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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

#421

Post by lmm »

freehunter wrote: post #284
lmm wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When millions of Americans live in rural or suburban areas, what do you think is easier? Extending rail and bus routes to within walking distance of every house, or convincing everyone to move to a city? The answer is neither, and that's why cars exist. My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars, no convincing needed. > Here's one that isn't a trick question: is it more efficient to buil…

>My generation is moving into the cities where we can live without cars If you think that's true for every Millennial across the country, you're crazy. >that's a "don't do that then" problem. Oh, okay. Just don't do that. Gotcha. Pretty simple. Just don't have a job, just don't go to work, I'm sure I can afford to move to Manhattan after I quit my factory job in Springfield IL because it was too far off the rail line…

> If you think that's true for every Millennial across the country, you're crazy.

Of course it's not everyone, but it's the overall trend.

> Just don't have a job, just don't go to work, I'm sure I can afford to move to Manhattan after I quit my factory job in Springfield IL because it was too far off the rail line.

Manhattan is expensive because there's only one of it. If the jobs build around the rail lines, you can save a load of money by not needing a car, and split the difference with your employer. And sure, not every job will be able to do this - factories need space. But that's a small portion of our economy at this point, and getting smaller all the time.

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

#422

Post by dkonofalski »

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…

I remember when people went crazy trying to nitpick the probability of spherical "wheels" when "I, Robot" came out and Audi had designed a car with exactly the type of system being mentioned. The general consensus, and even Audi agreed, was that spherical wheels would really only work "in the future" when roads weren't as gritty and mechanical as they are now. They would really only work when roads were smooth and made of some yet-to-be-invented material that wouldn't crack or break in pieces under regular use.

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

#423

Post by dkonofalski »

rothbardrand wrote: post #405
jacquesm wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like you don’t get Apple or their history of product development. 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 comp…

> They are improved user interfaces over things that already existed. This is the lie every Apple hater tells themselves to reconcile their hate with the fact that Apple keeps inventing things never before seen.

They also tend to qualify it as "refinement" instead of "invention" because their definition of "innovation" can't include Apple for some dogmatic reason.

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

#424

Post by dkonofalski »

coldtea wrote: post #375
ars wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure why you're arguing with the person that keeps responding to you. I think you've clearly made the point that Apple feels like they don't need to work off of existing design or technology methodologies and yet this person seems to think that Apple's entire predicted failure is that they're not working off of existing processes and technologies. He seems to be arguing a straw man of your argument rather than your actual argument and part of me feels like he's being willfully disingenuous in doing so. It's "Apple can't possibly do it different than everyone else because everyone else has only been able to do it in this one way" without any room for the possibility that the "best" (subjective, of course) solution may be one that doesn't exist yet because it requires the very paradigm shift you're referencing.

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

#425

Post by Turing_Machine »

aninhumer wrote: post #419
Turing_Machine wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 arou…

Evidence is against it. We have cabs (also Uber, Lyft, etc.) now, but most people outside dense urban cores still choose to own their own car.

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

#426

Post by dkonofalski »

ralfd wrote: post #260
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…

>> 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

That is seriously laughable how bad that is. The parent to your comment either doesn't remember what things were like prior to the iPhone or they're intentionally ignoring the differences.

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

#427

Post by dkonofalski »

danmaz74 wrote: post #253
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.

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.

That's like saying that the first mobile phone used technologies that were all proven and that the inventors just combined them in a much better way because radios and phones existed. The combination itself is exactly what made it an invention and a revolution. Nearly every technology right now that's a revolution (Uber, for example) is a revolution precisely because it did something that's never been done before by standing on the shoulders of what came before it. The difference is that the combination and or features gained from that combination allowed the invention to leap frog over what existed before it.

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

#428

Post by dkonofalski »

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).

What if the new car included a compressor that inflated/deflated the sphere as needed for traction control? I just made that up but that seems like it would make the idea a little less crazy.

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

#429

Post by SeeDave »

skgoa wrote: post #350
SeeDave wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is why I believe that comma.ai was so visionary, say whatever you want about George Hotz's personality. He truly _gets it_ that self-driving is the critical part, not…

comma was a scam. The car Hotz used for his "demonstration" already comes with the functionality he "demonstrated" from the factory. He just added wires and a joystick to his dashboard.

Out of curiosity... could you let me know how you came to this conclusion?

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

#430

Post by SeeDave »

pedroaraujo wrote: post #300
SeeDave wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is why I believe that comma.ai was so visionary, say whatever you want about George Hotz's personality. He truly _gets it_ that self-driving is the critical part, not…

"Visionary"? Hardly. His self driving technology was basically a big giant hack. He is a good hacker but calling him "visionary" is a bit of a stretch.

From my perspective, the vision was in truly understanding that the value-add is centered around "self-driving" more so than "cars."
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