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Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

81–90 of 434 posts

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#82

Apple really is a one hit wonder. Outside of computing devices, phone, tablets, laptops, (let's throw in desktops & watches) They really haven't been able to build and innovate much since Jobs. I was short on the idea when they announced a self-driving car. Without a major change and internal culture shock, they are going to stay on this course, hit peak cash extraction until they start mortgaging cash quickly. The o…

You called them a one hit wonder and then implied that they've had hits in all their product categories, fascinating.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#83
post #34

More proof Apple is done innovating. This is literally a story about giving up, in the NYT. Can we have SJ back please?

Stop down voting and show me proof of innovation.

USB-C? Don't get me started. Mac Pro?

There's nothing I'm aware of that they are doing that I'm looking forward to.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#84

“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality into interior displays. The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known as lidar. Lida…

Sounds a lot like The Homer to me: http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#85
post #13

Call me crazy but why not consider ways to let someone remote drive the vehicle? I'm sure there are all sorts of corner cases (bad signal for one) but it's done all the time with drones.

How will it solve anything?

Theoretically you could find someone far away who will drive cheaply.

Lot of trust in that individual when they too don’t get killed if the car crashes. Also hope you never have packet loss!!! There’s also that pesky speed of light restrictions on low latency, etc.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#86
A vehicle with a similar external sensor array has been parked in a lot near my workplace every weekday at lunch time for the past several weeks. Given the proximity to AC3 at Central and Wolfe, my coworkers and I had all assumed it was an Apple test of some kind.

Accords with the rumor mill surrounding Apple leasing a former Pepsi bottling plant down the street.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/03/01/apple-le...

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#87
post #3

"But people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company to reimagine the automobile experience, according to the five people." Ah Jony Ive, first he ruined iOS 7 and now this constant need to tinker with things that work fine. I love the hardware design but please leave the software and HID bit alone... of course YMMV P…

I miss the textures a lot. All the flatness makes the UI too harsh.

Disagree. This feels more contemporary and integrated.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#88
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more that most don't see Amazon's actual core competence. Amazon is a logistics business, both information and physical. They do logistics for themselves for various front-ends (amazon.com, echo, video, kindle, etc.) but you can view all of those as accessories to their AWS, warehousing, and shipping business which they provide both for their own front ends and for sale to anyone.

If you define "core competence" sufficiently vaguely then sure, everything can be related to that core competence. "a logistics business, both information and physical"? Really? Calling their massive retail business, original content, and physical devices an "accessory" to their warehousing is an extremely myopic view of Amazon.

Remember that much of what is sold on Amazon.com is not actually sold by Amazon. Amazon provides warehousing and fulfillment and an online storefront for third party sellers as well as for itself. The tools that it uses to run that online storefront in the form of AWS are used by many non-Amazon websites as well. The Kindle ecosystem helps Amazon sell retail books but also provides a self-publishing platform. It's not unreasonable to say that logistics, warehousing and web services are the real business, and that Amazon's retail business is one of many customers.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#90

Good, now if only we can get Musk to stop live alpha-testing his decapitation death code and slow down for a few years, then maybe some actual experts who have working sensors can get this done properly.

> decapitation death code

What are you referencing here? If you mean the accident that caused a car to drive under a truck, that driver ignored several alerts and warnings from the auto pilot system.

That accident was human error, not software.

Edit: Results of NTSB investigation https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/06/20/tesla-s...

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