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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

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

#71

Post by wombat-man »

yreg wrote: post #28
dougmwne wrote: 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.

AVP has not failed yet. Saying so today would be akin to stating that the iPhone failed in the fall of 2007. Some did, Steve Ballmer laughed his butt off, convinced that no one sane will ever buy a $500 phone.

Yeah but didn't the first iPhone sell pretty well? I tried a demo of AVP in NYC the week after release. The staff casually mentioned that they had units in stock if I'd like one.

I think apple is having a difficult time selling these things. I had a harder time getting a hold of an iPad pro over a month after launch.

Maybe later versions will catch on though.

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

#72

Post by Cyberdog »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #37
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

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.

And '90s. And '80s.

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

#74

Post by MBCook »

madeofpalk wrote: post #45
UncleOxidant wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah based on rumors they were on like version 12 of the program.

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

#75

Post by ponector »

MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

From the other side, phone and home electronics producer Xiaomi invested few billions into car business and now is producing car similar to Porsche.

Why you think Apple can't do the same if focused?

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

dougmwne wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by internetter »

checker659 wrote: post #69
gnicholas wrote: post #13

I really hope Apple continues its privacy-first ethos and offers an on-device LLM. It would also be great if they could use Handoff-like technology to let my (almost always nearby, almost always plugged-in) laptop do the thinking, instead of depleting the battery of my phone. I'd surely buy a bunch of HomePod minis if I could tie them into a local LLM.

I wish they'd put a huge FPGA on every device.

For all Apple's flaws, I trust that they could disrupt the AI industry once they enter it. Their decisions are all highly calculated, and they employee vast swaths of researchers. I would not be surprised if they entered the market with a well functioning local LLM

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

#79

Post by fullshark »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

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…

The only time it made sense to me was the idea they had some proprietary or trade secret 10x battery efficiency breakthrough from their work on computers and had a massive opportunity to utilize it in electric car space. Otherwise struck me as as a "tesla is doing this so we should too" move.

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

#80

Post by open_ »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #65
filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

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…

If you look at the market cap of Ferrari, it's not crazy why Apple was considering this. They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%). You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure. I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.

Or they could launch some much lower hanging fruit and wait for stock price to appreciate by that much or more. A car company, no matter how small, is very, very hard.
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