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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

#181

Post by gambiting »

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 way it could possibly work was always as an apple branded model under the umbrella of another manufacturer, with their support and dealership network. Think polestar being its own brand but using Volvo workshops for servicing and support, as well as using a lot of Volvo parts internally. I can imagine an Apple car that's just a really fancy version of an existing car, with their own infotainment.

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

#182

Post by acdha »

ein0p wrote: post #150
acdha wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The much-overstated “Apple premium” largely reflects that they don’t compete in the lowest end of the PC/phone market. They’d be competing with BMW, not charging even more.

As a current owner of a BMW 5 series, buying anything non-electric for the price of an EV sounds ludicrous to me. The moment your warranty expires, BMW takes ownership of your wallet and never lets go, and there’s _a lot_ of expensive maintenance and repairs you need to do. I know they also make EVs, but just based on my current experience with their dealers buying anything from BMW would be insanity. Whoever overhau…

A friend used to drive an M3, so I’ve heard plenty about their pricing and how often parts had to be air-shipped.

My point was simply that I don’t think an Apple car would sell for a notably different price than other premium brands.

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

#183

Post by astrange »

staticman2 wrote: post #128
huytersd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird thing to say about the company that will be the definitive LLM once Pro 1.5 is available with its million tokens. I can’t even imagine what ultra 1.5 will bring.

You're kind of contradicting yourself. If a high token count tells you all you need to know about how smart a model is Ultra 1.5 would be just as good as Pro 1.5. The fact of the matter is it remains to be seen how smart either model will be.

You can make up for a lot of smartness by having a smarter model generate all the text you put in that giant context window.

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

#184

Post by FirmwareBurner »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #147

So Apple pivots from one thing that it doesn't have a natural advantage with to another. Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at. AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure. To say AI moves fast is a serious understatement. I predict that which is white hot now (LLMs) will be a blind alley long left behind in a year o…

> AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure.

Just look at how retarded Siri is. Same goes for Alexa.

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

#185

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #147

So Apple pivots from one thing that it doesn't have a natural advantage with to another. Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at. AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure. To say AI moves fast is a serious understatement. I predict that which is white hot now (LLMs) will be a blind alley long left behind in a year o…

Apple had a huge lead on this with Siri, and then let it stagnate - actually devolve - instead of throwing money at it to develop it further.

My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system.

Text/image is close to being a solved problem, video is on its way but still not great. Both will be impossible to beat from a cold-ish start.

I'm not convinced Apple has the hire-power to attract the best people for any of this.

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

#186

Post by davitocan »

klik99 wrote: post #165
zer00eyz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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. Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc. The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of u…

Yeah, I absolutely believe that Apple can bring something to car industry - I remember Elon once said that Teslas hidden strength that no other car manufacturer caught on to was treating the car as technology akin to an iPhone with incremental updates and improvements pushed over the air. I've owned a Model X for a few years and I see that approach but don't think Tesla has perfected it. Apple has the potential to in…

Small nitpick but almost every car today still has brakes that work via direct force vs by wire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire

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

#188

Post by dmix »

zer00eyz wrote: post #109
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…

>>> 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. Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc. The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of u…

There's always going to be the debate between entrepreneurship vs "intrapreneurship". Whether large companies can successfully develop what amounts of startups in-house with separate R&D labs vs buying startups.

aka The Innovators Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

The solution the follow up book to this one ^ was to build isolated teams that are flush with the resources/capital of the parents but aren't at the whims, or constant meddling, of the parent company's management class / stockholders / old ideas.

For all the effort Google/Apple/Meta/Xerox/Bell/etc put into their internal moonshot divisions the whole concept mostly hasn't been very successful.

But at the same time they also haven't been great at buying young up and coming startups either, often ruining them the second they arrive by the same impulses which demands R&D moonshot teams be isolated from the host.

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

#189

Post by mdhb »

internetter wrote: post #78
checker659 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you actually used Siri? They are absolutely garbage at anything even remotely resembling the basics of AI/LLM related after spending a decade on it.

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

#190

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

>This was an idea that never made any sense to me.

I mean, for Apple, it absolutely makes sense.

Electric vehicles are relatively straightforward to make. Everyone and their mother are producing some sort of electric scooter/dirt bike these days with new companies popping up every month. Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.

Apple could easily outsource most of the functional development and design and certification, and then focus on their core competency which is aesthetics and marketing and integration into iOS ecosystem, which would be a winning combo economically.

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