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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

#411

Post by mcphage »

trapperkeeper74 wrote: post #393
mcphage wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That business is tettering on failure They sold over 4 million Macs this past quarter, so I don't know what you're going on about here.

Numbers today are all well and good, but goodwill and rate-of-change indicate future trends. People will tire of $3000 laptops with nonfunctional WiFi and Apple Authorized Service Centers voiding their AppleCare warranties.

> Numbers today are all well and good, but goodwill and rate-of-change indicate future trends

Well, they're down YoY, from 4.2 million to... 4.18 million. So in another 200 years, they'll have all disappeared.

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

#412

Post by valuearb »

millstone wrote: post #119
valuearb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a high margin, high ROE, low capital requirements business like Apple invest in a low margin, poor ROE, high capital requirements business like a car maker? Besides being a poor investment that would lock up lots of their capital, it would also create a ton of management distractions. If they are serious about building self-driving cars, they are probably making a huge mistake. Cars have been a poor busines…

My understanding is that it's one of the few markets left that can move the needle. The biggest markets are health care, finance, petroleum, consumer electronics, and automotive. PCs and phones are low-margin capital intensive businesses. Apple seems pretty good at commanding high margins in such industries. As for why Apple doesn't license their tech, well, that's not how Apple operates, because then they lose contr…

Apple has an easy way to move the needle, return it's profits to shareholders as dividends. They can produce better returns that way then dumping it into lesser businesses.

Apple has made great margins in PCs and Phones because it refused to use commodity operating systems. It's not clear that there is any similar advantage in cars. Everyone will be making autonomous cars, the markets will be highly competitive and they'll still require massive capital investments to make. It's unlikely customers will pay up much for a slightly better autonomous system.

If Apple wanted to go into cars, they should buy Porshe or Ferrari. They actually have brands that make their products difficult or impossible to copy well. Porsche in particular sells cares that are super highly engineered in every area, Apple can't create a Porsche like car business by selling an autonomous car by doing autonomous great, but ride, handling, acceleration, etc just acceptably

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

#413

Post by dang »

freehunter wrote: post #62

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…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15077631 and marked it off-topic because it turned into a flamewar. Please read the HN guidelines and follow them when commenting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#414

Post by dang »

freehunter wrote: post #277
Apocryphon wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Urban renewal is a policy which exists, yes.

Yeah that Empire State Building is almost 90 years old, time to tear it down and build a new one closer to the streetcar line. Jesus you are absolutely insane.

This kind of name-calling will get you banned here, so please just don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#415

Post by 72deluxe »

intoverflow2 wrote: post #301
72deluxe wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be completely lost but what is "visual voicemail"? This is an odd term - almost as daft as "visual BASIC"

Instead of calling a number and listening to messages one by one you have an inbox and can play/delete them using a UI.

Well I've never had that on Android here in the UK. I still have to ring my EE voicemail and listen to messages one by one. Thanks for the info.

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

#416

Post by collyw »

r00fus wrote: post #153
function_seven wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Moto ROKR was a stalking horse to give Apple intel on how the carriers worked. 100 songs? It was designed to fail.

It was Apple that insisted on the limit.

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

#417

Post by Turing_Machine »

aninhumer wrote: post #380
Turing_Machine wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Efficient at what?" Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I replied to was using it. "but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion?" I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".

>being able to go where you want, any time you want And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys, and rely on more efficient public transport for everything else. > in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine This is not an inherent issue with public transport. I take the bus to work every day and it's never smelled of urine.

"And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys"

No.

You will have to call the taxi and wait for it to arrive, and (inevitably) you're going to have to wait a lot longer at peak times.

That is not the same as going any time you want.

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

#418

Post by aninhumer »

freehunter wrote: post #283
robertlagrant wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, pretty much all the things you're claiming people have said are egregiously uncharitable readings of their comments.

Someone suggested abolishing public transport might not be the best idea, and you seem to have interpreted that (and all subsequent defences of it) to mean we have to abolish cars instead. No one's suggesting that, they're just saying that we should use more public transport where it makes sense.

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

#419

Post by aninhumer »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #417
aninhumer wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>being able to go where you want, any time you want And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys, and rely on more efficient public transport for everything else. > in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine This is not an inherent issue with public transport. I take the bus to work every day and it's never smelled of urine.

"And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys" No. You will have to call the taxi and wait for it to arrive, and (inevitably) you're going to have to wait a lot longer at peak times. That is not the same as going any time you want.

Well okay. If you really feel that being able to take a trip to a less accessible location at a few seconds notice at peak times is vitally important to you, then you're still free to own your own self-driving car.

But I think most people would much rather wait a few minutes on those occasions and save their money.

(And FWIW, I think it could be fairly quick, since you don't have to pay a self-driving car to sit around in a small town in case someone needs it.)

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

#420

Post by krakensden »

60654 wrote: post #290
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…

Hah, yes. Glad to see others were weirded out by that too. It's so strange to see people seriously discussing how to redesign the trimmings, when nobody even has an existence proof that fully autonomous navigation _is even possible!_ And it's not like robotics research hasn't been working on this problem for half a century now. It's a hell of a hard problem that one can't just product-design their way out of.

I see the Waymo cars puttering around. The existence proof is there.
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