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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

#331

Post by kccqzy »

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…

I predict they are going to use whatever Google provides (Gemini) and asks Google to pay them money to make it the default. Siri powered by Gemini. Why develop a technology yourself when you have enough market clout to let others pay you to use their tech? And Google, desperate for market share and mind share, might just agree to that while paying Apple a tidy sum (probably not a whole lot).

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

#332

Post by dabbz »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #185
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 att…

The issue is actually that they are throwing a ton of money into Siri. That's partly why it appears to have gotten worse for most queries.

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

#333

Post by nerdix »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #158
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 just don't see how they can make any more money with "generative ai" than a useful tool that actually can get me around. Seems like chasing after fool's gold.

Seems more like a defensive play rather than one designed to directly open new revenue streams.

In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind.

In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't moved the market much. But the risk is that generative AI is a paradigm shift that will unlock some game changing capability that could catch Apple off guard.

Same story with Microsoft and Copilot on the desktop.

If your two primary competitions are doing similar things then you start paying attention.

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

#334

Post by bluGill »

dmix wrote: post #188
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…

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 pare…

Large companies often are significant investors in small R&D moonshots. Because they own a large part of the startup they can choose to buy it if the product turns out profitable, or they can sell. And since it is a separate investment when things go south they can stop investing and thus save money without appearing to let anyone go.

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

#335

Post by sjwhevvvvvsj »

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.

South Bay is just like a giant company town, it’s actually pretty boring - 60% of people work at the same handful of giant companies, the other 30% work at a startup, and the last 10% serve the first group fair trade coffee.

The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.

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

#336

Post by scottyah »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #184
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.

If they can make a voice assistant that runs on-device I'd pay good money for that. Now that a lot of LLMs are able to run (slowly) on raspberry pi's, they could get a great following by just not stealing data and not having their assistant get very noticeably worse over time.

Google assistant has completely dropped the ball from a user perspective, though I'm sure they're capturing great data and have reduced server costs 90%.

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

#337

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

rhelz wrote: post #288

This reminds me of the oil curse. After a country discovers it has lots of oil, it nukes every other sector of their economy. Why? Because there's nothing you can invest your money in which would give you a larger return than oil. It sucks the lifeblood out of every other sector. Apple just didn't invest in its electric cars enough to let them develop it fast enough, and now with China coming online, the window of op…

To be clear, Intel aren't moving away from uarch design. Gelsinger has stated the economics of their fab business don't make sense without a large guaranteed customer like their processor business.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PrmrMQ9gJU&t=637s (Ian Interviews: Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO)

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

#338

Post by intrasight »

bombcar wrote: post #136
modeless wrote: post #91

Tesla is already the Apple of cars. Designed in California. Capacitive touchscreen instead of buttons. Vertical integration. Minimalist hardware design. Focus on software. Over the air updates. Custom SoC. When Apple did all this in phones it was unique. There was no Tesla of phones. But there is a Tesla of cars and it's tough to imagine what unique thing Apple could bring to the market.

Ten years ago Apple buying TSLA would have been something that could have happened. Today, not so much.

And if they had, they would likely have killed it off years ago. Apple's not exactly a "move fast and break things" kind of culture.

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

#339

Post by throwaway11460 »

ksherlock wrote: post #320
throwaway11460 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems wrong. My brakes work with both batteries disconnected, though I have to push very hard. Audi made in 2014.

With power brakes, there's a brake booster (usually vacuum powered) which applies most of the force. When the engine is off (or if you have a broken brake booster) braking is entirely on you.

Indeed. The brake boost works one or two times right after engine power down, it's kinda funny - I like to push the brake before getting out just to feel it harden.

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

#340

Post by adra »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #229
x0x0 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could easily buy Volkswagen sized company from the reserve cash they have and still have quite a good amount of reserve left. I don't think car experience is something that is the limiting factor.

Yes, let's take a very high margin business to buy a very low margin business. Our shareholders will surely appreciate that.
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