261–270 of 434 posts
Transportation is becoming a service rather than a product. There is no room for a Veblen good in a market of non-owners.
In the future perhaps, not just now https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/02/ferrari-race-secon... Though I expect in the future some people will still want fancy cars
“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…
On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.
“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…
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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.
If they scale them down even more than they already have, we'll end up with a horse drawn buggy. Hey, it's self driving!
> Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language, or the industry standard, C++. Wow. Few things guarantee success like starting off a project with a good old-fashioned language…
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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…
Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up. Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus on the main problem: safely getting around. Nothing wrong with this I think. On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.
the iPod was not the first music player, the iPhone not the first smartphone. Re-engineering those was the only way to get them to market in a way that might drive mass adoption.
As for the spherical wheels, yes, however such a development is totally tangential (pun intended) to self driving cars.
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>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 n…
That's only true if the team that reinvents the wheels and the team that does the self-driving tech is the same, and you're stealing members from the latter to the former.
Obviously those are not the same teams, nor they need to be.
And when you get out with your self-driving car, as 3-4 companies will do at more or less the same time or within a few years of each other, having other great new innovations on top of that will give you an edge.
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> 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…
Yup, exactly this. They have no idea how to make a self driving car so wasted time on other things hoping someone will solve the actual hard part. It's pretty common when given an impossible project, and you need to show something .
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> 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…
There is no such thing as a UI layer. UI and function are inextricably linked. For example, see iPhone's voicemail. Or the touch screen. Or the app store. None of those things could have been executed by UI teams at any other device manufacturer at the time.