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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

41–50 of 992 posts

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#41
post #5

This is a smart move. Apple seems so far behind in generative AI it's making Google look innovative.

But Google has Waymo. Either way, Apple will be far behind.

Yeah, but I don't think Google was planning on being an auto manufacturer. Isn't Google's plan to partner with existing manufacturers?

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#43
post #33

It's insane how many companies went down the "full self driving by 2020" rabbit hole.

I think it makes sense if consider the fact it “solves an actual problem”, would have a massive adoption rate and has a massive market, and the potential value of developing a product like that is easily in the 100 Billions if not Trillions

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#45

Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especia…

> What surprises me is that it took this long to kill the product Maybe I'm misremembering, but I seem to recall that it was killed once before?

It's been killed, restarted, scaled down, scaled up about every 9 months for the past 10 years.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple seems so far behind in generative AI Apple is a best-in-class second mover. With the clusterfuck that has been generative AI (from OpenAI’s corporate drama to Google renaming and reörganizing their products every fifteen minutes) this seems prescient, with the only savvy player so far being Microsoft.

And so we'll be back to Apple vs Microsoft? Nostalgia from the aughts.

> we'll be back to Apple vs Microsoft?

Possibly. On the consumer side, they’re in their own niches. What will get interesting is how Apple lets developers hook into the on-device AI, or one that’s running on its own metal.

Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

#50
post #7

I wonder if this is connected to the Vision Pro release. That’s another giant hardware fishing project that failed to meet the “vision” of an all-day wearable iPhone. Perhaps it became obvious that the car was in even murkier waters. And to dump some of the employees on image and text generators off whatever self driving computer vision work they were presumably doing before? Interesting choice.

Vision Pro was never designed to replace the iPhone from day one.

People seem to have this revisionist history where every Apple product is an instant hit. But the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch etc all took years to reach that product-market-fit stage.

All Apple has done is establish a baseline for what they want the category to be.

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