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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

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

#91
Tesla is already the Apple of cars. Designed in California. Capacitive touchscreen instead of buttons. Vertical integration. Minimalist hardware design. Focus on software. Over the air updates. Custom SoC.

When Apple did all this in phones it was unique. There was no Tesla of phones. But there is a Tesla of cars and it's tough to imagine what unique thing Apple could bring to the market.

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

#92
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.

Correct. All of those products were pretty crappy when they were first released and then got very good. In the case of the iPhone, I think it was like the third revision when it got good. The iPad comes to mind as one of their only somewhat recent products that was really good right from the start. That one still benefited from being more or less a giant iPhone and it was years before it really came into its own. For at least the past 25 years, their initial forays into a new category have been marked by potential that isn't realized for several more years. I think the Vision Pro will be fine.

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

#93
Disappointing to hear. It seems every car manufacturer has settled in to their niche, and they are now working to become software companies, adding a bunch of “smart” functionalities to their cars. I was very curious as to whether it was easier for an automotive company to get good at tech, or for a tech company to get good at automobiles. Perhaps this result is a good indicator.

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

#94
post #33

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

Now everyone's diving straight into the "full AGI by 2025" hole. Which, to be fair, would solve the "full self-driving" problem as a pure side-effect, I guess.

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

#95

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…

> requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.

I was going to say. If anyone knows how to quickly create and expand a network of dealerships and post-sales support, it's Apple. They literally wrote the book on this with computers and phones and all their accessories.

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

#96
Granted it's already been several years since Apple reportedly abandoned self-driving as a priority for its car project, but I wonder if this signals a larger shift.

A decade ago, the popular sentiment was that autonomous vehicles were going to completely reshape our built environment in the coming decade. And yet here we are in 2024, with the industry leader still only running limited trials in two markets, the next two woefully behind, and everyone else out of the market.

Perhaps AVs have entered the realm of fusion, something that may yet be transformative, but on a much longer time scale than initially thought.

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

#97

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.

I feel Microsoft's desperation to put LLM's into every product suggests mismanagement. Same as Microsoft's past efforts to Bing everything. Adobe seems to be the only one with an empowered product team that's consistently finding sensible and profitable uses for machine learning.

I agree. The only two examples I've seen of embedded AI that "works" is Bard in search results, and generative AI in Adobe's. Everything else feels tacked on.

Edit: And on my iPhone, the offline photo categorization and image OCR

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

#99
post #44

Does this mean Waymo and/or Cruise had given up and they're no longer a threat to Apple?

Cruise has given up, but Waymo is doubling down I don't see how either is/was a "threat to Apple" though, people aren't going to replace their iPhones with Waymo rides.
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