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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

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

#351

Post by passion__desire »

bluGill wrote: post #323
brailsafe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interests must align. People must know common jargon which convey high density information faster. I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

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

#352

Post by jcgrillo »

k8svet wrote: post #287
jcgrillo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work

I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard. But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.

I haven't owned an iPhone since the iPhone 4, I lean really heavily on autocorrect on my Pixel (is that using Gboard?). It's just an infuriating experience to me compared to physical buttons. I probably hit the backspace key at least three times as often and often when I try to type a backspace instead it comes out as an "l", "m", ".", or enter.

Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into the phone, that would fix it completely most of the time (except, obviously, when I'm not near my desk).

An ideal compromise would be physical buttons on the device for when it's necessary and the ability to easily use my workstation's external keyboard (dock + switch maybe?) the rest of the time.

EDIT: Now that I think of it.. let me plug in a mouse too and give me a real OS (maybe in a container like you get on a Chromebook) and i can just replace my workstation with the docked phone. But then I would buy only half as many computers and wouldn't need all that GPU compute to train a bunch of statistical models so I guess that doesn't work for the computer companies.

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

#353

Post by hn72774 »

vineyardmike wrote: post #174
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…

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…

People also do that to get insider info to trade on or for industrial espionage/competitor spying. They'll hang out in the lobby of a building, coffee shops nearby, appearing to work while eavesdropping and taking notes.

At my last bigco job, I was advised not to discuss company matters outside of the office.

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

#354

Post by Keyframe »

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…

company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS)

I'm curious what makes you say that about MS? Out of three, I'd actually put MS first and Apple last if for nothing else than Microsoft Research which is like a separate entity in its own strong right (judging from the outside). So many things useless to Microsoft business from them, yet so many many things..

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

#356

Post by bastawhiz »

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…

> My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system.

I'd speculate they can't do this without 5-10x the compute, which means a wildly bigger battery. I can't think of how you'd mash VR gaming and generative AI together into a headset form factor in a way that's practical for gaming. We can _only just_ run image models in almost real time, and that still requires some heavy lifting and compromises on quality. Doing generative AI on-device for a gaming experience is a hugely tall ask. (And if you're doing it in the cloud, why not do it for the simpler, more popular hardware instead, like iPads?)

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

#357

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

tippytippytango wrote: post #235
bryanlarsen wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? ...?

Healthcare is still on the table.

Healthcare is even more heavily regulated than the auto industry.

Generally, the closer you are to "people will die if this code has a bug," the more regulated the industry.

People that don't work in a heavily regulated space vastly underestimate the constraints. It's hard enough to create a product that's beautiful and works well at a price point that the market will bear, but it's often near-impossible to do all this while also complying with all the regulations of all the markets in which you intend to sell your product.

It takes a tremendous amount of commitment, money, and time, and companies that aren't used to working within snail's pace regulatory environments quickly lose focus and the projects sputter out.

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

#358

Post by gnicholas »

xp84 wrote: post #286
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.

I am sure Apple leadership agrees with your overall idea of on-device, but don’t see how this could compete with big GPUs in a data center for “actually doing a good job.” Apple is a distant last place in everything to do with AI today, so I’m skeptical that they can suddenly make an impact with both hands tied around their back (in other words 1/100th the TDP, one iPhone chip on battery vs farms of GPUs). I’d honest…

I think the way they could compete is by having on-device handle a limit universe of queries, and then use some souped-up Siri for the rest. Currently iPhones can do some Siri commands even when offline, for example.

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

#359

Post by bigstrat2003 »

eastbound wrote: post #327
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't know why you think one needs to buy Apple in order to get good products. I research and find out what products are good, buy them, and am happy. If you're happy with Apple then good for you, but don't kid yourself that it's because they are just better. They aren't.

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

#360

Post by AmericanChopper »

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 has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at.

Apples biggest advantage is having piles of cash to spend on R&D.

Developing new products that it doesn’t have much previous experience with is how it’s gotten this big to begin with. That’s what the iPod was, that’s what the iPhone was, that’s what Apple TV was, that’s what the Apple Watch was, that’s how it became such a good chip designer, etc…

The difference between now and 2001, is that it’s got so much cash today that it doesn’t need all, or even most, of its new R&D to succeed, so it can invest in more less-potentially-viable R&D, and it’s not such a big deal if it never gets to market. Which seems like the opposite of desperation to me…

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