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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

#151

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jcgrillo wrote: post #88
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, it looked to me like they were going for the supercar market (>$250k price tag, low volume) which (I guess naively) seemed pretty sensible..

It's in opposition to the brand. Apple products range from affordable to aspirational. But every line is carefully segmented so there's a somewhat affordable option - certainly not cheap, but relatively accessible.

And all mass-produced in incredible numbers.

A low volume $250k car would be pure luxury for the sake of it. That's not Apple's market.

Apple's market would be a $50k Tesla killer with far better styling and build quality and some attempt at a game-changing killer feature, all bundled with cross-marketing for other walled-garden products.

I'm not surprised that turned out to be impossible - for now.

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

#153

Post by Tostino »

mrcarruthers wrote: post #126
closewith wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.

You'd think so... GM has stated that they're doing away with CarPlay and Android auto in favour of their own thing, which will most likely suck on large ways. Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.

Which rules out GM for me as an option for my next vehicle. Maybe they can make up the lost sales by data mining the rest of their customers.

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

#154

Post by ldjkfkdsjnv »

MisterPea wrote: post #10

Cook's best trait is being reactive very well. What he lacks in the Jobs "magic", he has in the ability to react to industry incredibly well and do better than most. I have little doubt Apple is going to be a major player in AI, especially in the non-Nvidia hardware space after playing around with MLX

Cook just optimized Jobs vision. He hasnt done anything special

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

#155

Post by jcgrillo »

cududa wrote: post #102
jcgrillo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but having tried it I can't figure out what they're talking about. Seems like more NFT-esque nonsense.

That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.

Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace?

EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.

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

#156

Post by edfletcher_t137 »

> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea.

It sounds like this means the official end of SPG, the group that Tony Fadell took over to eventually build the iPod (among other things). A storied history, to say the least.

RIP SPG.

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

#157

Post by jcfrei »

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…

Don't have a source ready but if I remember correctly they never planned to build the car themselves. There are plenty of contract manufacturers out there that build for a variety of brands (Magna Steyr in Austria is a typical example). Then Apple adds it's custom electronics and AI driving assistants and voila you got an iCar.

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

#158

Post by DinaCoder99 »

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…

I just don't see how they can make any more money with "generative ai" than a useful tool that actually can get me around. Seems like chasing after fool's gold.

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

#159

Post by DinaCoder99 »

dbbk wrote: post #114
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…

Apple was never going to release a product that would inevitably kill lots of people. Absolute non-starter.

Was the car supposed to have self-driving or something?

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

#160

Post by ARandumGuy »

iaseiadit wrote: post #81
yreg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While some may have doubted the iPhone, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhones in the year it launched, and cell phones had already been established as an enormous and growing market. VR seems very different from that. Most people simply don’t want what companies are trying to sell them, and I think multiple major technical breakthroughs would be necessary to change that.

While there were absolutely people who thought the iPhone would fail, the idea that most people were skeptical about the iPhone is simply ahistorical. The iPhone had a huge amount of hype from the moment it was announced, and it was pretty clear from the outset that this was the direction cell phones were headed.

The Vision Pro just doesn't have that. Apple was able to clearly articulate what the iPhone allowed you to do that you couldn't do before. But the use cases presented for the Vision Pro just are a lot more niche, and a lot less compelling. Some people will certainly find uses for it, but right now the Vision Pro feels like a solution in search of a problem.

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