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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

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191–200 of 992 posts

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

#191

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

Everything environment, health, wearables related is Tim Apple.

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

#192
post #105

I still think it's reasonable to have Apple consider building a car. Their core competency is in design, integrated platforms/ecosystems, and outsourced manufacturing. Assuming that they could use their supply chain expertise to simplify and outsource manufacturing, the cars of the future likely looks more like a software enabled consumer electronics device than a consumer mechanical device, and there are some really…

It's a highly regulated product, something they have no experience with.

they're growing experience with regulated markets -- but with a privacy/medtech slant.

Of the two, I'd probably rather fight with the FDA versus the NTSB, though.

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

#193

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…

An Apple that doesn't attempt something because it's hard is an Apple that is going to fade. There aren't many trillion dollar markets; I think attempting to break into cars was probably the most accessible of the trillion dollar markets to Apple. What were the alternatives? Oil? Real Estate? ...?

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

#194
post #165

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…

>>for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes

I'm sorry but you're getting it completely wrong. Brake by wire isn't legal anywhere in any market of the world and consequently there are zero cars implemented this way - every car currently on sale everywhere has to have a physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes.

Throttle by wire on the other hand - sure. Nearly all new cars only have an electronic throttle.

Steer by wire is making progress, with Lexus making the first road legal car that has a steering wheel that's fully disconnected from the steering rack, with only electronic control.

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

#195

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

But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and dis…

If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.

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

#196
post #114

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.

Why? Plenty of companies and products kill loads of people or at least are involved in slave labor and environmental damage and their stocks are through the roof and their products fly off the shelves. See Saudi Aramco, Chevron, BP, H&K, BAE, and Nestle.

Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?

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

#197

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

> 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.

The issue here, although easier due to moving second, is that Apple don't seem to really have a software culture, and this is pure software in multiple limits.

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

#198

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 att…

If Apple’s grand plan is convincing large numbers of people to stick a $3000 clunky ass rectangular box to their face they are in serious trouble.

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

#199

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…

An Apple that doesn't attempt something because it's hard is an Apple that is going to fade. There aren't many trillion dollar markets; I think attempting to break into cars was probably the most accessible of the trillion dollar markets to Apple. What were the alternatives? Oil? Real Estate? ...?

A self-driving car is not something that Apple has any relevant expertise at building. They can't even make siri work well. They had zero hope to make a self-driving car.

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

#200

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.

Microsoft haven't really taken any deep interest into the (say) Office suite in decades so now they have no intuition at all for where its value is, thus the "umm copilot?"-ing everywhere.
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