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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

#381

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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.

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have. You must be fun at parties.

I usually cringe when people make this quip but it might be the first time I've seen it used effectively.

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

#382
post #165

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>>> 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…

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…

The accelerator likely would have been a better example. I'm not sure that any car currently shipping has a direct connection between the accelerator and a throttle.

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

#383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.

> Interests must align.

That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.

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

#384

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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.

People who work for startups can’t afford coffee?

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Siri being terrible is thrown around thoughtlessly, you should try it. It's actually pretty good these days. It's shocking how many things it can respond with actual answers.

I use Siri all the time for really trivial things like settings alarms/timers. Any time I try to do something slightly more complicated, like maintaining a shopping list, it gets terrible pretty quickly.

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

#386

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.

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.

haha this, its great to try it, but like NYC, dont stay too long...

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

#387
I hope this means that CarPlay gets some more focus, because I would like a CarPlay integration where everything I have configured in a car is stored in a profile on my phone. This is what I imagine: When I get into a car, I just have to connect my phone, and the seat automatically adjusts, the radio has my favorite stations configured, and the UI is set up as I prefer it. When I find myself in a car model that I haven't driven before, the phone is able to make a good guess of how to configure things based on my setup in other cars.

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

#388
post #215

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>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.

They own the OS they don't need to decrypt the transport if they own the source.

They could track every button pressed if they wanted to.

https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...

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

#389

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 do a lot of open source LLM research/dev work on a Mac Studio. While it doesn't quite compete in terms of speed with a GPU for standard transformers models, I can run pretty huge models locally. When I'm working with llama.ccp, the speed and model size I can run is very impressive.

I can also run Stable Diffusion XL in reasonable time frames on an iPad Pro. The current gen Macbook Pro can perform almost as well as the Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra, only the M3 Max has about 1/2 the bus speed (though still wild that you can run good sized local LLMs on a laptop).

If local generative AI becomes a major part of computing in the future, Apple has a huge advantage over the other players out there. This was obvious the second I started working on my Mac Studio. I have spent plenty of time using a traditional GPU setup for LLM work, and yes it is faster, but the complexity of getting things running is way beyond the average user's ability. Not having to fight with cuda ever is amazing, and so far everything else has 'just worked' as is typical of Apple.

If Apple has a team of talented people working to get gen AI performance tuned specifically to their hardward, I suspect we'll see some very competitive offerings in this space.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People who work for startups can’t afford coffee?

They have to make their own, and it’s not fair trade.
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