381–390 of 434 posts
How much energy does it take to move one train 500 miles? How much energy does it take to move 10 cars 25 miles each? That's your question. Why do people always frame public transport in the light of "everyone can just take a single train!"? It doesn't work like that. It never works like that. It's a ridiculous argument barely even worthy of a response. 500 people might take one train in LA or NYC, but how about Gree…
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> In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving). No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there. They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driv…
> No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there. They are not the same teams doing each, so there's no opportunity cost involved. And whether it might or might not actually "take decades", if Apple considered it would "take decades to solve" they wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. The idea was that we are cl…
It's completely backwards. You can kind of do it, but it's a huge waste of time and money.
Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something, anything.
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Instead of calling a number and listening to messages one by one you have an inbox and can play/delete them using a UI.
I think we've gotten so used to it we forget just how awful it used to be.
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> 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 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…
The degree to which globular wheels would complicate such a design is such that it would leave you being passed by your competitors right out of the gate, on top of that it would complicate all kinds of things such as certification and potentially reliability and safety as well as supply chain issues after delivery. Solving too much is a fantastic way to crash a project.
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>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 t…
Interesting what-if: would the iPod touch have been significantly less irrelevant in absence of the iPhone? Could the iPad have been a success without the iPhone paving the way for apps? I remember the last generations of high end feature phones as quite capable media consumption devices, who knows what could have come from that strain of development had they stayed in the limelight a few years longer.
Sure, without the iPhone they'd probably have sold a lot more, but it's not a very compelling counterfactual. Palm started off selling PDAs, but a smartphone is really just a PDA with a cellular radio and a phone app. By the time the iPhone came out standalone PDAs were already dead.
I don't think it would have made a lot of difference to the iPad. It is what it is. It might have had more of a 'wow' factor rather than the 'just a big iPhone' jibes, but even so it sold, and is still selling in very large numbers. Sure sales are down, but they're still selling about 40 million a year. That's more than Dell's annual PC sales and twice as many as Apple's Mac sales, it's also one sixth of global PC sales. So bear that mind when people say it's a declining business. It's slowly declining from spectacular success.
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> No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there. They are not the same teams doing each, so there's no opportunity cost involved. And whether it might or might not actually "take decades", if Apple considered it would "take decades to solve" they wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. The idea was that we are cl…
What you are suggesting is like designing how a hotel will look before you know where it will be or how big it will be. It's completely backwards. You can kind of do it, but it's a huge waste of time and money. Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something,…
Well, you know most things. You know you're making a car, you know it will have LIDAR, you know it will be self driving etc. You are free to (and if you want to win time, you pretty much got to) design the car, the interior, materials, displays, etc -- even the transmission, engine and wheels -- independently of the self-driving algorithms.
If and when those self-driving algorithms are ready, you don't then have to spend another 1 year to design the rest.
There's not any real dependency between them -- so much that you can even test your self driving algorithm in ANY random car as almost all companies do. It's not like being a self-driving car dictates the car form and the latter has to be designed around that property.
(That said, before even Google's car and the self-driving hype, a lot of rumors insisted on Apple merely making an electric iCar -- Tesla competitor, not some full self-driver type 5).
>Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something, anything.
I, for one, have no doubt that Apple got some top notch researchers in ML and driving car technology. I also have no doubt they got some top notch car guys (plain car). I also have no doubt that there's nothing to know about "how to make a self driving car" that the Apple team doesn't know (or any team for that matter), apart the ML/self-driving algorithm aspects. So there was nothing about the form of the car holding them back.
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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…
They definitely should have not wasted time with multitouch and just used a stylus and a physical keyboard for iPhone. Right? Any time someone says “no stylus” it’s time to refocus right? After all, that just isn’t how portable devices in 2002 already worked? Apple doesn’t care about incremental improvements when talking about a new product category. They look to leapfrog. Have you considered the benefit of spherical…
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What you are suggesting is like designing how a hotel will look before you know where it will be or how big it will be. It's completely backwards. You can kind of do it, but it's a huge waste of time and money. Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something,…
> What you are suggesting is like designing how a hotel will look before you know where it will be or how big it will be. Well, you know most things. You know you're making a car, you know it will have LIDAR, you know it will be self driving etc. You are free to (and if you want to win time, you pretty much got to) design the car, the interior, materials, displays, etc -- even the transmission, engine and wheels -- i…
So what's the plan? Design a car, then let the designs sit on a shelf for 10 years (or more)? In 10 years tastes will change, and the people who made the designs will no longer have them fresh in their mind - if they are even still employed by Apple.
How does that make any sense?
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It's really not. Calm down and don't pick up on one minor point and reply with a giant response. Obviously no one else thinks that cars are unnecessary.
No, it really is. So far I've seen people saying buildings older than "a few decades" should be torn down to move them closer to street car lines, people calling that "urban renewal", people saying that the problem solves itself because all young people are moving to cities as a rule, people saying self-driving cars will never work and every road should be replaced with street cars that lead to busses that lead to tr…
Do you think Apple is going to create a car for the 15% of the rural people?
This is why your limited market is irrelevant and worth exactly 0.
It's your responsibility to catch up with the world, not the world's responsibility to cater to you.
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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…
They definitely should have not wasted time with multitouch and just used a stylus and a physical keyboard for iPhone. Right? Any time someone says “no stylus” it’s time to refocus right? After all, that just isn’t how portable devices in 2002 already worked? Apple doesn’t care about incremental improvements when talking about a new product category. They look to leapfrog. Have you considered the benefit of spherical…
I get it just fine. They are improved user interfaces over things that already existed. Changing the main method of transfer of energy from the motor to the road in a vehicle is a fundamental change that has significant implications for everything else in the vehicle to the point of making it very unlikely that that vehicle will ever be completed.
People would not buy a car with spherical wheels for the 'cool factor' they would not buy it because it is untested technology with significant implications for the safety of the occupants and others on the road.
> Apple doesn’t care about incremental improvements when talking about a new product category.
Well, what is a leapfrog to you looks suspiciously like an incremental improvement to me. There were some phones that had a fair amount of resemblance to the iPhone before it launched and the iPod had a large number of predecessors as well. And without iPod no iPhone.
Arguably the iPhone could have been a success without multitouch, it's perfectly possible not to have multitouch and at the same time not to have stylus and not to have a keyboard.
As for the benefit of spherical wheels, yes, I can see some benefits, but I can also see significant drawbacks that are not easily engineered away.
A car is a device on an entirely different plane than a phone, the only time your life depends on your phone is when you're trying to call 911 after an accident, with a car you (and the people on the road around you) depend on your car from the moment you get into it until you disembark. That requires a more conservative kind of development.
Such as Tesla is showing, and which they occasionally get wrong, usually when they release stuff that isn't quite as reliable as it should be for mass deployment.