Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 434 posts

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

#141

Post by askafriend »

segmondy wrote: post #44

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…

This is either very cleverly veiled sarcasm or straight up obliviousness with a side of trolling. Hard to tell which, well done!

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

#142

Post by icanhackit »

na85 wrote: post #140
icanhackit wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah...I suspect a lot of people said something similar when it was rumoured they were going into the phone business. I know a car is a very different beast to a small touchscreen computer that makes phone calls, but at the time everyone was looking at it from the perspective of a computer and entertainment company making a phone in a cut-throat thin-margin industry. What they did is make an iPod Touch with a cellula…

A consumer electronics company changing market segments is different than a consumer electronics company that wants to enter the automotive industry. Apple was overly ambitious.

> a consumer electronics company that wants to enter the automotive industry.

I'd argue electric cars paired with automation are as near consumer electronics as they are to the automotive industry. Shedding the engine, transmission, steering column, and pretty much all mechanical systems bar the electric motors and braking systems, why couldn't they design it in California and outsource manufacturing to Hon Hai/Foxconn and their partners the way they do with their phones?

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

#143

Post by dmix »

colordrops wrote: post #126
tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“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 like a lot of bike-shedding.

Sounds a lot like a company that wanted to build a new house of the future but found out they prefer redesigning the light fixtures, faucets, etc rather than the house itself. Aka the general UX details rather that would be ideal in a modern house rather than the house itself.

Apple probably would never have developed the smartphone first but they did a hell of a good job at getting all the details right with the iPhone once the bigger picture was worked out by other companies - and general technical progress.

I'd imagine the same thing for the future AI interface. I'd want my AI front-end to be developed by Apple but my pedestrian detection algorithm developed by Google, and my car designed by BMW.

The most important thing for talented people (and by proxy organizations) to figure is what they are best at contributing to the world and focusing on that. Instead of trying to do everything.

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

#144

Post by 1_2__4 »

Eridrus wrote: post #118
1_2__4 wrote: post #113

Can the "mass production self driving cars are just a couple of years away" meme finally die yet? Are we ready to admit that maybe this is a harder thing to invent than we've been trying to make ourselves believe?

What about this article makes you think this? Do you have some insight that all the major automakers are missing when they say they expect to have autonomous cars on the road in the next 5 years?

Yeah, they've been saying that for the past five years.

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

#145

Post by function_seven »

hallmark wrote: post #136
colechristensen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they were biting off way more than they could chew. If Apple partnered with an existing car company to apply their design principles on top of an existing car platform (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Mini_platform ) they could see a lot of success if they weren't too ambitious. They wouldn't win if they tried to reinvent the wheel because there would be far too big of a chance of either taking 10…

We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. Imagine if they had just partnered with existing phone manufacturers rather than trying to build a magic touch slate. Wait, we do know what would have happened - the Motorola ROKR, which everyone should be forgiven for forgetting.

I don’t forgive you for reminding me of that hobbled abomination.

Though I guess it serves as an example of unchecked carrier power. Something to point to for today’s net neutrality arguments?

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

#146

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

colechristensen wrote: post #68
tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“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…

Seems like they were biting off way more than they could chew. If Apple partnered with an existing car company to apply their design principles on top of an existing car platform (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Mini_platform ) they could see a lot of success if they weren't too ambitious. They wouldn't win if they tried to reinvent the wheel because there would be far too big of a chance of either taking 10…

> Seems like they were biting off way more than they could chew.

They are building a patent portfolio that will be valuable over the next 20 years. No way will Apple enter a completely new market outside of consumer electronics.

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

#147

Post by EddieRingle »

tambourine_man wrote: post #36

“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…

I remember reading about Goodyear releasing a "spherical wheel" concept in early 2016: http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a19747/goodyear-eagle-3...

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

#148

Post by greggman »

hallmark wrote: post #136
colechristensen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like they were biting off way more than they could chew. If Apple partnered with an existing car company to apply their design principles on top of an existing car platform (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Mini_platform ) they could see a lot of success if they weren't too ambitious. They wouldn't win if they tried to reinvent the wheel because there would be far too big of a chance of either taking 10…

We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. Imagine if they had just partnered with existing phone manufacturers rather than trying to build a magic touch slate. Wait, we do know what would have happened - the Motorola ROKR, which everyone should be forgiven for forgetting.

there is a 20+ year history of PDAs before the iPhone. For all intents and purposes my 1998 Windows CE Casio PDA looks and acts like a first gen iPhone. It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons of apps and general works very analogous to the iPhone. Apple did an amazing job of polishing the PDA but they made an incremental jump being at the right place at the right time with affordable cellular data and capacitive touch and an amazingly well designed ui

it sounds like they we're doing much more with their car efforts

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

#149

Post by plicense »

ctdonath wrote: post #58
plicense wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely wouldn't call AWS, Echo from Amazon occasional. I think companies come in all shapes and sizes - some focus 90% on their core, some try to spend more time and diverge out to other business segments. Its upto Apple to figure out what to do and what would make it successful.

AWS is an offshoot of building the massive system needed to process the "we sell absolutely everything" goal. Methinks they just got so good at it, cloud services just kinda took on a life of its own and grew from there - but still feeds the retailing monster. Echo is a consequence of exploring digital appliances as marketing tools. If you're going to build a device which can voice-interface someone ordering 6 bottle…

I worked at Amazon for a while and the point to note is that the Fire phone, despite being a public failure, led to a lot of things at Amazon. For ex: 1. The computer vision and machine learning stuff behind the 8 cameras on the Fire phone has been repacked and reused at multiple places. There's also a object recognition service in AWS if I remember correctly. 2. The FireOS, which powered the Fire phone, is being used on all Kindles except the older e-ink Kindles.

While the hardware division was indeed shut down, Amazon did manage to salvage as much as they can.

The cloud service didn't take a life on its own - in the very early days there was just EC2 and S3, nothing else. It took a lot of focused investment, commitment and trust from the management to give the AWS experiment more time so that it could succeed and eventually it did.

Fire phone was one of Amazon's many experiments. It failed sure, but hey you miss 100% of the changes you don't take.

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

#150

Post by semi-extrinsic »

icanhackit wrote: post #142
na85 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A consumer electronics company changing market segments is different than a consumer electronics company that wants to enter the automotive industry. Apple was overly ambitious.

> a consumer electronics company that wants to enter the automotive industry. I'd argue electric cars paired with automation are as near consumer electronics as they are to the automotive industry. Shedding the engine, transmission, steering column, and pretty much all mechanical systems bar the electric motors and braking systems, why couldn't they design it in California and outsource manufacturing to Hon Hai/Foxco…

> pretty much all mechanical systems bar the electric motors and braking systems

... and the shocks and dampers and steering and servos and diffs and transfer boxes and electronic stability systems and dozens of sensors regularly exposed to harsh conditions and lights and crumple zones and doors and windows and air bags and seat belts and seats and air conditioning and ...

Elon Musk said something very true about the myriad of components and OEMs Tesla use - that having 99.9% of the parts on a car available and working, is a lot like having 0% of the parts.

Post reply on HN