
Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, but why would an OEM choose Apple instead of others they’re used to and are likely far easier to work with.
Unless they went highly left field for the US, like tiny city cars more like Smart, I just don’t get it. And if they did that… well Smart isn’t breaking records in the US are they.
The initial idea seemed to be self driving cars, but for individuals you have the problems above and for fleets why would they want to buy from Apple? So unless Apple wanted to be Uber that doesn’t make much sense either.
To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
The phone made sense to me because by that point Apple had clearly proven themselves as a consumer electronics company. It’s wasn’t as big a jump and cell phone software was largely junk.
The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough.
But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does (existing Apple stores wouldn’t cut it). And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.
If they a fully self driving car by 2018 and beat everyone by 7 years maybe. But as time went on it went from little to almost no sense.
I enjoyed following it for that reason. But I never thought it would happen.
Apple is still waiting it out until most of the existing EV issues are resolved. Then, they can swoop in and leverage their walled garden to get buyers/users. They'll also be different than Ford, Mazda, Honda, etc since I don't think they will try to sell their cars. It'll be a subscription fee and Apple will own the car.
All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.
What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with buying a car?
I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?
I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competition.
What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with bluetooth headphones? Now, look at AirPods, simple bluetooth headphones, with tight integration with iOS. I was the one ridiculing Apple for even entering this market and I thought they looked dumb. Sony XMs looked way better.
Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.
Maybe an enhanced version of CarPlay or something more nefarious like cutting off other auto makers from using CarPlay anymore. People that are used to CarPlay might be inclined to jump ship. Trust me, Apple will find a way to leverage their walled garden, to my chagrin. Just look at how they’re maliciously complying with the EU DMA law. I want to leave Apple’s walled garden myself, but can’t deny it exists.
That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform.
Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?
>Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?
Given that 30k is the difference between an entry level and mid level car, sure. The premium brands would definitely want to get Apple's branding under their wing, and those buyers are already used to paying a premium when they can buy a $30k car.
The problem is I think Apple would want to be premium above existing luxury cars. I don’t think it would be 60k. I think they would be 90k or even 120k.
Sure Apple’s $60k car is better than a $30k Honda. But is it better than a $60k Acura or BMW or Lexus?
> Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?
Yes. People happily pay an extra 1-200% for something because it's Apple, all the time. I'll probably never understand why, but I've come to accept that they do.
No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now.
No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did.
The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.
It’s been like a month. Seriously. That’s a ridiculous hurdle to clear.
“The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”
Cannibalizing your own product is an achievement when done correctly. You don’t see Apple running to add a touch screen to MacBooks because that would cannibalize the iPad.
Let’s take iTunes. People were clowning Apple for releasing Apple Music because they had millions of people buying Music on iTunes. Spotify showed it could work but they weren’t exactly making money over fist.
Its strange to me you have a list full of "no one thought" statements that were all things that most of the people around me at least seemed like things Apple would do. Especially the movies and TV stuff, they already had a big marketplace for movies and hardware for watching movies and TV, other competitors in those spaces were producing original content, it seemed absolutely logical for them to do so as well.
The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.
Apples strategy is to wait and see they are rarely first to put money into something where they can't learn from mistakes of others. iPhone wasn't the first mass produced smartphone and I'd argue Apple is a software company first and foremost, the hardware part is just the means to lock you in.
Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.
I think it’s a lot more simple than that. They’ll probably buy an existing EV company when they’re serious about entering the market. That’ll give them a head start and they won’t be reinventing the wheel. The acquihire will help bring in talent as well.
Before they released the AirPods, they bought Beats. It would along the same lines but with a way more complex machine.
>Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist?
Same as the rest of apples brand: "it just works". The seemless, polished integration of their products gave them a devoted fanbase that pays a huge premium over competition.
Not my point. Why doesn't Apple start manufacturing airplanes that "just work"? Fridges that "just work"? TVs that "just work"? (they did try and give up on TVs because it made no sense) Their brand marketing focuses on creative people; why don't they start making grand pianos? Those make as little sense as a car, and are just as far from Apple's competencies, competitive advantages, and market as a car. Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.
>Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.
Sure they do. Facebook was so confident in VR they rebranded their entire company. Elon Musk got his horrible bluff called out and he owns the largest social media site (for now). It's not business related, but the CEO of Amazon owns a national newspaper.
Apple car didn't come out of nowhere. They and Google were working on Car Os's for years and we both know Apple cares hough about vertical integration to shun off Intel and Nvidia in order to make their own chips. Regardless of my confidence in the idea, the act itself is consistent with Apple.
Subscription would be odd. All my other Apple gear I've bought for cash.
Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.
> And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.
The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product.
Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain.
Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry about any of your infotainment solutions? We'll build the unit, in exchange for owning the exclusive app store it uses. And you'll get to say your cars are powered by Apple." Win/win.
Instead, they dicked around until the automakers figured their consoles out (mostly... still looking at you angrily, Nissan) and Apple was left without a key differentiator.
Hell, the mind-numbingly obvious reason for Apple -- do it at a loss for the real-time mapping and traffic data!!
I think the risk to the carmaker is your customers getting used to the apple infotainment system. Maybe they start to see the car as less a Fiat and more an Apple car. Then the exclusive expires or needs to be renegotiated.
From Apple's perspective, yes. That's exactly the playbook that built the iPhone into what it is today.
People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands."
iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.
I saw Huawei cars being sold in Huawei stores in China. (Huawei stores are like Apple Stores). They were incredibly normal, beautiful cars. In contrast, Apple would have to make a gamechanger. Too big of a risk?
> The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough.
That’s not quite how that happened. They were turned down and laughed out of the room by nearly every carrier they approached. The only one that didn’t was AT&T; but they definitely weren’t “desperate” at the time.
They had lots of leverage, which is how they got exclusivity.
Sorry I meant the carrier was desperate, not Apple. That was the case with AT&T (Cingular when the deal went down). They wanted customers so bad they were willing to give up everything for a possible hit phone.
And it worked out.
You’re right Apple was riding high on the iPod, they weren’t in any danger of going under. They could have waited longer.
I think it would have been funny if they released it in Europe or something where the carriers weren’t in control and then told Americans “call your carrier, sorry, they wouldn’t let us”. Not that that would have ever happened.
I'm not sure if the GP here was edited to be substantially different, because your response doesn't match what they are saying.
AT&T wasn't desperate, and I'm sure Jobs would have preferred to skip on exclusivity, since that really didn't serve iPhone.
"Desperate for more customers"? Well sure, but I'm sure Verizon was even more desperate for more customers considering they were so close to being number one (AT&T was number one at the time, by a slim margin). After all, Pepsi literally bought restaurants and forced them to serve Pepsi in order to force consumers to drink their sodas from the runner up spot.
I don't have any reference for this, but just on its face it would make sense that if Apple needed to sweeten the pot for a carrier to allow it, exclusivity was a way to do it, and it would have been in Apple's best interest to pick the carrier with the biggest market share at the time, which was AT&T.
EDIT: Others corrected me that at the time the deal was signed in 2005 and during the famous 2007 keynote, the partner was Cingular. Through a series of M&A Cingular became what we know of as AT&T, and by the time the phone launched in July 2007, it was AT&T who held the deal.
Interestingly,
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
In Jobs' keynote he referred to Cingular as the #1 carrier with 58 million subscribers. I think the logic above still makes sense given that.
> But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does
And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.
I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
> Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
That cash ironically is an obstacle to Apple being able to innovate. Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is nothing but a “phone company” with a bank attached, which is fine, it will continue to operate, but it won’t continue to grow and innovate.
>Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status.
Apple is rather frugal with acquisitions and hires and somewhat frugal with salaries.
Hmm I don’t think the SpaceX metaphor works super well here.
One is an established tech company trying to do business in a space it’s unfamiliar with. It has existing forces pulling it in a certain direction because it already makes money in those ways. Google is the perfect example of how this hampers innovation. It’s one of the reasons the concept of Alphabet exists.
SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
> SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
Apple used to be organized differently than other big companies, and more like multiple startups. Just look at the trajectory of other PC builders of the 90’s.
> And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.
But they were working towards that all the time. And then SpaceX didn't try to make a car, Tesla was started as a mostly-separate company to make a car. Because there's very little business synergy between those two things.
> The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough.
The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?
Oh, it was Cingular at announcement and AT&T at launch. Interestingly,
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
Not really the point. Apple succeeded because they applied their strengths, product and user interface design, to what is essentially a small computer.
Apple have always developed core products that are essentially a computer.
Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.
I think that’s why they were a bit more interested when the original idea was to skip all that and do all automatic driving.
But as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option I don’t understand why they didn’t just give up and instead seemed to try to shift towards a more normal car.
I agree that a car is on a different scale, but I think it's only in hindsight that a phone is obviously just a computer and that the user interface is important part.
Do you really not see how a car is a much greater departure from their core expertise than the iphone? They were already making handheld electronic devices well before the iPhone. And they were making computers pretty much for the whole history of the company. Ipod touch was a natural evolution of the ipod and the iphone was basically just an incremental improvement on the ipod touch.
The closest thing they've made to a car is those wheels for the mac pro.
Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.
iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.
Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.
Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.
It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.
> Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.
Yep. Well said. The cost of a full phone + expensive plan is a lot.
Plus kids wanted the apps (really games) the iPhone had. Apple wanted to sell them games.
And besides that parents were far more hesitant to give young kids phones than (for better or worse) than today.
The final reason I’ve heard is the number of hand-me-down phones given to kids now that smartphones are ubiquitous means sales slowly fell to ver little compared to when introduced.
And further, buying your kid an iPod Touch at the time served the same purpose (for Apple) as buying your kid an iPad today. It gets them into Apple's products space, develops brand affinity and trust, and gets them familiar with iOS so that they are more likely to buy an iPhone.
It would be surprising if we had stats on iPad versus non-iPad kids and what percentage of them ended up being iPhone users, and those stats didn't show a strong correlation.
Turn your thinking around. The only reason we still call it a phone is because that's what the original function was. They are pocket computers in everything but name. A significant percentage of the population doesn't even use them for voice calls anymore.
And yet we're fine having the draconic business model of phone carriers from the 90s and early aughts carried into the modern day, just wielded by Apple instead of AT&T.
Computers run software the user asks for, phones run the software the phone manufacturer allows it to.
> Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.
Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.
A connected PDA was always a thing. Palm/3Com made phones. HP/Compaq made iPaq phones. Sharp made their Zaurus. The were OEM phones you could get branded. The Qt guys had their Trolltech phone.
Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like.
The Apple phone was perhaps the most anticipated device in years. What surprised people wasn't that they released one, it was that they went all in on a capacitive touch screen, which was novel tech, and that it didn't have real mobile data or native apps. There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages but people were still skeptical.
Terrible compared to what? At the time, mobile applications were universally pretty crap. Browsers were atrocious, not being able to render real CSS or anything (they’d give you a simplified broken layout). I didn’t have the first iPhones (my first was the iPhone 4) but I had a first generation iPod Touch, and Safari felt pretty magical at the time compared to anything else on the market. The capacitive screen, multitouch, being able to decently render pages - lots of stuff we totally take for granted now…
The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.
Opera Mobile would render pages with heavy CSS (for the time) pretty accurately.
Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it.
The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more.
When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?
To be fair, Symbian apps were quite okay-ish. I had Nokia 6600 and it had a lot of great games and apps. Of course, when Apple finally launched the Appstore, and apps there were able to use iPhone's touchscreen, it was over for Symbian.
Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins.
A car and a cell phone, or anything Apple has yet made, are wildly different. They may as well have had a battle tank program, or started making airplanes. Those things have screens and "infotainment systems" too.
Yes. Anything that has machined and injection molded housings, a screen, pcbas and software/firmware. Basically all consumer electronics are cousins in this context. Time doesn't matter here, industry verticals do.
Cars are wildly different, 50 years ago GE would have seemed like the one that would make a phone, not ford.
Before 2006 my phone was already my portable media player, my internet modem on the go, a quick web browser, my portable email machine, my internet instant messenger client, a mapping tool, and more. By 2007 I was even using it for video calls.
The problem is that smartphones had very little consumer uptake before the iPhone came out.
You had your Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, which were popular among hardcore turbonerds, but normies weren't interested in them. And that goes double for the US; there was more uptake of WinMo and Symbian in Europe, but very little in Apple's home market. The closest thing to a "normie" smartphone before the iPhone was BlackBerry, but most people who had one were business users who had their device issued and provisioned by their employer. And enthusiasts always pooh-poohed BlackBerries as "not a real smartphone" because it was basically just a messaging and groupware beast with limited general-purpose capabilities.
So there was a big gap to be filled. Enthusiasts had their market segment, business users had their market segment, but the ordinary consumers had nothing. And Apple gladly swooped in to fill this gap.
The problem is that cars are already ubiquitous, especially in the US. What can an iCar offer that a Toyota can't? Hell, even if you specify electric cars, other companies still have this covered. What can Apple offer that Tesla can't? And if you look internationally, it's even worse. You start selling electric cars outside the US market, you're going to end up going head-to-head with Chinese giants like BYD that are already kicking Tesla's ass outside the US.
The only real path forward for an iCar that does to cars what the iPhone did to phones is if Apple were to perfect true Level 5 self-driving. If they could actually pull off "Siri, take me to work", it would change things enough that normal cars would look like dumbphones compared to the iCar. But that's a pipe dream. Our roads are too chaotic for Level 5 to be feasible for a long, long time. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the reason this project lasted a whole decade was because Apple was throwing everything they had at Level 5 self-driving, and they canned it because after an entire decade they still couldn't make it work.
>To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola
Not true. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank before and after iPhone's launch. If anything, Apple was the one company that had the technology and market credibility to immediately make a splash in the market despite being totally foreign to it.
>and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
We did think that there was a real possibility of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. But this was again out of belief that Apple had the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, not because Apple—of all companies—could not get what it wanted from carriers.
I’d be far more willing to buy a partnership as reasonable, but that didn’t seem to be the plan. At most they’d find someone to act like Foxcon and built it, but not a real partnership.
And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.
> doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.
It’s increasingly obvious that Apple has ensured by their cutthroat and rent-seeking behavior in the one place they have market power (the App Store) that no sane business wants to partner with them on anything. Everyone knows Apple will leverage any partnership to get a firm foothold and then extract as close to 100% of the possible margins for Apple, leaving them with crumbs, or possibly just losses. And the whole time, Apple’s corporate personality seems to genuinely believe that all of this is not ruthlessness, but just Apple being fairly compensated for their great work.
By the way, this doesn’t make them bad, lots of companies are known for margin extraction, like Walmart famously did with its suppliers. Apple are very good at Doing Capitalism in this way, but competitors are rightly going to defend themselves by ruling out anything that could help Apple expand further.
Even if you ignore the App Store, Apple’s ethos is to control their own destiny. That means they try to bring everything in house or control it with an iron fist.
And they have more money than god.
So if you parter with them, they will learn from you. And you’ll get “the Apple bump” if the car is successful.
But don’t expect to be partners in 10 years. Expect to be competitors or a new division.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I was under the impression that Xiaomi did not target only the top end of the market as Apple tends to. I would expect an Apple card to start at $120k or more.
I suppose Apple could go after the Corolla or something if they really wanted to but that just doesn’t seem like an Apple move to me.
Do you really think Apple would come out with a $25k car?
They convinced everyone to increase what they’d pay for a phone. , and to be fair a smartphone is for more capable so that’s understandable.
But they would make a luxury level car and I don’t think they’d convince much of the public it would be worth the premium. Even if everyone wanted it I doubt many would buy.
Xiaomi is better at being the New Apple than Apple is. Apple should be selling micro transportation appliances that fit into a higher urbanized environment. Extremely small cars would be the largest thing I would rent.
Not everywhere is the US. Xiaomi doesn't appear to enter the US market. European sales of the smaller car would likely outweigh a Land Cruiser lookalike.
Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.
You'd think so... GM has stated that they're doing away with CarPlay and Android auto in favour of their own thing, which will most likely suck on large ways.
Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.
I’m pretty sure when you hand in the paperwork for creating a car company, there’s a little pledge you have to take: I will make the crappiest possible OS to include in my car.
It is really bizarre that they insist on continuing to try. Just give us AUX in (stereo or usb). Cellphones can do it all now anyway. The car’s entertainment system should be about as complex as a pair of headphones.
In my mind Tesla is sort of special because they offered something no one else did. For a long time the only other electric cars were the volt/bolt and the leaf. None of those are performance cars in the slightest.
As other brands get more and more popular in the US I wonder if the CarPlay issue will really start to hurt them. But we won’t know for a while.
I’m certainly very curious to see what happens since GM was dumb enough to remove CarPlay. I expect that’s gonna hurt. But maybe I’m wrong.
I haven’t driven a Tesla, so maybe I’m way off base here, but their infotainment software seems modern and at least reasonably well designed.
Legacy automakers have thoroughly demonstrated that when it comes to making a decent infotainment system they are unwilling, incapable, or some mix of the two
Agreed about Tesla's software being modern and most other automakers' being garbage, but I'll take physical controls for things like climate, turn signals, windshield wipers, and lighting with a side of crappy infotainment software, over slick software with everything being crammed onto the touchscreen and few (capacitive) steering wheel buttons. I don't understand how it's legal for Tesla to delete the turn-signal stalk and replace it with a pair of buttons on the steering wheel...
One of the pain points that CarPlay and Android Auto solve for is that any car I rent or buy has the same media controls and all of my presets. When I travel for work, I try to always pick a rental vehicle that is compatible with my phone in order to reduce cognitive load of learning a new vehicle's unique controls.
Don't have a source ready but if I remember correctly they never planned to build the car themselves. There are plenty of contract manufacturers out there that build for a variety of brands (Magna Steyr in Austria is a typical example). Then Apple adds it's custom electronics and AI driving assistants and voila you got an iCar.
I believe you’re right, but I thought the plan was to design it all themselves as opposed to buying/licensing an existing platform as skinning it + their electronics.
But then again they’ve changed things so many times according to the rumors maybe both were true at various times.
I was trying to pick brands that we’re both expensive and low volume. If I don’t think Apple could get the sales of some of those makers then I definitely don’t think they could target numbers like BMW.
Lamborghini may be a little small for that list, I don’t really know. But I would think they would stay pretty boutique due to output size.
1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.
2. People who want cheap modes of transportation. This is your cheapest level sedan buyers.
3. People who want specific utility and are willing to pay for it. This is the largest group of buyers that ranges from people wanting the convenience/novelty/technology of an electric vehicle, to people who want the safety/robustness/cargo capacity of a pickup truck. Apple car would definitely fit in here.
How can Apple products be status items when over 60% of smartphones in the US are iPhones? Is Coca-Cola a status item? Is it possible that they're just good products that deliver good value to the majority of people who buy them? Is a $1300 Galaxy S24 Ultra not a status item?
"I spent 50-200% more on an item of similar utility" is a status statement, even if every other guy can afford it. Bonus points for a new iphone every time one is released.
You can make your own conclusions about people who are affected by such status statements.
In order to be in 1, Apple car has to be a complete package with performance as well. While Apple can build an electric car, you can't outsource design of something that feels sporty.
> 1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.
I don't disagree with what you're probably trying to say here, but I disagree with how you're stating it.
First, "car enthusiast" != "performance enthusiast". There are plenty of people who like cars for reasons other than going fast, and sub-interests in the car enthusiast community that are not performance oriented.
Second, people who actually do enjoy the art of performance driving don't have to do it on the road. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US that have driven on race tracks.
Third, there are certainly performance cars that people do take to the limits on the streets, often in violation of some traffic rules. Not every performance car is a 911 GT3. Probably a very high percentage of Miata owners have approached cornering limits on the street on cloverleafs.
I don't think that changes the parent's point at all. Whether the focus of your enthusiasm and status is performance or luxury is irrelevant if you're spending more than you "need" to for your vehicle.
It's like custom PCs - some go for EATX systems with Threadripper and dual graphics cards and NVMe RAID 0 while others go for 4L ITX systems or fanless configs. But a Dell tower is functionally very similar.
Someone buying a S-class Mercedes probably isn't doing it for the V8 but for the comfortable interior. They're still spending $100,000 when a Camry could do a similar job.
There are an extremely small number of car enthusiasts that are in it because they like working with their hands to make performance mods to try stuff. The rest is all about status. I know this because I used to be solidly in the car world back in the early 2000s , my friend from college had an Integra Type R that he raced in the Honda Challenge that we both tracked and worked on, and I got to experience pretty much all of car culture first hand.
People who are into modifications for power to roll race on the street do it solidly just to show off how much money they can spend.
People who drive "hard" on the street really arent even close to performance capabilities of their car. Give me most any ~250 hp sedan, no matter which wheel drive, Ill redo the suspension and stick on good tires, and I can keep up with any 911 on twisty roads. The culture in this regard is pretty evident because I will be seen as a poser if I do this.
As for the track, there is a separate subculture that happens at the track. Sure there is a minority out there to just have fun in their regular cars, most everybody including them are oogling the expensive track toys, and nobody is paying attention to actual driving skill of the people. At one point and time, a husband and his wife pulled up with a mobile home towing a garage with 2 Ferrari Challenge cars, with the entire setup costing more than I have ever made in my entire life even now 10 years later, and of course they were not any faster around the track, but they were the stars of that day.
Racing series are also literally about who can spend the most money, until you cross the bridge of being good enough to run sponsors. Not even on the car parts either, for example, we would camp at the track, while other people would pull up in their trailer homes and get a much better night sleep with AC, which gives a huge advantage come racing.
I know, I've been to the track with a couple of my cars too.
My point is that you neither have to reach the limits of a car's performance, nor do you need a high performance car, to appreciate cars for what they are. Many of the people who ended up on the track in the 00's and 10's are people who enjoyed whippin' 90s shitboxes around country roads, but couldn't afford the track. These are hardly people who buy cars for status.
Your categories are largely correct, but #1 is way bigger than you think and not just about performance (unless it's the performance of being seen owning the car). For example, most pickup trucks are status symbols and lifestyle choices, not purely for function. If they were purely for function most of them would be transit vans.
Apple car would have absolutely been a pickup truck-like status symbol for highly urban people.
> I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.
Why were you puzzled? What is so impossible about making a car from scratch, then making money on it? I don't own any Apple products, but I know they could do it. Yes it's difficult, but a lot of the difficulty comes from a lack of resources, not something Apple is worried about.
I find it really interesting that you (and those who did not contradict you) choose to form this opinion. I suspect Apple shares it. But to me it's a missed opportunity combined with a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's probably the lack of this very characteristic that makes Elon so successful. He never lets FUD get in the way of his goals.
There are some companies out there who don't seem subject to these artificial limitations, at least, at certain points in their history. For a while Mitsubishi made both cars and televisions. Panasonic made both batteries and bicycles.
I think what really separates winners from losers when it comes to developing a product and selling it is the willingness to set aside artificial limitations and really commit to beating the competition. Core competencies matter more for companies who are no longer interested in growing. Apple definitely wants to keep growing. So if Apple really was putting R&D money into cars and then quit, then I see this as a failure of Apple leadership. Apple can make a great car, and people would buy it.
Because just being able to do it isn't the point. The real question is whether or not it's a good use of the cash they have available. OP is saying that it doesn't make good business sense for Apple to do this, not that it's impossible for them to pull it off.
> I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini.
Jaguar is owned by Tata motors, Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary, Lamborghini's ownership is Audi -> Volkswagen, so not really small makers in any sense.
But generally I agree, I think Apple making the full car is an odd choice. I think so much of their DNA, though, is "hardware and software working in concert together", and that's probably what they thought this was a good idea to begin with.
The "car" part would have been subcontracted and must have been seen as inconsequential as say phone screen suppliers. I'd speculate there were some hard realizations in both the car part and the robot part.
>I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.
That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches.
The average car is crap compared to what it could be - and that's without any self-driving involved either: purely the basic car functionality has seen little thought UX and convenience wise in 50+ years.
When Apple got into music players no one cared because they were waiting for the company to die.
When Apple got into watches there were lots of rumors they were for years first, and it made sense as an extension to the iPhone. Remember the Pebble already showed the basic idea could be useful.
>Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches
Those things were said for both music players and smart watches, by pundits and competitors alike.
E.g. re the Apple Watch, here's a Forbes summary: "In 2015, the year the Apple Watch was launched, LVMH watch division president and Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver said the Swiss industry was not afraid of Apple’s new product, because it could not be repaired in a thousand years or eighty years, nor inherited by children, nor would it ever become a status symbol. As is always the case when disruption occurs in an industry, traditional competitors are not able to see the threat, and continue to try to analyze it according to the variables that were important yesterday."
I'm more surprised they haven't bought a smallish car maker with proven automotive engineering experience that is already making EVs and then focus on the software and self-driving aspects. Polestar would have been a nice fit and Apple could easily afford it.
As a subsidiary of Geely it seems unlikely Polestar would be available, but perhaps one of the US-based EV startups like Rivian, Lucid or Fisker would be interested. I am not sure how that would work with the Apple brand though.
The world doesn't need another tony, luxury car. The world needs an affordable (preferably electric) "folks" car (and I don't see that as Apple's market).
To develop patents to license and further develop CarPlay maybe. If they hit it big with the right patent they could become the Qualcomm of the carspace.
If anyone could have created a new category for cars. And NOT gone head on against others. It would of course be Apple.
What is possible is that after spending enough effort on the project, they couldn't see what that new category could be. And that just making one more (like one more monitor perhaps) had not enough margin to bother.
I think it makes sense if consider the fact it “solves an actual problem”, would have a massive adoption rate and has a massive market, and the potential value of developing a product like that is easily in the 100 Billions if not Trillions
Now everyone's diving straight into the "full AGI by 2025" hole. Which, to be fair, would solve the "full self-driving" problem as a pure side-effect, I guess.
I believe Musk once admitted on camera that ~"full self driving basically requires AGI." If anyone could help me identify that video, I would appreciate it.
> I believe Musk once admitted on camera that ~"full self driving basically requires AGI." If anyone could help me identify that video, I would appreciate it.
Low-latency multi-modal LLMs with constrained outputs can outperform most specialized prev-gen networks, so this may actually work out independent of achieving AGI!
I (maybe incorrectly) feel that Asian companies are better at this type of vertical diversification. So many of the big Japanese and Korean companies do so many different things. I'm thinking of Yamaha, Casio, Sony, Samsung, etc.
Cruise has given up, but Waymo is doubling down I don't see how either is/was a "threat to Apple" though, people aren't going to replace their iPhones with Waymo rides.
Surely this must be a hardware focused move? I can't see generative AI benefiting Apples core software. Rather I'd be interested to see what I can do with some specialized, custom hardware on their platform.
It's a strategic, capability building project for Saudi Arabia.
They want to turn the country into the AI / advanced manufacturing / software development hub of the Middle East and they need an innovative brand that can help to attract talent and foreign investment.
The idea that Apple had any business making cars was rooted in overconfidence and business school nonsense.
It was overconfidence to think that the shipping of tens of millions of smartphones meant the company was well-suited to make heavy machinery.
It was business school nonsense that birthed the idea. Consumers never needed Apple to make a car; the car presumably was to 'diversify' and placate investors worried about smartphone market saturation.
Tim Cook, and whoever else had a part in scrapping this dumb project, are probably mourning its death, but they ought to congratulate themselves.
Tesla is already the Apple of cars. Designed in California. Capacitive touchscreen instead of buttons. Vertical integration. Minimalist hardware design. Focus on software. Over the air updates. Custom SoC.
When Apple did all this in phones it was unique. There was no Tesla of phones. But there is a Tesla of cars and it's tough to imagine what unique thing Apple could bring to the market.
Definitely similar in a lot of ways (going against the current, similar design language), but there are a couple of key differences to the point I wouldn't say Tesla is the Apple of cars -
Apple typically productizes mature technology and ensures that its products are designed well. Tesla is an early adopter and productizes immature technology which it overhypes and overpromises on (e.g. self-driving).
Apple's manufacturing quality control and attention to detail is also generally pretty impressive. Tesla products looks impressive on the outside but feel cheap on the inside, and there are a lot of issues with the quality of manufacturing. Apple uses nice materials and Tesla uses cheap materials.
Apple making a car always struck me as weird, though.
I would argue BMW or Mercedes are much closer to being the Apple of cars - they aren't early adopters of new technology, and their products are immaculately designed (though using a much different design language than Apple does) and are and feel expensive, unlike Tesla's cars, which look nice but feel like toys.
Disappointing to hear. It seems every car manufacturer has settled in to their niche, and they are now working to become software companies, adding a bunch of “smart” functionalities to their cars. I was very curious as to whether it was easier for an automotive company to get good at tech, or for a tech company to get good at automobiles. Perhaps this result is a good indicator.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadGenerative AI is significant enough to Apple's use cases that there would seem to be a very strong business case to bring it in house.
They are laughably behind the curve. Android should see widespread deployment of Gemini baked into the next generation of phones, and this could have a significant impact on Apple.
Their reputation is of being the best. The most polished. The most accessible.
It’s never been to be on the bleeding edge. Apple’s brand is that of the perfectionists. Even in their hackiest 80s lore, the elements that rise to myth are those about resourcefulness and design.
Quite the opposite.
The iPod was panned by tech commentators; famously, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
The iPhone saw similar reactions; https://www.fastcompany.com/40436054/10-of-the-most-interest.... "There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies."; "The real elephant in the room is the fact that I just spent $600 on my iPhone and it can’t do some crucial functions that even $50 handsets can."; "That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone."
I can't imagine how apoplectic Gates was over the iPad's success after a decade of trying to make a Windows tablet sell.
The fact of the matter is it remains to be seen how smart either model will be.
I just asked mistral 7b to provide 5 sentences that end with Apple. It couldn't do it. I then provided 5 examples generated from ChatGPT 4 and asked it to generate 5 more. It still couldn't do it. 10 ChatGPT examples- still couldn't do it.
You seem to be saying the models can generalize on the entire context size, that I should keep provided examples up to the token limit because this will make the model smarter. Is there evidence of that?
It can do some extrapolation on tasks it's already been proven to do, but that's not every task.
Apple is a best-in-class second mover.
With the clusterfuck that has been generative AI (from OpenAI’s corporate drama to Google renaming and reörganizing their products every fifteen minutes) this seems prescient, with the only savvy player so far being Microsoft.
Possibly. On the consumer side, they’re in their own niches. What will get interesting is how Apple lets developers hook into the on-device AI, or one that’s running on its own metal.
Adobe seems to be the only one with an empowered product team that's consistently finding sensible and profitable uses for machine learning.
Edit: And on my iPhone, the offline photo categorization and image OCR
A careful plan for a product would be less hamfisted and include more flexibility to deal with the backlash.
Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space.
Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Airpods, Watch were all category defining rather than "me too" products.
In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.
iPod was released in 2001. Portable MP3 players were released in the late 90s.
I would say that only one of the examples you gave was unambiguously the first mover in a brand new space. I will give you "category defining", though.
For example, the iPod had tons of competitors already in the field when it launched.
Airpods were not even close to the first wireless earbuds.
One of the Apple Watch's major competitors (fitbit) launched 8 years prior. The first smartwatch that could sync with a computer came out in the 80s.
The iPad came like a decade after Microsoft's first major tablet push. ATT and Sony/Magicap and Apple all released "smart tablets" in the early 90s.
The iPhone was not the first capacitive touch screen smartphone, and certainly not the first smartphone - over a decade late to that game.
The Macintosh was (sort of) a sequel to Apple's own Lisa, which itself was also not a first mover. The Mac was incredibly innovative and successful, but was preceded by the LISA, PERQ, Alto, various Lisp Machines.
> In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.
Couldn't be farther from the truth.
Apple Watch was a success because it used iPhone as a moat. iPad was built upon iPhone's foundation.
Apple is - by and large - "an iPhone company".
I was already using smart phones, handhelds, tablets, etc, for years before the iPhone. Apple entered an existing category.
The iPhone wasn't even the first capacitive touchscreen phone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
Back in 2007 it was not seen as a completely new category or truly original. It was a variation within an existing category. At the time we did not think it was revolutionary, but of course it became the new standard.
Before they became an "iPhone company" they were an "iPod company", and that was also an existing category when it launched.
Wow, you really got their asses. Who could forget Microsoft's first major tablet push.
you think when the iPhone came out the space was not crowded? You think they defined the category? Jobs himself have put up a number of smartphones in his 2007 presentation. Yes, the iPhone was far, very far better but it was definitely not a first.
Same thing with the iPod vs Diamond Rio MP3 layers.
As for the Watch, gosh, I do not even know where to start. Pebble Kickstarter two years before that? Two generations of the Samsung Galaxy Gear came out well before the Apple Watch.
They didn't take whatever was out there in the market and copy it/make it incrementally better. They started from scratch and built something drastically different and better than the rest. Same for iPod (yes there were plenty of cheap MP3 players out there, but none of them were comparable), Airpods and all the rest.
It wasn't that far ahead when it first launched. Very basic functionality. But a few versions later it was the end of Nokia and Blackberry.
https://www.mobilegazette.com/2007-review-07x12x12.htm
"No handset polarised opinions during 2007 more than the Apple iPhone. Although it has many good points, the list of bad points is equally impressive. The iPhone lacks 3G, the camera is only two megapixels and lacks autofocus and flash, you cannot send MMS messages, third party applications are not allowed, the battery is not replaceable and it is absurdly expensive."
Literally EVERY single example you listed were markets that already existed before Apple entered them (except maybe the Mac but that was so long ago who cares). MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. Wireless earbuds existed before Airpods. Tablets existed before the iPad. Smartwatches existed before the Apple Watch. VR goggles existed before Vision. Smartrings existed before the Apple Ring (just wait, its coming).
Their skill isn't in being a first mover. Their skill is being a second, or even last, mover into a space that has untapped potential, and unlocking that potential (for both their benefit and competitors).
That's not savvy that's desperate.
Apple can arrive last to a product market. They can take six years of iterative releases to refine their vision on a product market. They will still dominate that market. Cue the "they can't keep getting away with this" meme, because this happens with EVERY PRODUCT THEY RELEASE and these people still keep thinking this time will be different.
The whole "Siri sucks" thing is also hilarious, because you have to ask: So? So what? Apple, Google, and Amazon invested billions upon billions into these systems (Amazon especially). Then LLMs came around and are absolutely eating their same lunch ten times faster. Apple, again, looks like a genius (intentionally, or far more likely, not). They didn't over-invest. They're not laying off a thousand people from the Alexa division [1], or removing a ton of Google Assistant features [2], or releasing hardware no one is buying. They built exactly enough of a voice assistant to be competitive throughout the 2010s, and now its time for the next generation of all these things anyway.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-alexa-job-cuts-generative-...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034262/google-assistant...
EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and discovers "AGI".. then what? Is that worth money, somehow?
EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do.
The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.
How does "generative AI" help ?
This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there".
Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.
But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.
Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into the phone, that would fix it completely most of the time (except, obviously, when I'm not near my desk).
An ideal compromise would be physical buttons on the device for when it's necessary and the ability to easily use my workstation's external keyboard (dock + switch maybe?) the rest of the time.
EDIT: Now that I think of it.. let me plug in a mouse too and give me a real OS (maybe in a container like you get on a Chromebook) and i can just replace my workstation with the docked phone. But then I would buy only half as many computers and wouldn't need all that GPU compute to train a bunch of statistical models so I guess that doesn't work for the computer companies.
I'm sad there isn't more built around Android's AVF. I thought for sure, by now, we were going to have "Linux on Android" ala Crostini.
Simple example: Adding something to a reminder list, but the name of your lists don't exactly match the list you said to add to.
Prompt: "Add milk to my shopping list"
Siri: "I didn't find a shopping list, do you want to create one?"
ChatGPT (when asked to pick from my actual lists), properly identifies the "groceries" list as the intended list.
I wouldn't dream of trying to use a Siri, it sounds absolutely maddening. All I expect is that when I press a key on the keyboard the character I commanded with my key press shows up on the screen before I can blink, and does so exactly once.
Sounds infuriating to me. (To be clear, I don't have any always-(maybe)-on mics in my life, I doubt Hey Google or Bard or whatever is much better.)
I use Siri to add stuff to my grocery list and set timers. That's it. It's useful when I'm in the kitchen to just say what needs to go on this list instead of remembering to write it down later.
The day when Siri or Google or whatever can make the corrections I mentioned in my higher post will improve it vastly.
Taking a completely different type of example, image editing. Let's say you ask your computer to remove a blemish in a photo. A professional could remove it, maybe better even, without AI. They know the tools to use, the keys to press, and effect change. Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
It's not here yet, so yes you're right that Siri IS maddening to use.
This feels dangerously close to a lack of empathy for the user. I understand that's not your intention, in fact the opposite. But in order to accept the notion that users actually want an intelligent employee instead of a tool I have to believe that everyone truly wants to be a manager instead of an individual contributor. I don't believe it.
Take a simpler case, hammering in a nail. What I want from my hammer is for it to disappear and become an extension of my arm. I just want to hammer in the nail. I don't want to negotiate with the hammer about how it's going to strike the nail, all I want is to hit the nail. There's no amount of "clever" the hammer can be which will help. Cleverness can only hurt my user experience.
In your example, what recourse does the user have if the AI didn't do the job the way they wanted? Removing something from an image implies (probably? or maybe not?) that the void is "backfilled" somehow. What if they're not happy with the backfill job? Do they have to argue with the tool about it? Will the tool take their feedback well or will it become a fight?
I think, generally, giving users tools that scale like hammers is the way to go. A hammer in the hands of a skilled carpenter, blacksmith, or cobbler with 30yr experience is no different than the same hammer in the hands of a 2yo child learning to drive their first nail. But that hammer's utility will scale with that child's skill for their entire lifetime. There's no "beginner" vs "advanced" distinction. What makes us (as computer hammer builders) believe that we can distinguish between "beginner" or "advanced" computer hammers? Or "regular" vs "special" users?
EDIT: or maybe we're not building hammers, instead we're building dishwashers. Dishwasher users aren't supposed to be skilled beyond loading and unloading the dishwasher, and hitting the start button. Do "regular users" really want an appliance, or do they want a tool?
EDIT: another way to phrase it -- are computers "bicycles for the mind" or are they just a bus?
It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.
On the other hand there’s what the washing machine, mechanized farm equipment, etc. did. A slow shift in how many people are required to do a job. There were no absolute jobs lost, just a shift in the economy.
Chances are it’ll be somewhere in between.
Apple's advantage is always been superior hardware and processing. My guess is that they try to do some on device LLM. It's currently possible to run Mistral 7B on your phone (MLCChat app), which is quite decent for a small model but is pretty terrible compared to the largest / best models.
I mean looking at Google and the various daily AI dramas they get, it seems like everyone else has rushed to market and is dealing with the negative fallout of that.
And to dump some of the employees on image and text generators off whatever self driving computer vision work they were presumably doing before? Interesting choice.
I think the VR goggles were always a stab at what's supposed to become Meta's core business.
Regardless, I would have really like to see a car from Apple. Tesla is still too small to get the attention of EU regulators when it comes to their stupid warranty and serviceability. Apple is large enough and already known to not play nice when it comes to repair - I'm sure we would've gotten some amazing legislature about electric vehicle repairability out of it!
Some did, Steve Ballmer laughed his butt off, convinced that no one sane will ever buy a $500 phone.
I still don't get the case for a screen you can wear. My phone screen is big enough for most use cases (like posting this comment). If I need to get work done, my laptop is realistically not much larger than the keyboard I'd need to use anyway. The laptop is also cheaper, and I can show what I'm working on to other people without jumping through hoops.
Classic solution in search of a problem.
Utopian or dystopian, this is exactly the future that Apple, Meta and NeuraLink are chasing.
Maybe in a few versions they will have something that could sell a billion units, but they have a lot of work to do to get there.
I think apple is having a difficult time selling these things. I had a harder time getting a hold of an iPad pro over a month after launch.
Maybe later versions will catch on though.
About the same as the Vision Pro.
I don't think AVP will sell that well. My guess is they won't hit their goal of 400k in the first year.
VR seems very different from that. Most people simply don’t want what companies are trying to sell them, and I think multiple major technical breakthroughs would be necessary to change that.
And as you say, the VR market is small compared to the phone market of 2007.
The VR market is small for a reason.
The Vision Pro just doesn't have that. Apple was able to clearly articulate what the iPhone allowed you to do that you couldn't do before. But the use cases presented for the Vision Pro just are a lot more niche, and a lot less compelling. Some people will certainly find uses for it, but right now the Vision Pro feels like a solution in search of a problem.
People seem to have this revisionist history where every Apple product is an instant hit. But the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch etc all took years to reach that product-market-fit stage.
All Apple has done is establish a baseline for what they want the category to be.
I have little doubt Apple is going to be a major player in AI, especially in the non-Nvidia hardware space after playing around with MLX
https://gist.github.com/gengwg/26592c1979a0bca8b65e2f819e31a...
The hardware side doesn't look much better. Apple's biggest userbase is located on iPhone, which poses hardware constraints on what kinds of model you can realistically deploy. The Mac has a deeply-ingrained audience, but it's unlikely that the AI will be a selling point to commercial customers (who have Nvidia) or PC users (that have other models).
Honestly, I believe AI research would be a wasted investment relative to supporting third-party libraries upstream and welcoming Nvidia back onto their platform.
Please just use some huge models to make actually smart products and run them in the cloud if it isn't feasible to run them on-device. Perhaps have an 'offline mode', which runs small models (the google assistant already does that - and it's very noticeable that the online mode has very accurate speech recognition, whereas offline mode can only recognise basic words reliably).
More impressive would be shortcut automation/smart shortcut tips IE; "Create a shortcut routine based off my device habits for week XYZ."
Is there any other examples you've heard talked about?
Apple doesn't have a privacy first ethos, it's more of an All your-data-are-belong-to-us.
They just don't like to share the asset of their users data, that's not privacy.
It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.
They could track every button pressed if they wanted to.
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...
From Apple’s legal page [0] for e.g. maps: “Individual usage metrics are associated with an identifier that rotates multiple times per hour, and is not tied to your Apple ID. This means Maps cannot search for information about you based on an identifier linked to you or your device.”
[0]: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-maps/
We know that Apple will throw their users under the bus for profit if incentives align.
"Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing" https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/apple_warns_suppliers...
"The problem with canceling Jon Stewart: Apple bowed to Chinese government censorship" https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2023/10/26/jon...
"Apple pulls Taiwanese flag emoji from iPhones in Hong Kong" https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-08/apple-taiw...
Even Google didn't went that far and withdrew from China.
"In early 2010, Google shut down its Chinese website altogether after failing to reach an agreement with Beijing over how much content to censor in search results." https://observer.com/2022/10/alphabet-shut-google-translate-...
I’d honestly more appreciate the ability to choose “best quality with theoretical decrease in ‘privacy’” over “best that you can do without hurting the tiny iPhone battery but perfect privacy.” I’d always pick the first one if given the choice.
I expect there will be a lot of iPhone upgrades this fall, as buyers will finally see a difference between their 1-3 year old device and a new iPhone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/14/iphone-16-upgraded-neur...
It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especially when you could just have a higher-margin business selling software for other people’s cars.
What surprises me is that it took this long to kill the product. And while I feel bad for the engineers and researchers who worked on this project, this really does seem like the best outcome.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I seem to recall that it was killed once before?
I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.
I didn't realize Apple literally wrote a book on the subject. Sounds interesting, what's the title?
And that’s the thing. Apple does really well at attainable luxury consumer goods. I think it does less well the higher the price point and market segmentation. Hence why the $10,000 Apple Watch didn’t work (and that was for lots and lots of reasons, first and foremost I think a misunderstanding of why watch enthusiasts spend so much on watches).
But putting that aside, partnerships (dealers) make up the car market for everyone with the exception of Tesla, and although with enough time and money, Apple could absolutely build out their own network, unlike Apple Stores, where they had a solid 5 years to a decade to really grow (coincidentally timed to Apple’s rise as a consumer giant) into that infrastructure, they’d need to have that basically day one for a car. Which is my whole point about it being overhead/capital intensive. Even Tesla had a chance to grow over time as it was a new company and not expected to sell and service cars everywhere. Apple would have a difficult time, I think, releasing a car and saying it could only be bought and serviced in select cities. The stakes are higher the bigger you are.
It isn’t that I don’t think Apple could do these things. It’s that I don’t think Apple could do them at the scale and margins at which it has based its business on. Especially if the net result is growing $100b in market cap. Apple added $1T to its market cap in 2 years (2018 to 2020) and another briefly in 2023 (current is $2.82T). I think there are far less intensive ways to add $100b to the bottom line than to become a car company.
They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%).
You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure.
I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.
And all mass-produced in incredible numbers.
A low volume $250k car would be pure luxury for the sake of it. That's not Apple's market.
Apple's market would be a $50k Tesla killer with far better styling and build quality and some attempt at a game-changing killer feature, all bundled with cross-marketing for other walled-garden products.
I'm not surprised that turned out to be impossible - for now.
It isn't the only way to break in, but it is common.
I'd love some retro apple "lifestyle" gear, throwback porsche racing jacket would be clutch right now with the yoots
I’ll admit that I’ve stopped at plenty of Apple stores while traveling, simply because they’re nearby. They’re usually in very nice locations for tourists (5th av, grand central station, etc) and I can totally see them dramatically improving brand appeal and catering to fanboys with localized tee shirts or Apple Watch bands or polishing cloths or any number of other gimmicks.
Oh and their retro stuff would sell out in an instant. Their 80s stuff was cool.
That was the case until SUV release. Ferrari announced plans to limit SUV sales, but that wont last in light of what Lamborghini is doing.
They might position themselves as an aspirational brand outside the US, and by keeping retail prices close to the same as in the US, no matter the local purchasing power, I can see how they can be perceived as an upscale brand in some markets.
So now, instead of buying things twice because the one was shit, I just buy Apple. I don’t buy “the iPhone”. I buy “iPhone”. It could be 99% more expensive, it’s still less than buying things twice.
See what Rimac did, it is a good example that starting a luxury sports car company and be successful is possible nowadays, and talking from the ignorance it seems to me easier than the past. If that is what apple wants or needs is a different story.
What Rimac did was partner with big automotive OEMs for research joint ventures and sell a tiny number of cars and a relatively large amount of battery and drivetrain tech to other OEMs. Difficult to imagine anything less like Apple's business model than that.
I have similar concerns about the Apple Vision Pro, given its small yields and current high ASP/muted demand, but at least there you can see the vision (pun unavoidable) of how it could eventually be an iPad-sized business or greater. A car only works if you do go after Tesla and Mercedes and BMW, etc.
I just don’t see any reason Apple would enter any business if not to take it on as a mass market player. Selling a $10,000 variant of a $500 watch is one thing (and that strategy failed, for what it’s worth), selling a low quantity machine that you still have to maintain and support that isn’t part of your core competency as a company is something else entirely.
I’d wager this cancellation is purely due to there being no chance in hell Apple could get the Apple premium for it when vehicle sales are stagnating due to massive price increases.
IOW Apple could easily charge their customary 20-30% margin and create fierce brand loyalty by just looking at whatever it is BMW is doing and doing the opposite in nearly every situation.
My point was simply that I don’t think an Apple car would sell for a notably different price than other premium brands.
Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc.
The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed to avoid more anti trust issues is often forgotten. Apples products are built on legacies. "Resting on the shoulders of giants" is probably true in this case.
Apple is now an AT&T, its now a Xerox, it is now the company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS). Apple, unlike google, knows how to make a consumer product, and one of these moonshots could make it even bigger...
I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.
Edit: I'm a dumb dumb and the brakes example was bad. I don't edit my mistakes in forums so peoples replies make sense. I still think the rest of the point is valid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
I'm sorry but you're getting it completely wrong. Brake by wire isn't legal anywhere in any market of the world and consequently there are zero cars implemented this way - every car currently on sale everywhere has to have a physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes.
Throttle by wire on the other hand - sure. Nearly all new cars only have an electronic throttle.
Steer by wire is making progress, with Lexus making the first road legal car that has a steering wheel that's fully disconnected from the steering rack, with only electronic control.
But isn't there famously brake by wire in toyota EVs? And that physical connection is required as a fallback?
https://youtu.be/agMrewRJTow?si=DrjfGsrKp5_ZazB-
There isn't a mechanical connection of any kind - the car just relies on triple(!) Backup for every component, including three fully independent power sources.
I don't think this is true for most vehicles. Skoda Octavia 2020 for example still has hydraulic brakes. I was going to suggest that no mass-production vehicles use a brake-by-wire system but I would have been wrong, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
I think Apple can provide an emphasis on modularity for the car manufacturers. What if you literally had a place to slip in an iPad as your display? What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets - if not for the drivers, then the passengers. What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements). Another car company could make the shell and the power train. Apple would handle the "experience" and integrate it into its other offerings. Cloud Cars.
> What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets
Or what if the people who wanted that just bought their headset of choice?
> What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements).
Question: when you get into someone else's car, is the first thing you notice the lighting, or is it how clean it is?
Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on R&D but that’s how the game works.
Tangentially, it's funny to me that people link to YouTube for podcasts these days.
For others out of loop:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_an...
Maybe the fact that they were moved away from the car project would have been a leak though, depending on what else they said.
If some one asks what I do they'll say "that's neat, must be nice to work from home!" and that's the end of the conversation, we can talk about hobbies or something else instead.
What part of it is confidential? Its existence? Obviously not. The fact that it uses SLAM? Not confidential, of course it does. That a person was transferred from that to the Vision Pro? Probably also on their linkedin page.
Nothing that OP described this person as saying sounds "stupid" or confidential. Sure, maybe they also said something that was confidential in addition to what was described. Maybe they also insulted your mother. We don't know.
I've known people at Facebook and Microsoft who were working on upcoming not-yet-released products and were free to talk about the products and their roles on them. These people, much like the person we're discussing, worked on upcoming projects which had already been publicly announced.
Of course publicly discussing a confidential project that no one knows about could get someone fired, but that's not the scenario we're talking about.
Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.
Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.
More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.
The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram where you actually do bump into and communicate with new and stimulating people.
You must be fun at parties.
Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.
> Interests must align.
That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.
some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have
Incidentally, one of the scariest things about the volatility in the housing market and in my (lack of) career, is that I may at some point be forced to abandon the neighborhood and city in which I've adopted as my home and in which I've befriended many of these random delightful people of all ages, and they might have to too. They're my community, I see them at the gym, the coffee shop, walking down the street, or at the park. A 1 bedroom condo starts at around $650k CAD, and most of the people here who haven't already owned something for a while depend on renting basements.
I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.
The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.
That said, nowhere on earth had better driving directions on apps since people will notice the bugs on the drive into work and fix them. ;-)
Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.
Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?
Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?
For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.
It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.
Unless the thing is "afford housing"
At my last bigco job, I was advised not to discuss company matters outside of the office.
aka The Innovators Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
The solution the follow up book to this one ^ was to build isolated teams that are flush with the resources/capital of the parents but aren't at the whims, or constant meddling, of the parent company's management class / stockholders / old ideas.
For all the effort Google/Apple/Meta/Xerox/Bell/etc put into their internal moonshot divisions the whole concept mostly hasn't been very successful.
But at the same time they also haven't been great at buying young up and coming startups either, often ruining them the second they arrive by the same impulses which demands R&D moonshot teams be isolated from the host.
I beg to differ; when I was at AT&T in the late eighties we tried to enter the computer business, on the PC side with Olivetti, and on the UNIX side with the 3B2 minicomputers made with our own chips running System V UNIX. I even had a 3B2-200 in my house for a couple of years.
Entering a new business is hard: although the engineering was solid, we didn't have a saleforce trained in selling computers, and we didn't have a rich ecosystem (Oracle! Ingres! Informix!). AT&T didn't throw UNIX out the window, but found that capitalizing on UNIX was hard.
If anything of !35 years of cyberpunk input - and output building shit that spies on you:
Apple is Ono-Sendai and your iPhone is your deck. - the real battle is going to be how much agency does a Human Being have over all PII - all their data?
Your jack-in is your screen. Your data is your ID. But, who are YOU?
AT&T (owner of Westinghouse and Bell Labs) then proceeded to take their monopoly and patent factory, and started buying up competitors and new small companies. Eating their golden goose in this way is what caused the government to break them up.
Bell Labs was independent for a few years doing... Stuff. Spent their remaining prestige on falsification scandals because of the publish or perish culture this new profit motive created. They were bought by Nokia a few years ago (now called Nokia Bell Labs) and now only employ a couple theoretical physicists last I read. The lab that put into practice the foundations of modern tech (Unix and C are in almost every non-consumer-facing device) just does some Nokia product development nowadays. What a loss.
It wasn't an unspoken agreement. It was an explict one, the Kingsbury Commitment.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment
I'm curious what makes you say that about MS? Out of three, I'd actually put MS first and Apple last if for nothing else than Microsoft Research which is like a separate entity in its own strong right (judging from the outside). So many things useless to Microsoft business from them, yet so many many things..
But the really big stuff all requires working like your future depends on it. They can't do that, so they usually just end up with laundry lists of fancy PoCs.
Even when they work, the rollouts can be glacial at best (eg, Waymo).
Tim will only tell.
...I'll walk myself out now.
I hope so. That would be a great result, even if the consumer product didn’t land. That said, I would argue that sometimes you do just have to call something and move on. You’re right that Apple is one of the few places that can do research for research sake, but this wasn’t a research project. By all accounts this had a real goal of making and manufacturing a car.
It appears this project was in the works for more than a decade, had numerous stops and starts, leadership and focus changes and if your goal isn’t just research for the sake of research (which I do actually think is demonstrably different from Bell Labs or Xerox Parc which are more akin to things like Microsoft Research and Google X and the like), you need to ship at some point.
I think giving ten years to something like this is definitely a gift and I hope we see fruits from some of the work that went into it other places. But at the same time, there are other moonshots you can try if one doesn’t work out and there is arguably a cost if you keep focused on one idea that isn’t going to pan out for too long. Ten years for a project like this seems like a fair amount of time to try and a fair time to pull the plug.
And what characteristics does the phone look for? It could just be sitting on someone’s lap or held in a way that cannot see the outside or the steering wheel.
Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?
While it may yet happen, the "about to" part of course turned out wrong. There was no AV revolution in the late 2010s, and Apple reportedly pivoting away from self-driving a couple of years ago was probably the actual death knell for the project.
Apple making an AV in the middle of the self-driving revolution makes sense; Apple making just a nice EV in a very crowded market does not.
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/2/16/8045625/jo...
In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind.
In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't moved the market much. But the risk is that generative AI is a paradigm shift that will unlock some game changing capability that could catch Apple off guard.
Same story with Microsoft and Copilot on the desktop.
If your two primary competitions are doing similar things then you start paying attention.
And Apple is showing off parts of Car Play that could be fully integrated by manufacturers in a much deeper way, assuming they want to give up control (which given GM’s decision to drop Car Play and Android Auto, seems like it’ll be a challenge).
There is certainly a world where Apple could be a modern QNX unencumbered by its parent company baggage and a better business model (ongoing subscription and not 50-cents a car or whatever it is QNX gets) and provide the software for all that stuff, but based on everything that has been reported, that wasn’t what Apple was doing here. They were trying to build a real car. And as challenging and interesting as that might be as an R&D exercise, I just don’t see why that would be a business you’d willingly want to enter when you are so successful in other areas and the margins are so poor.
It makes sense for companies like Netflix to shy away from the Apple "walled garden." They want to deliver a unique experience with exclusive content, not just be another content supplier to the Apple experience. They don't want to wind up like the record companies.
But car manufacturers? There's a whole lot of stuff going on w.r.t. your driving experience. Like driving. Hundreds of physical things. Etc. Unlike the media industry I can't think of a future where the car companies eventually find themselves subsumed by allowing CarPlay integration.
Then again, I can't tell what's the main fear... if car companies are scared of getting iTunes'd, or if they really just want that revenue from 5% of car buyers paying for the Premium GM Infotainment Experience Recurring Subscription or whatever.
The small margin GM gets on its cars is buffered by the revenue splits it gets with Sirius XM and the various call for assistance services. Sirius revenue is on the decline because everyone listens to Spotify on their phone. The GPS revenue stream died with Google Maps on phones. So they have to try to lock in those fees where they can. See also: BMW selling a subscription to unlock features like heated seats.
Now, I think this backfires for GM. I think way more people will not buy new cars if they lack Android Auto or Car Play than they think. I also think that it will be harder to maintain the apps and services than GM thinks. When Ford was doing its partnership with Microsoft 15 years ago (and then they took it in-house because Microsoft Connect or whatever it was called was buggy as hell), I think that made a lot of sense. But it was also expensive to do and so you saw the car companies offload a lot of those details to Apple and Google via a QNX or other middleware layer. Tesla built its own software as sort of a foundational part of the car experience, and I think it has worked well for them. I don’t have the same confidence in GM.
The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system. But I bet Apple and Google would insist on 30% of that revenue (at least).
I really can't imagine significant numbers of people paying for it and I don't know that a 5G bundle makes any sense. I don't understand why anybody would want their car to have it's own 5G connection when they already have their 5G phone in their pocket.
Even my elderly borderline-technophobe parents are able to understand (with some effort) the concept of CarPlay since it's more or less the existing phone interface that they're used to.
Maybe the real killer issue is that on one hand, clearly many people value CarPlay enough to pay for it. But it has always been free, and will continue to be free from quite a few other auto makers, and that's a big obstacle to getting anybody to pay for it. That has historically been difficult for any sort of good or service...
I mean, for Apple, it absolutely makes sense.
Electric vehicles are relatively straightforward to make. Everyone and their mother are producing some sort of electric scooter/dirt bike these days with new companies popping up every month. Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.
Apple could easily outsource most of the functional development and design and certification, and then focus on their core competency which is aesthetics and marketing and integration into iOS ecosystem, which would be a winning combo economically.
Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?
If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.
Take a car with 4 motors, 1 per wheel (which is the best arrangement). The total list of moving parts.
- wheels - suspension linkage - driveshafts - brakes - pedals - windows - wipers - coolant pump - washer fluid pump - seats - frunk/trunk
Thats the list of moving parts. Dunno where you got 1000 moving parts from. Most each one of those has reliable manufacturers that have figured out how to build them correctly.
Reliable manufactures? Auto suppliers are notorious for being unreliable - the supply chains are exceedingly complex, there's constant pressure to drive down cost and quality control lapses are a constant issue.
Not to mention each vehicle has hundreds of different suppliers and an issue in any one of them will grind your manufacturing line to a standstill.
They could hire people with the expertise, but Apple is allergic to growing engineering expertise outside of Cupertino.
Then again, that isn't necessarily working out perfectly well for Fisker.
Waymo and Baidu can credibly claim they have the people and track record to do this thing. Apple isn't anywhere close.
Generally, the closer you are to "people will die if this code has a bug," the more regulated the industry.
People that don't work in a heavily regulated space vastly underestimate the constraints. It's hard enough to create a product that's beautiful and works well at a price point that the market will bear, but it's often near-impossible to do all this while also complying with all the regulations of all the markets in which you intend to sell your product.
It takes a tremendous amount of commitment, money, and time, and companies that aren't used to working within snail's pace regulatory environments quickly lose focus and the projects sputter out.
> It’s one thing to create a new [lower-margin business], it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins.
While I agree that this plan didn't fit with any of Apple's strengths, as a general principle good companies plan for margin erosion. In fact failure to do this is a classic failure described in The Innovator's Dilemma, where you're leaving room for a disruptor to grow. Or as Sun used to put it: "if someone's going to show up and eat our lunch, it should be us who does that"
But a car...SMH
Probably, but who knows with Apple. I suppose they could have created a cheap Citroen Ami type thing with some cool tech and just doubled the price because it's Apple. I would assume they got into it because they saw a product with good margins.
If you think about it cars are poorly designed for the average journey. They tend to be designed for that one time you actually need to drive 300km, or the one time a year you need to fit 5 people in the car, or the one time you need to load 3 suitcases in the boot. And in America they're also way too big for no good reason.
Apple more than anyone might have been able to experiment with the conventional car design perhaps.
But we don't really know what they were trying to do do we? I think you assuming that they were just trying to create another low margin electric car company to compete the likes of Tesla and Ford is probably wrong though.
Only if they were to sell vehicles. I think it's more likely they were planning on having a fleet of self driving cars.
Also bad. From the article:
> many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division
So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen EV startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.
I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build.
Lucky for Apple, generative AI doesn’t need to work for 100% of the cases to be successful, unlike autonomous vehicles, so maybe Apple has a better chance to be successful this time.
> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle
Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.
It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.
Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.
I’m not sure why everyone thinks that Apple only wanted to create an EV to compete with Tesla or BYD. Given that the Apple execs thought that fully autonomous driving was achievable, it’s possible that Apple wanted to introduce a mobile entertainment pod-type product which may have been relatively lucrative as a premium luxury product at first and later could have become a good product for keeping mindshare when the general public used it for their daily two hour commutes.
But after COVID started the work from home movement, Apple pivoting to a product like Apple Vision Pro makes more sense when the importance of commuting lessened. Peering backwards in time the decisions that Apple made look logical. Now whether Apple can monetize generative AI by leveraging their iDevices market share will determine whether they can make it to a 4T market cap. Apple has a tough mountain to climb going forward since none of these products are sure hits like the iPhone was.
Cars were a good candidate, but it sounds like AAPL now thinks that GenAI is a better bet. ChatGPT is such a basic product, that it sounds reasonable that there will be bigger and better products in the future.
Right. The electric car business took a wrong turn when most of the players decided that electric cars were a premium product that could be sold with huge margins. Tesla started there, and it seemed to be working for them. This led to excesses such as the electric Hummer, a 9,000 pound vehicle with sports car acceleration and a price in 6 figures. It's a great engineering achievement but a silly product. It also led to electric versions of vehicles having a price premium around US$10,000 over the same model with internal combustion.
Then Tesla exhausted the fanboy market. Reality ensued. Price mattered. Tesla had to start offering discounts.
This is a big problem for some major car companies that bought into the high margin myth. Ford should have known better. Stellantis' CEO was running around saying that they were going to get margins like tech companies, partly by adding on aftermarket fees. That didn't work out.
Electric cars are doing just fine, and prices are coming down. That's a good thing. BYD gets this.
Having to compete on price scares Apple.
The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment.
Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, but why would an OEM choose Apple instead of others they’re used to and are likely far easier to work with.
Unless they went highly left field for the US, like tiny city cars more like Smart, I just don’t get it. And if they did that… well Smart isn’t breaking records in the US are they.
The initial idea seemed to be self driving cars, but for individuals you have the problems above and for fleets why would they want to buy from Apple? So unless Apple wanted to be Uber that doesn’t make much sense either.
An odd move all around.
The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough.
But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does (existing Apple stores wouldn’t cut it). And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.
If they a fully self driving car by 2018 and beat everyone by 7 years maybe. But as time went on it went from little to almost no sense.
I enjoyed following it for that reason. But I never thought it would happen.
All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.
I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?
I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competition.
Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.
Green bubble vs blue bubble another example.
That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform.
Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?
Uh yes, of course. I would be highly surprised if there weren't. That's Apple's MO.
Given that 30k is the difference between an entry level and mid level car, sure. The premium brands would definitely want to get Apple's branding under their wing, and those buyers are already used to paying a premium when they can buy a $30k car.
Sure Apple’s $60k car is better than a $30k Honda. But is it better than a $60k Acura or BMW or Lexus?
That’s where I think the trouble would be.
Yes. People happily pay an extra 1-200% for something because it's Apple, all the time. I'll probably never understand why, but I've come to accept that they do.
No one thought they would do VR and they did.
No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now.
No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did.
The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.
What has this VR achieved? Nothing so far.
Cannibalising your own product isn’t an achievement
They have never shipped a large physical product or anything mechanical in the entire history of the company, this is outright delusional.
“The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”
A month of near 0 buzz for apples introduction to the era of “spatial computing”
Usually Apple parades around a few exemplar apps or use cases, but for the vision pro, it was just business meetings?
imo just having infinite floating screens is a better feature to show off.
Let’s take iTunes. People were clowning Apple for releasing Apple Music because they had millions of people buying Music on iTunes. Spotify showed it could work but they weren’t exactly making money over fist.
The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.
Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.
I wish we could read the internal emails on it.
Before they released the AirPods, they bought Beats. It would along the same lines but with a way more complex machine.
Same as the rest of apples brand: "it just works". The seemless, polished integration of their products gave them a devoted fanbase that pays a huge premium over competition.
Sure they do. Facebook was so confident in VR they rebranded their entire company. Elon Musk got his horrible bluff called out and he owns the largest social media site (for now). It's not business related, but the CEO of Amazon owns a national newspaper.
Apple car didn't come out of nowhere. They and Google were working on Car Os's for years and we both know Apple cares hough about vertical integration to shun off Intel and Nvidia in order to make their own chips. Regardless of my confidence in the idea, the act itself is consistent with Apple.
Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.
The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product.
Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain.
Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry about any of your infotainment solutions? We'll build the unit, in exchange for owning the exclusive app store it uses. And you'll get to say your cars are powered by Apple." Win/win.
Instead, they dicked around until the automakers figured their consoles out (mostly... still looking at you angrily, Nissan) and Apple was left without a key differentiator.
Hell, the mind-numbingly obvious reason for Apple -- do it at a loss for the real-time mapping and traffic data!!
People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands."
iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.
That’s not quite how that happened. They were turned down and laughed out of the room by nearly every carrier they approached. The only one that didn’t was AT&T; but they definitely weren’t “desperate” at the time.
They had lots of leverage, which is how they got exclusivity.
And it worked out.
You’re right Apple was riding high on the iPod, they weren’t in any danger of going under. They could have waited longer.
I think it would have been funny if they released it in Europe or something where the carriers weren’t in control and then told Americans “call your carrier, sorry, they wouldn’t let us”. Not that that would have ever happened.
AT&T wasn't desperate, and I'm sure Jobs would have preferred to skip on exclusivity, since that really didn't serve iPhone.
"Desperate for more customers"? Well sure, but I'm sure Verizon was even more desperate for more customers considering they were so close to being number one (AT&T was number one at the time, by a slim margin). After all, Pepsi literally bought restaurants and forced them to serve Pepsi in order to force consumers to drink their sodas from the runner up spot.
I don't have any reference for this, but just on its face it would make sense that if Apple needed to sweeten the pot for a carrier to allow it, exclusivity was a way to do it, and it would have been in Apple's best interest to pick the carrier with the biggest market share at the time, which was AT&T.
EDIT: Others corrected me that at the time the deal was signed in 2005 and during the famous 2007 keynote, the partner was Cingular. Through a series of M&A Cingular became what we know of as AT&T, and by the time the phone launched in July 2007, it was AT&T who held the deal.
Interestingly,
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
In Jobs' keynote he referred to Cingular as the #1 carrier with 58 million subscribers. I think the logic above still makes sense given that.
And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.
I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
That cash ironically is an obstacle to Apple being able to innovate. Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is nothing but a “phone company” with a bank attached, which is fine, it will continue to operate, but it won’t continue to grow and innovate.
Apple is rather frugal with acquisitions and hires and somewhat frugal with salaries.
One is an established tech company trying to do business in a space it’s unfamiliar with. It has existing forces pulling it in a certain direction because it already makes money in those ways. Google is the perfect example of how this hampers innovation. It’s one of the reasons the concept of Alphabet exists.
SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
Apple used to be organized differently than other big companies, and more like multiple startups. Just look at the trajectory of other PC builders of the 90’s.
But they were working towards that all the time. And then SpaceX didn't try to make a car, Tesla was started as a mostly-separate company to make a car. Because there's very little business synergy between those two things.
The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Wireless_Services
Only in hindsight. At the time Apple had tried once before with the Rockr, and it really sucked.
The iPhone launch was wonderful because it changed the game enough for a 2G phone to be an acceptable trade off in a 3G market.
It was not clear at all that would happen before the launch presentation.
Steve Jobs said that Motorola were calling the shots which is why Apple decided to do its own phone.
Apple have always developed core products that are essentially a computer.
Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.
But as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option I don’t understand why they didn’t just give up and instead seemed to try to shift towards a more normal car.
The closest thing they've made to a car is those wheels for the mac pro.
Now I'm wondering why it existed it all.
iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.
Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.
Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.
It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.
Yep. Well said. The cost of a full phone + expensive plan is a lot.
Plus kids wanted the apps (really games) the iPhone had. Apple wanted to sell them games.
And besides that parents were far more hesitant to give young kids phones than (for better or worse) than today.
The final reason I’ve heard is the number of hand-me-down phones given to kids now that smartphones are ubiquitous means sales slowly fell to ver little compared to when introduced.
It would be surprising if we had stats on iPad versus non-iPad kids and what percentage of them ended up being iPhone users, and those stats didn't show a strong correlation.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...
700 bucks, now just imagine what one would have to pay for the wheels on your shiny new applecar
Computers run software the user asks for, phones run the software the phone manufacturer allows it to.
Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.
Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like.
The Apple phone was perhaps the most anticipated device in years. What surprised people wasn't that they released one, it was that they went all in on a capacitive touch screen, which was novel tech, and that it didn't have real mobile data or native apps. There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages but people were still skeptical.
Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them
The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.
Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it.
The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more.
When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?
A car and a cell phone, or anything Apple has yet made, are wildly different. They may as well have had a battle tank program, or started making airplanes. Those things have screens and "infotainment systems" too.
Were they really close cousins in 2006?
Cars are wildly different, 50 years ago GE would have seemed like the one that would make a phone, not ford.
You had your Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, which were popular among hardcore turbonerds, but normies weren't interested in them. And that goes double for the US; there was more uptake of WinMo and Symbian in Europe, but very little in Apple's home market. The closest thing to a "normie" smartphone before the iPhone was BlackBerry, but most people who had one were business users who had their device issued and provisioned by their employer. And enthusiasts always pooh-poohed BlackBerries as "not a real smartphone" because it was basically just a messaging and groupware beast with limited general-purpose capabilities.
So there was a big gap to be filled. Enthusiasts had their market segment, business users had their market segment, but the ordinary consumers had nothing. And Apple gladly swooped in to fill this gap.
The problem is that cars are already ubiquitous, especially in the US. What can an iCar offer that a Toyota can't? Hell, even if you specify electric cars, other companies still have this covered. What can Apple offer that Tesla can't? And if you look internationally, it's even worse. You start selling electric cars outside the US market, you're going to end up going head-to-head with Chinese giants like BYD that are already kicking Tesla's ass outside the US.
The only real path forward for an iCar that does to cars what the iPhone did to phones is if Apple were to perfect true Level 5 self-driving. If they could actually pull off "Siri, take me to work", it would change things enough that normal cars would look like dumbphones compared to the iCar. But that's a pipe dream. Our roads are too chaotic for Level 5 to be feasible for a long, long time. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the reason this project lasted a whole decade was because Apple was throwing everything they had at Level 5 self-driving, and they canned it because after an entire decade they still couldn't make it work.
Not true. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank before and after iPhone's launch. If anything, Apple was the one company that had the technology and market credibility to immediately make a splash in the market despite being totally foreign to it.
>and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
We did think that there was a real possibility of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. But this was again out of belief that Apple had the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, not because Apple—of all companies—could not get what it wanted from carriers.
And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.
It’s increasingly obvious that Apple has ensured by their cutthroat and rent-seeking behavior in the one place they have market power (the App Store) that no sane business wants to partner with them on anything. Everyone knows Apple will leverage any partnership to get a firm foothold and then extract as close to 100% of the possible margins for Apple, leaving them with crumbs, or possibly just losses. And the whole time, Apple’s corporate personality seems to genuinely believe that all of this is not ruthlessness, but just Apple being fairly compensated for their great work.
By the way, this doesn’t make them bad, lots of companies are known for margin extraction, like Walmart famously did with its suppliers. Apple are very good at Doing Capitalism in this way, but competitors are rightly going to defend themselves by ruling out anything that could help Apple expand further.
And they have more money than god.
So if you parter with them, they will learn from you. And you’ll get “the Apple bump” if the car is successful.
But don’t expect to be partners in 10 years. Expect to be competitors or a new division.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Why you think Apple can't do the same if focused?
I suppose Apple could go after the Corolla or something if they really wanted to but that just doesn’t seem like an Apple move to me.
They convinced everyone to increase what they’d pay for a phone. , and to be fair a smartphone is for more capable so that’s understandable.
But they would make a luxury level car and I don’t think they’d convince much of the public it would be worth the premium. Even if everyone wanted it I doubt many would buy.
Xiaomi bought Segway (Ninebot) and released tons of e-bikes, e-scooters and even an electric gokart.
Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.
> Their trucks still sell massively
If they didn't know what people wanted, they probably wouldn't be able to sell a massive amount of them.
It is really bizarre that they insist on continuing to try. Just give us AUX in (stereo or usb). Cellphones can do it all now anyway. The car’s entertainment system should be about as complex as a pair of headphones.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/general-motors-removing-appl...
As other brands get more and more popular in the US I wonder if the CarPlay issue will really start to hurt them. But we won’t know for a while.
I’m certainly very curious to see what happens since GM was dumb enough to remove CarPlay. I expect that’s gonna hurt. But maybe I’m wrong.
Legacy automakers have thoroughly demonstrated that when it comes to making a decent infotainment system they are unwilling, incapable, or some mix of the two
One of the pain points that CarPlay and Android Auto solve for is that any car I rent or buy has the same media controls and all of my presets. When I travel for work, I try to always pick a rental vehicle that is compatible with my phone in order to reduce cognitive load of learning a new vehicle's unique controls.
But then again they’ve changed things so many times according to the rumors maybe both were true at various times.
None of these are practical luxury car brands. Certainly their competitors would be, say, BMW or Porsche?
Lamborghini may be a little small for that list, I don’t really know. But I would think they would stay pretty boutique due to output size.
1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.
2. People who want cheap modes of transportation. This is your cheapest level sedan buyers.
3. People who want specific utility and are willing to pay for it. This is the largest group of buyers that ranges from people wanting the convenience/novelty/technology of an electric vehicle, to people who want the safety/robustness/cargo capacity of a pickup truck. Apple car would definitely fit in here.
How can an official suit and tie be a status item if most men have one?
How can a good beard be a status item if it grows for free?
A beard definitely isn’t a status item. That’s like saying black hair are a status item
Hmm good question
You can make your own conclusions about people who are affected by such status statements.
This is an incredible achievement of Apple marketing.
I don't disagree with what you're probably trying to say here, but I disagree with how you're stating it.
First, "car enthusiast" != "performance enthusiast". There are plenty of people who like cars for reasons other than going fast, and sub-interests in the car enthusiast community that are not performance oriented.
Second, people who actually do enjoy the art of performance driving don't have to do it on the road. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US that have driven on race tracks.
Third, there are certainly performance cars that people do take to the limits on the streets, often in violation of some traffic rules. Not every performance car is a 911 GT3. Probably a very high percentage of Miata owners have approached cornering limits on the street on cloverleafs.
It's like custom PCs - some go for EATX systems with Threadripper and dual graphics cards and NVMe RAID 0 while others go for 4L ITX systems or fanless configs. But a Dell tower is functionally very similar.
Someone buying a S-class Mercedes probably isn't doing it for the V8 but for the comfortable interior. They're still spending $100,000 when a Camry could do a similar job.
People who are into modifications for power to roll race on the street do it solidly just to show off how much money they can spend.
People who drive "hard" on the street really arent even close to performance capabilities of their car. Give me most any ~250 hp sedan, no matter which wheel drive, Ill redo the suspension and stick on good tires, and I can keep up with any 911 on twisty roads. The culture in this regard is pretty evident because I will be seen as a poser if I do this.
As for the track, there is a separate subculture that happens at the track. Sure there is a minority out there to just have fun in their regular cars, most everybody including them are oogling the expensive track toys, and nobody is paying attention to actual driving skill of the people. At one point and time, a husband and his wife pulled up with a mobile home towing a garage with 2 Ferrari Challenge cars, with the entire setup costing more than I have ever made in my entire life even now 10 years later, and of course they were not any faster around the track, but they were the stars of that day.
Racing series are also literally about who can spend the most money, until you cross the bridge of being good enough to run sponsors. Not even on the car parts either, for example, we would camp at the track, while other people would pull up in their trailer homes and get a much better night sleep with AC, which gives a huge advantage come racing.
My point is that you neither have to reach the limits of a car's performance, nor do you need a high performance car, to appreciate cars for what they are. Many of the people who ended up on the track in the 00's and 10's are people who enjoyed whippin' 90s shitboxes around country roads, but couldn't afford the track. These are hardly people who buy cars for status.
Apple car would have absolutely been a pickup truck-like status symbol for highly urban people.
Why were you puzzled? What is so impossible about making a car from scratch, then making money on it? I don't own any Apple products, but I know they could do it. Yes it's difficult, but a lot of the difficulty comes from a lack of resources, not something Apple is worried about.
I find it really interesting that you (and those who did not contradict you) choose to form this opinion. I suspect Apple shares it. But to me it's a missed opportunity combined with a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's probably the lack of this very characteristic that makes Elon so successful. He never lets FUD get in the way of his goals.
There are some companies out there who don't seem subject to these artificial limitations, at least, at certain points in their history. For a while Mitsubishi made both cars and televisions. Panasonic made both batteries and bicycles.
I think what really separates winners from losers when it comes to developing a product and selling it is the willingness to set aside artificial limitations and really commit to beating the competition. Core competencies matter more for companies who are no longer interested in growing. Apple definitely wants to keep growing. So if Apple really was putting R&D money into cars and then quit, then I see this as a failure of Apple leadership. Apple can make a great car, and people would buy it.
If they went through and released a car, would it be profitable enough for all those costs?
Or would spending all that money on insourcing some manufacturing or getting more manufacturing out of China pay off more?
Tim Cook is a finance guy, not a “what the hell we’ve got money to burn” leader.
Why would that matter? Those are sunk costs.
Jaguar is owned by Tata motors, Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary, Lamborghini's ownership is Audi -> Volkswagen, so not really small makers in any sense.
But generally I agree, I think Apple making the full car is an odd choice. I think so much of their DNA, though, is "hardware and software working in concert together", and that's probably what they thought this was a good idea to begin with.
I do agree that there's a huge amount of specialization for cars that doesn't overlap with gen AI in any meaningful way.
That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches.
The average car is crap compared to what it could be - and that's without any self-driving involved either: purely the basic car functionality has seen little thought UX and convenience wise in 50+ years.
Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches.
When Apple got into watches there were lots of rumors they were for years first, and it made sense as an extension to the iPhone. Remember the Pebble already showed the basic idea could be useful.
Those things were said for both music players and smart watches, by pundits and competitors alike.
E.g. re the Apple Watch, here's a Forbes summary: "In 2015, the year the Apple Watch was launched, LVMH watch division president and Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver said the Swiss industry was not afraid of Apple’s new product, because it could not be repaired in a thousand years or eighty years, nor inherited by children, nor would it ever become a status symbol. As is always the case when disruption occurs in an industry, traditional competitors are not able to see the threat, and continue to try to analyze it according to the variables that were important yesterday."
CarPlay? Cool.
Actual car?
The world doesn't need another tony, luxury car. The world needs an affordable (preferably electric) "folks" car (and I don't see that as Apple's market).
Very odd, why would you mention these? These brands neither have the brand recognition Apple would strive for nor the scale they are interested in.
What is possible is that after spending enough effort on the project, they couldn't see what that new category could be. And that just making one more (like one more monitor perhaps) had not enough margin to bother.
You mean this one? He actually says self driving and LLMs are both headed towards AGI there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEm81F3vjy0
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/26/xiaomi-bets-on-new-ev-su...
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42400955/afeela-sony-hond...
It's a strategic, capability building project for Saudi Arabia.
They want to turn the country into the AI / advanced manufacturing / software development hub of the Middle East and they need an innovative brand that can help to attract talent and foreign investment.
The idea that Apple had any business making cars was rooted in overconfidence and business school nonsense.
It was overconfidence to think that the shipping of tens of millions of smartphones meant the company was well-suited to make heavy machinery.
It was business school nonsense that birthed the idea. Consumers never needed Apple to make a car; the car presumably was to 'diversify' and placate investors worried about smartphone market saturation.
Tim Cook, and whoever else had a part in scrapping this dumb project, are probably mourning its death, but they ought to congratulate themselves.
9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047833
When Apple did all this in phones it was unique. There was no Tesla of phones. But there is a Tesla of cars and it's tough to imagine what unique thing Apple could bring to the market.
Today, not so much.
Apple typically productizes mature technology and ensures that its products are designed well. Tesla is an early adopter and productizes immature technology which it overhypes and overpromises on (e.g. self-driving).
Apple's manufacturing quality control and attention to detail is also generally pretty impressive. Tesla products looks impressive on the outside but feel cheap on the inside, and there are a lot of issues with the quality of manufacturing. Apple uses nice materials and Tesla uses cheap materials.
Apple making a car always struck me as weird, though.
I would argue BMW or Mercedes are much closer to being the Apple of cars - they aren't early adopters of new technology, and their products are immaculately designed (though using a much different design language than Apple does) and are and feel expensive, unlike Tesla's cars, which look nice but feel like toys.