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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

#321

Post by gumby »

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 agree with your entire comment but have some nuance about one point:

> It’s one thing to create a new [lower-margin business], it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins.

While I agree that this plan didn't fit with any of Apple's strengths, as a general principle good companies plan for margin erosion. In fact failure to do this is a classic failure described in The Innovator's Dilemma, where you're leaving room for a disruptor to grow. Or as Sun used to put it: "if someone's going to show up and eat our lunch, it should be us who does that"

But a car...SMH

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

#323

Post by bluGill »

brailsafe wrote: post #278
RealityVoid wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd argue this is true of a lot of cities where you're likely to bump into anyone, depending on how narrow your scope is of what one considers interesting. Also true of probably most universities if they're doing anything right. The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram…

Everybody is interesting if you get talking to them. You just think the guy who collects your trash is uninteresting and never talk to him (or do you?). Sure not everyone has the same background, and so they are interesting in different ways, but they are all interesting.

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

#324

Post by jcgrillo »

ryandrake wrote: post #144
jcgrillo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether the…

I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.

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

#325

Post by itsoktocry »

ActorNightly wrote: post #190
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 functi…

>Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.

Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?

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

#326

Post by [deleted] »

khokhol wrote: post #316
epistasis wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, but I can't understand why that makes you happy. What benefit does it bring you?

The benefit of being a part of the actual human world, where real people live. Where not essentially everyone is obsessed with their careers and/or comparative wealth. That sort of thing.

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by eastbound »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #166
jakeinspace wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP. Apple is just not that elite of a brand, I don’t see how selling million-dollar vehicles would significantly change their brand (assuming an Apple logo hood ornament).

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.

I love how Apple haters don’t understand the phenomenon. Look, I bought Sony headphones, some reference like xixikxixkklkxwx. I now have tinitus. Everyone tells me it’s because I didn’t buy the xixikxixkklkxwii, which were obviously better. The entire PC market is like this. Intel sells i7, but it’s not the same as the i7 of 20 years ago. LG sells screens where you have 90% chances of buying shit and get told “Well they do make good screens, you should have bought the other reference. What did you expect. You noob.” The entire Android market is like this. You buy Samsung and you get OEM preinstalled shit. “Yeah everyone knows you should gave bought the Pixel, not the Samsung.”

So now, instead of buying things twice because the one was shit, I just buy Apple. I don’t buy “the iPhone”. I buy “iPhone”. It could be 99% more expensive, it’s still less than buying things twice.

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

#328

Post by StableAlkyne »

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…

It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good. Bell Labs was part of the public good - and why they employed multiple physicists and materials scientists whose employment involved basically researching whatever they wanted as long as it had some link back. Shannon was hired after his master thesis (which basically created the field of information theory) and, among other things, had a side project involving the application of computers to chess. They constructed the New Jersey lab specifically to encourage watercooler conversations and deliberately had greenhorns to work with the most senior researchers like Shannon. Bell Labs solved engineering problems needed by AT&T and Westinghouse, but they had the financial security to spend money on incredibly theoretical projects like transistors, operating systems (unix), and programming (C). Those pie in the sky projects would both benefit AT&T through automation, and covered the public good requirements of their monopoly.

AT&T (owner of Westinghouse and Bell Labs) then proceeded to take their monopoly and patent factory, and started buying up competitors and new small companies. Eating their golden goose in this way is what caused the government to break them up.

Bell Labs was independent for a few years doing... Stuff. Spent their remaining prestige on falsification scandals because of the publish or perish culture this new profit motive created. They were bought by Nokia a few years ago (now called Nokia Bell Labs) and now only employ a couple theoretical physicists last I read. The lab that put into practice the foundations of modern tech (Unix and C are in almost every non-consumer-facing device) just does some Nokia product development nowadays. What a loss.

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

#329

Post by ARandomerDude »

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.

You have to step over the poop and the needles to get into the coffee shop though, and while you're inside your car is being burglarized.

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

#330

Post by kypro »

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…

> It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.

Probably, but who knows with Apple. I suppose they could have created a cheap Citroen Ami type thing with some cool tech and just doubled the price because it's Apple. I would assume they got into it because they saw a product with good margins.

If you think about it cars are poorly designed for the average journey. They tend to be designed for that one time you actually need to drive 300km, or the one time a year you need to fit 5 people in the car, or the one time you need to load 3 suitcases in the boot. And in America they're also way too big for no good reason.

Apple more than anyone might have been able to experiment with the conventional car design perhaps.

But we don't really know what they were trying to do do we? I think you assuming that they were just trying to create another low margin electric car company to compete the likes of Tesla and Ford is probably wrong though.

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