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

221–230 of 434 posts

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

#221

Post by suprfnk »

hueving wrote: post #192
froo wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given there are auto manufacturers[1] that already exist with self driving cars, I'm going to go ahead and say its not a meme and more just a technology in the process of being fully realised. Some times, things just take time. Especially when you're trying to create machines capable of not killing the general public. [1] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

Tesla's are not self-driving cars in the sense of revolutionizing any driving. You still have to pay attention and be ready to take over all of the time. That means you can't sleep, read emails, etc. on your commute. It's a fancy lane assist that reduces mundane movements you have to make and it improves safety, but it's not resulting in super cheap automated taxis or overnight road trips.

This just depends on what you classify as 'self-driving'.

https://www.sae.org/news/3544/

Ofcourse, the lower levels of automation will be reached first.

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

#222

Post by simonh »

josteink wrote: post #162
hallmark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re -invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market. They took something which existed and was awkward to use, and re-did the UI layer of the whole thing. They refined something else which was already proven. They didn't invent something original from…

>When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing...

That's what it looks like from the outside, but listening to interviews with current and former Apple people that's not at all how it looked from the inside.

When they initially developed the OSX derived core OS, System architecture and UI libraries they weren't thinking about phones at all. It was intended to be a tablet computer OS. It's only fairly late on in development that Jobs pivoted the team to adapt the technology to a phone form factor and tacked on a phone app and cellular radio. It was not at all developed from the starting point of looking at existing phones and going from there. Things like touch swipe to scroll and pinch to zoom were taken straight from contemporary touch UI research, not Palm or any other existing commercial products.

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

#223

Post by xgbi »

ars wrote: post #176
nradov wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spherical wheels are such a stupid, dangerous idea. The contact patch on regular tires is already tiny. Make them spherical and the contact patch becomes even smaller, which will cause them to lose traction and spin out in any rapid maneuver (like to avoid a collision).

Only if you massively increase the PSI so that the tire stays spherical. If you keep the PSI at normal levels the contact patch will be exactly the same size as it is now, and the tire will deform on the bottom. So just design it to be extra flexible.

Dropping the pressure in the tire will lead to (way) higher risk of tearing of the tire fabric. You should never drive with a deflated tire, it multiplies the risk of tire failure like crazy.

So no, deflated spherical wheels is not a good idea :/

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

#224

Post by rimliu »

greggman wrote: post #148
hallmark wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

   > capacitive touch
Without this I do not thing anything qualifies as "acts like first gen iPhone".

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

#226

Post by fastelephant »

"But __our_ai_project_here__ ran into trouble, said the five people familiar with it, dogged by its size and by the lack of a clearly defined vision of what __our_company_here__ wanted in a __our_ai_product_here__. Team members complained of shifting priorities and arbitrary or unrealistic deadlines."

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

#228

Post by dilemma »

IBM wrote: post #181
dilemma wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like he didn't confirm anything at all.

>“Shelved” is an accurate word, but I think many people have interpreted it as meaning that Apple has given up on designing its own vehicles. My understanding is that it’s more like “Let’s get the autonomous shit down first, and worry about designing vehicles to put it in after that.” Eat the steak one bite at a time rather than all at once.

1. He doesn't speak for Apple so can't confirm anything. 2. "I think". 3. '"Shelved"' is an accurate word..'

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

#229

Post by colordrops »

pertymcpert wrote: post #216
colordrops wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just a form of bike-shedding?

How is that bike shedding?

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding

"Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively"

For Apple's task of building a automated car, industrial design is an "unimportant but easy-to-grasp" issue since Apple's expertise is design. They should have focused on the harder core problem of a car that can drive itself.

In fact this seems almost like an archetypical example of bikeshedding.

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

#230

Post by dragontamer »

robertlagrant wrote: post #206
enjo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002. That doesn't take away from what Apple did. They really took all of the best ideas (and in many cases hired the engineers who made them in the first place) and put them into one incredibly tight and delightful package. Just about every individual feature can be traced to Palm, Symbian, or a host of other systems... bu…

The only new thing was a capacitive touchscreen, which allowed more responsiveness to a touch input. It just came along at the right time.

Capacitive screens were less responsive than resistive screens.

The difference was that you used your physical finger instead of a stylus. Personally speaking, I preferred resistive screens for their responsiveness and accuracy.

The capacitive screen was needed for "pinch to zoom" and other gestures of the modern era. The delay in the UI compared to resistive screens (as well as the higher-CPU time required for processing) turned out to be a smaller deal than multi-touch technology.

Post reply on HN