261–270 of 992 posts
> Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project Was Apple really trying to build a self-driving electric car from scratch with just a 2,000 person team?
Sounds like Apple is in panic mode and FOMO because they are late to the GPT game. Similar cases didn't work out for MS
They absolutely did. Microsoft was late to web and now we have O365, Azure, etc. I'd say, however, that this is less FOMO and more employee-retention. A team shifting from electric cars to generative AI sounds more like a directionless hype squad where you park flight risks who can still add value to other departments while they play with the newest shiny.
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.
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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…
There was a recent YC podcast about Vision Pro where SLAM and the overlap with autonomous vehicles was explained.
For others out of loop:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_an...
> Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project Was Apple really trying to build a self-driving electric car from scratch with just a 2,000 person team?
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Really? really ? you think when the iPhone came out the space was not crowded? You think they defined the category? Jobs himself have put up a number of smartphones in his 2007 presentation. Yes, the iPhone was far, very far better but it was definitely not a first. Same thing with the iPod vs Diamond Rio MP3 layers. As for the Watch, gosh, I do not even know where to start. Pebble Kickstarter two years before that?…
> the iPhone was far, very far better It wasn't that far ahead when it first launched. Very basic functionality. But a few versions later it was the end of Nokia and Blackberry. https://www.mobilegazette.com/2007-review-07x12x12.htm "No handset polarised opinions during 2007 more than the Apple iPhone. Although it has many good points, the list of bad points is equally impressive. The iPhone lacks 3G, the camera is o…
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Aren't they? Their entire business is pretty much based on brand. Apple products aren't actually better than the competition (often they are worse, like the iPhone not letting you install apps outside the app store). But it doesn't matter because people think Apple is cool. I don't see why that wouldn't translate to cars.
61% marketshare for phones in the US doesn't sound like a luxury brand to me. They might position themselves as an aspirational brand outside the US, and by keeping retail prices close to the same as in the US, no matter the local purchasing power, I can see how they can be perceived as an upscale brand in some markets.
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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.
Ferrari's value is driven more by merchandising than by car sales. Even if a hypothetical Apple car did well, that wouldn't drive billions in sales of Apple branded jackets, hats, luggage, shot glasses, etc.
That was the case until SUV release. Ferrari announced plans to limit SUV sales, but that wont last in light of what Lamborghini is doing.
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I’m interested about the Sony/Honda joint venture car (Afeela), and I’d buy an Apple/Toyota joint venture car in a heartbeat.
I’d be far more willing to buy a partnership as reasonable, but that didn’t seem to be the plan. At most they’d find someone to act like Foxcon and built it, but not a real partnership. And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.
It’s increasingly obvious that Apple has ensured by their cutthroat and rent-seeking behavior in the one place they have market power (the App Store) that no sane business wants to partner with them on anything. Everyone knows Apple will leverage any partnership to get a firm foothold and then extract as close to 100% of the possible margins for Apple, leaving them with crumbs, or possibly just losses. And the whole time, Apple’s corporate personality seems to genuinely believe that all of this is not ruthlessness, but just Apple being fairly compensated for their great work.
By the way, this doesn’t make them bad, lots of companies are known for margin extraction, like Walmart famously did with its suppliers. Apple are very good at Doing Capitalism in this way, but competitors are rightly going to defend themselves by ruling out anything that could help Apple expand further.