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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

#241

Post by iknowstuff »

gambiting wrote: post #194
klik99 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Lexus has a backup mechanical link it engages when a fault is detected. The Tesla Cybertruck is the first vehicle on the road with no such backup. They rely on redundancy of motors, power, and compute instead

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

#242

Post by thefourthchime »

croes wrote: post #215
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.

>privacy-first ethos Apple doesn't have a privacy first ethos, it's more of an All your-data-are-belong-to-us. They just don't like to share the asset of their users data, that's not privacy.

That's not true you can have complete end to end encryption. By default. iCloud is not encrypted, but you can encrypt it and nobody but you can get access access your data.

It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.

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

#243

Post by nerdjon »

It still seems wild that Apple was even working on it, similar to the rumors that they were working on an actual TV.

I have to imagine that there was some shared tech with other products that helped make it make sense for so long.

Maybe some of the CarPlay stuff? Like the next generation CarPlay that takes over all the screens and controls.

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

#244

Post by filmgirlcw »

crazygringo wrote: post #95
silverquiet wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Cars are different both for sales and more importantly for support. Apple is best in class for a turnkey consumer experience. But if you’ve ever had to deal with Apple Care Enterprise, which is a lot more similar to the sort of support you have to do for luxury cars, in my experience it just isn’t the same. It is fine, but it isn’t the same experience that a consumer gets (I’m unsure of what the experience is like for people that shell out the money for the on-site support from IBM or whoever the contractor is now).

And that’s the thing. Apple does really well at attainable luxury consumer goods. I think it does less well the higher the price point and market segmentation. Hence why the $10,000 Apple Watch didn’t work (and that was for lots and lots of reasons, first and foremost I think a misunderstanding of why watch enthusiasts spend so much on watches).

But putting that aside, partnerships (dealers) make up the car market for everyone with the exception of Tesla, and although with enough time and money, Apple could absolutely build out their own network, unlike Apple Stores, where they had a solid 5 years to a decade to really grow (coincidentally timed to Apple’s rise as a consumer giant) into that infrastructure, they’d need to have that basically day one for a car. Which is my whole point about it being overhead/capital intensive. Even Tesla had a chance to grow over time as it was a new company and not expected to sell and service cars everywhere. Apple would have a difficult time, I think, releasing a car and saying it could only be bought and serviced in select cities. The stakes are higher the bigger you are.

It isn’t that I don’t think Apple could do these things. It’s that I don’t think Apple could do them at the scale and margins at which it has based its business on. Especially if the net result is growing $100b in market cap. Apple added $1T to its market cap in 2 years (2018 to 2020) and another briefly in 2023 (current is $2.82T). I think there are far less intensive ways to add $100b to the bottom line than to become a car company.

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

#245

Post by ein0p »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #210
acdha wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree, repairing a recent-gen out of warranty MacBook at Apple is nearly as expensive as servicing a car. Why wouldn't Apple want those margins from premium cars as well?

You probably haven’t had your car serviced in a while. My BMW is currently is at the dealer, to replace water pump and thermostat. The invoice is $4.5K. The winning strategy for a newcomer is not to charge for repairs, but to create a car that doesn’t need repairs or maintenance.

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

#246

Post by boznz »

RealityVoid wrote: post #232
vineyardmike wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embarrassingly, I was eves dropping on a (loud) woman in a coffee shop who worked on the Apple Car project. She did SLAM work. I was evesdropping because that was a core part of my thesis and I was curious. She told her dining partner she was moved to the Vision Pro team to build the inside-out tracking. Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on…

I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things. The density of talent must be amazing.

And I am so happy I live in a place where this doesn't happen.

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

#247

Post by chucke1992 »

timetopay wrote: post #149
paxys wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is a best-in-class second mover. Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space. Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Airpods, Watch were all category defining rather than "me too" products. In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.

> Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space. I would say that only one of the examples you gave was unambiguously the first mover in a brand new space. I will give you "category defining", though. For example, the iPod had tons of competitors already in the field when it launched. Airpods were not even close to the first wireless earbuds. One of the Apple Watch's major compet…

iPhone has basically defined a category of mutli-touch screen devices. It essentially created the whole foundation how all the mobile phones went. It was a completely new consumer category of devices.

Apple Watch was a success because it used iPhone as a moat. iPad was built upon iPhone's foundation.

Apple is - by and large - "an iPhone company".

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

#248

Post by tqi »

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…

Yeah, the consensus here seems to be that this is a good move because the car was a bad idea... but it doesn't follow that AI is a therefore a better idea? Apple's poor reputation in ML related areas not withstanding (I've heard its a lot of bad infra and silo'd development), I don't see how they will make money from this.

Siri is fine for sending a text or setting a timer, but I don't think most people are going to pay money for an "AI assistant" to plan vacations or make restaurant reservations, if for no other reason than most people aren't busy enough for it to be worth it?

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

#249

Post by itronitron »

It's shocking/hilarious how much/many people believe that there are any economic prospects in generative AI. By definition, if something is generated by an AI then it's worthless if for no other reason than supply and demand.

There's also a reason it's called a singularity, it sucks everything in that touches it but otherwise has very little influence on anything else.

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

#250

Post by gambiting »

klik99 wrote: post #227
gambiting wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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.…

Thank you, yes that was probably literally the worst example I could have given. But isn't there famously brake by wire in toyota EVs? And that physical connection is required as a fallback?

Yes, they always have a physical fallback :-) and don't worry the systems like that do exist just not with brakes - it's an easy mistake to make.
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