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Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

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

#251

Post by wut42 »

jacquesm wrote: post #240
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…

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

>When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-focus.

Goodyear released spherical wheels. It's not that stupid at all to reinvent the wheel, sometimes: https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-goodyear-unveils-the-futu...

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

#252

Post by collyw »

nradov wrote: post #157
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…

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).

Reminds me of this bike concept going around FB a while back.

http://www.designlaunches.com/transport/ibike_the_apple_bike...

It looks kind of cool, but a bike without spokes is a really bad idea.

Spokes give very high strength to weight ration for wheels. And having cog teeth close to the wheels is guaranteed to get clogged with crap. But it looks kind of "cool" to those who don't know any better.

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

#253

Post by danmaz74 »

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.

All technologies used in the iPhone were proven - what Apple did right is to combine them in a much better way than the previous iterations.

With self driving cars, it's not about usability/utility, it's still about having the basic tech work.

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

#255

Post by jacquesm »

wut42 wrote: post #251
jacquesm wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession. Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The fir…

>When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-focus. Goodyear released spherical wheels. It's not that stupid at all to reinvent the wheel, sometimes: https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-goodyear-unveils-the-futu...

You're missing my point. It may not be stupid to reinvent the wheel at all. But that's not a project that you should mix with inventing a self driving car unless you conclude that spherical wheels are the only way a self driving car will ever become a reality.

Similar to how every software application project could theoretically result in a new database, a new operating system and if you really want to go all out a new CPU it is much more efficient to concentrate on your application if you actually want to see it go to market.

> Goodyear released spherical wheels.

No, they didn't, that's just some fancy CG stuff, not an actual product.

Also, it just so happens that Good Year is in the wheels-and-tires business so for them such research makes good sense, and of course it is a theory of a concept, not an actual proof of concept much less something that they are ready to roll out. It's more like serious science fiction even than actual science, it's how things maybe could work, not how they actually work.

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

#256

Post by moduspwnens14 »

plicense wrote: post #149
ctdonath wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

> The cloud service didn't take a life on its own - in the very early days there was just EC2 and S3, nothing else

Just a minor point of correction: Actually SQS was first.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-blog-the-first-five-yea...

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

#257

Post by lagadu »

xgbi wrote: post #223
ars wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

He's not saying it should be completely deflated, it just shouldn't be at max pressure; you can control the amount of deformation with pressure.

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

#258

Post by LyTeo »

threeseed wrote: post #154
greggman wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For all intents and purposes my 1998 Windows CE Casio PDA looks and acts like a first gen iPhone I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari. Because that is what you are saying. I owned that PDA as well as the Treo 650 which was far better and the iPhone isn't an incremental jump. It was a complete revolution.

> I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari.

He argued against an assumption that apple reinvented smartphone. If you want to use this argument, you have to show that people think that Ferrari reinvented the car.

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

#259

Post by FussyZeus »

usrusr wrote: post #246
josteink wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They took something which existed and was awkward to use This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone. The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades. Everything unpleasant about cars is happening to the outside. Not just to pedestrians, cyclists and residents, but also…

> This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone.

I'm part of that (seemingly ever shrinking) demographic that does indeed love cars; I love their shapes and their looks, the roar of an engine (or the thrust of an electric, both hit me in different places), but even I have to admit that people like me are going away. The vast majority of people want a way to get from point A to point B relatively quickly in some measure of comfort; they don't give a shit how cheaply the car is built, as long as it comes with a warranty and the cabin is spill proof, and they don't care how ugly or bland the outside is as long as it keeps the rain out. There's not nearly the same appreciation for cars and driving as their once was, which is why I firmly believe a lot of people these days can't drive very well nor take decent care of their cars; they don't care. Driving is a means to an end, whereas to me, driving is half the fun of doing anything.

> The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades.

I'd say the enjoyable car and the enjoyable smartphone (iPhone, yes I know, my opinion) have about the same market share these days. :)

I don't mean to say Apple was on to something: I think it was doomed from the start for many of the reasons listed here. I just think you're misreading the market is all. That being said, I do hope the self driving revolution leaves room for enthusiasts who truly love putting the hammer down and seeing what our machines can do; I'm willing to pay more for manual mode or even a much higher fee to continue to have a license to operate; I understand what being put into an enthusiast market means and I'm willing to put up the cash.

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

#260

Post by ralfd »

enjo wrote: post #203
2bitencryption wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when I was watching the keynote live, and Jobs swiped his finger to scroll, I audibly gasped.

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…

>> when I was watching the keynote live, and Jobs swiped his finger to scroll, I audibly gasped.

> Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002.

I don't know how good Palm OS was at that time, but the contrast between the iPhone and the rest of the industry was blinding 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMzg70MIZCo

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