351–360 of 407 posts
I don't get why Apple's user experience keeps being repeated as "second to none". It really depends on what you are doing and used to. I personally find Android easier to use than iOS, but maybe I would feel differently if I haven't been using it for a while.
Apple always had anti-consumer rules for their products... not sure why it finally took off.
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As if Apple is just a tiny little startup looking for VC funds to get into the automotive industry and couldn't possibly compete with Ford. >And for what? Control over the entire driving experience. Just like they are obsessed with controlling the experience of a phone or a tablet and refuse to relegate aspects to partners. >improving them isn't some insurmountable challenge for existing manufacturers You say this bu…
> Control over the entire driving experience. Impossible. The driving experience is also controlled by other road users and traffic laws, for example. > To note, I'm not convinced the Apple Car will happen, but I'm frankly confused by people with the perspective that they have no leverage and nothing to offer here. The Apple Watch looks sexless. Most people don't want a car like that.
All I hear is people complaining about how all cars today look exactly the same, so it doesn't seem to be a huge impediment.
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> Even in 2022, most manufacturer haven't still figured out how to do firmware update without using USB drives. This... makes sense to me? Physical access and automotive service go hand-in-hand. Over-the-air presents update hell and security issues.
Why does it not present hell in any other use case, such as computers, phones and games consoles, or actual cars on sale today? Why aren't Tesla or Rivian owners collectively going crazy - there are over 1 million Teslas receiving updates approximately every two weeks? These arguments do not appear to be borne by any evidence in reality. It's not like physical car repair places have some amazing flawless track record…
It absolutely causes problems on computers and phones. Windows updates are famous for interrupting/losing work at this point. MacOS upgrades are less aggressive but far more likely to break formerly functional software (and stomp custom configs). Phone security is always an issue if not an outright disaster in dozens of ways. Look up the Qualcomm / MediaTek audio decoder issues from just this year.
Somebody can spy on you and steal sensitive data w/ access to your computer or phone. What can they do with a car?
Have you read the Wired article from 2015 about hackers remotely killing a jeep on the highway?
Some levels of computer security rely on avoiding connecting to public networks. Or any network.
> Why aren't Tesla or Rivian owners collectively going crazy
Just last year there were over the air updates on Teslas where owners reported vehicles stopping without warning. They fixed that promptly with another emergency OTA update, but not exactly a shining example.
Just last month someone I know told me that the performance profile of his Tesla was weird since a recent update.
These are the realities. There's a ton of evidence.
A full Apple Car has always seemed unrealistic to me. Cars are a fundamentally different industry then consumer electronics and software. Apple would be starting from scratch, and facing a lot of entrenched competition with huge budgets and infrastructure. And for what? What could Apple do that GM, Toyota, or Tesla couldn't? Maybe a better UX for the dashboard. And while many car UXs are absolutely terrible, improvin…
The biggest reason that cars have horrible UX is that consumers don't care about it. No one is buying one for how good the speedometer looks. Give me a good performance and MPG. Make the components last long and be serviceable. Make it look good on the outside. Put advanced safety features. Perform well in crash tests. A hundred more of these and maybe the car will be worth buying. People here are delusional when the…
But comparing the UX of two cars' built-in systems when you're test-driving them for 15 minutes is hard, and reviews usually gloss over it, maybe mentioning how laggy it is or isn't and what whiz-bang new feature it has that nobody is going to use.
Unless you're Apple, it's hard to sell UX. But Apple is, well, Apple!
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Why does it not present hell in any other use case, such as computers, phones and games consoles, or actual cars on sale today? Why aren't Tesla or Rivian owners collectively going crazy - there are over 1 million Teslas receiving updates approximately every two weeks? These arguments do not appear to be borne by any evidence in reality. It's not like physical car repair places have some amazing flawless track record…
> Why does it not present hell in any other use case, such as computers, phones It absolutely causes problems on computers and phones. Windows updates are famous for interrupting/losing work at this point. MacOS upgrades are less aggressive but far more likely to break formerly functional software (and stomp custom configs). Phone security is always an issue if not an outright disaster in dozens of ways. Look up the…
One simply can't ignore the fact that today, including outside my own home, millions of cars update software just fine every few weeks, without issue. The number of phones or computers managing it is in the billions.
So I've always wondered if Apple actually building a 'car' was ever really the goal. It seems like a skunkworks where they try crazy things and then incorporate into Carplay. Future seems to be ever expanding Carplay support. I use it and probably would not buy another car that did not have it integrated. I imagine car manufacturers are somewhat tired of always building HUDs and in vehicle control systems. So gradual…
They probably have a few plans like that.
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I understand where the automakers are coming from and agree that it'll take a while for this to become mainstream because of this. But I can help but laugh a little at this attitude from carmakers. Modern cars have almost all become the poster child for "bad ui" with their addition of touchscreens that almost universally look dated and run poorly.
> Modern cars have almost all become the poster child for "bad ui" with their addition of touchscreens that almost universally look dated and run poorly. The dashboard dials have little left to be optimized. This is separate from the issue of media controls in the centre console. Given occasional hiccups with CarPlay itself, intermittent dropouts or UI lag because of a flaky cable or an older phone running the last s…
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I think this is a fair take, and I've had similar thoughts too. However, one thing computer industry people don't seem to get is how much the idea of Apple owning the "dials" on the instrument cluster as shown in the keynote this year will likely go down like a cup of cold sick at most European auto makers. In many cases the designs or colors used in the dial faces have decades of brand history behind them. Regardles…
I'm willing to bet that Apple will lay down some cash to get car manufacturers on board if they think it will increase lock-in for iOS (and therefore the iPhone and other devices) by a certain margin. Google I'm sure has its own incentives to do this. Too early to tell if this will be the case or not.
The car makers usually defined the functions in their car and how to split that to the different computers (plus quite a few of this is fixed to specific computers, anyway). They also defined the data going back and forth between these, at least in part. Everything else was defined and done by the suppliers.
This entire approach was upended by increasingly powerful embedded hardware and possibilities resulting from it, which rendered the entire software stacks in the cars so complex, the car makers had to seize control over this again. Someone has to define the larger scale software architecture in a vehicle etc.
Combine that with that juicy lock-in scenario (I mean the big idea is to have cars connected all the time, like your phone), and you can bet on the fact that the car makers are very well aware of the possibilities which come with that (think of all the data which comes with that). And they are not exactly willing to just yield to the likes of Google or Apple because of it, i.e. we are talking really big money here.
How all this will play out in the longer run, lets see. Car makers sit on a lot of cash, so this will be a fight which will be going for a while.
I think people focus too much on the actual car in this speculation. What about the service? Apple is really, really good at finding industries full of bullshit (computers in the 80's, mobile phones in the early 2000's) and saying, "okay, here's a slightly better looking product, with fewer features, and no more bullshit." The vehicle market is full of bullshit. Tesla took the same tactic and has knocked it down cons…
It's amazing to me how short-sighted many views on Apple Car are. Service is key. Apple won't be following the model of the existing car makers. They WILL NOT sell cars direct to consumer. That's the key insight. They will not have showrooms, sales teams, or public service centers. You won't buy their cars directly at all. Instead, they are going for the end goal: Fully autonomous electric vehicles on-demand. This is…
Apple doesn't get into low margin businesses. They get into an adjacent business. A prime example is TVs. There is no Apple TV set. There is AppleTV, a high margin add on for any TV with HDMI that makes it "just work". They had the chance to buy a cellular carrier, but chose not to, because it's low margin. Instead they make a phone that works on any carrier. Cars are a low margin business. But a car add-on could be…
Which begs the question why there is no Apple gaming console, an Apple TV (as in an actual TV). Instead what we got was a rather underwhelming Apple TV thing that isn't very good as a gaming console and more of a chrome cast substitute aimed at people who want to experience a very watered down Apple experience on their non Apple TV. And we got the streaming service which so far isn't making too much of a dent in Netflix.
What's weird is that they've had a great chip for many years that is perfectly capable of running lots of games. A lot of their mobile apps are in fact games and they run great on IOS. And the M1/M2 chips are pretty decent at running GPU accelerated software as well. But what they did not do was open up the platform to games. They have a few game ports running on mac OS and the Apple TV is technically an IOS device and even has some games. But it's so crippled that that is very much a side show of a side show. The Apple TV itself is of course a side show and playing games on it is very much an afterthought; that's not what it's for.
Cars are much worse for Apple. They could do one on paper but they'd have to partner with someone on all the car bits, which is uncomfortable for Apple (it means they don't control the platform) because they don't have a lot of in house experience building cars. And there are a lot of new companies focusing on making great cars right now (Tesla famously being labeled the Apple of cars, for example). And, car ventures are very capital intensive. You'd need many billions of investment to produce even a small number of cars. Tens/hundreds of billions to scale up; like Tesla has done. That makes it a very risky business.
So, they did Apple Car play instead, which seems the closest Apple will get to the automotive experience and it's similar to the Apple TV in the sense that it's a watered down experience that only makes sense for existing Apple users. It expands their reach a little and it brings in some revenue. But it's not an Apple Car.