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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

#421

Post by _ea1k »

duped wrote: post #284
bryanlarsen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's far from true. They have world class expertise in design and supply chain management. That would transfer over to the car market a lot easier than it would to pretty much any other trillion dollar market.

Shipping a billion iPhones and shipping millions of cars only reasonable each other at a surface level. Apple does not have much expertise in maintaining the same supply chain and logistics, and certainly not in design. They could hire people with the expertise, but Apple is allergic to growing engineering expertise outside of Cupertino.

They could hire Magna to build it for them!

Then again, that isn't necessarily working out perfectly well for Fisker.

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

#422

Post by lotsofpulp »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #317
lotsofpulp wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- Apple design in general has lost a lot of it's soul. They used to be more fun and whimsy, just look at iMac designs of the past. The Cyber truck, love it or hate it, is not boring. Everything apple sells is a glass and metal slab, or as close as possible to it. The Cybertruck is also a glass and metal slab.

a fun and whimsical one.

Not so much for pedestrians and bicyclists, or people using other forms of travel that don’t involve being inside a tank-like vehicle.

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

#423

Post by kjkjadksj »

ra7 wrote: post #221

An Apple car wouldn't be attractive without autonomous driving. The real (and unsurprising) news here is that Apple has given up on autonomous driving. They are far, far behind Waymo and don't want to compete with them, just like how they didn't want to compete with Google for search. They simply lack the expertise to do it.

They have no servicing model anymore. Replacing the stock like for like for each and any issue isn’t going to scale for a car. At least not in a way that makes any sustainability claims total greenwashing.

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

#424

Post by lumost »

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…

There are very few businesses which can add 1+ Trillion to a companies market cap. To grow at pace with the S&P, Apple needs to find a new 1 Trillion dollar business every 2-3 years.

Cars were a good candidate, but it sounds like AAPL now thinks that GenAI is a better bet. ChatGPT is such a basic product, that it sounds reasonable that there will be bigger and better products in the future.

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

#425

Post by jordanpg »

moooo99 wrote: post #371
bradgessler wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried talking to Siri? Compare that to ChatGPT and you'll see that it's much better. The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases, which when connected to "plugins" means we'll all have our own personal assistants. That's worth something.

> The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases But people in general don't seem to be interested in voice assistants in general. They were a huge hype when you basically had to manually uncheck boxes to not accidentially order an Amazon Echo, etc, but as quick as the hype was there it was gone. To my knowledge Amazon has yet to make any kind of substantial revenue with Alexa stuff. With LLM…

I'm not interested in voice assistants because they suck at the moment.

When they achieve something like 99.9999% accuracy and near-undetectable latency, I will become much more interested in them.

As it stands now, if I have to repeat something -- ever -- I'd rather just type it.

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

#426

Post by wes-k »

croes wrote: post #349
samatman wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's playbook for at least three decades has been getting in the game late, but timing "late" very carefully so that the product they debut defines the category. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, AirPods. It's the most obvious thing about the company, this is a bland truism at this point.

iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, AirPods had USPs, will be hard in the AI sector where people don't care about round corners.

Oh we care plenty! Some AI round corners: hands in images, hallucinations in GPTs

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

#427

Post by albedoa »

timetopay wrote: post #149
paxys wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple is a best-in-class second mover. Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space. Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Airpods, Watch were all category defining rather than "me too" products. In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.

> Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space. I would say that only one of the examples you gave was unambiguously the first mover in a brand new space. I will give you "category defining", though. For example, the iPod had tons of competitors already in the field when it launched. Airpods were not even close to the first wireless earbuds. One of the Apple Watch's major compet…

> The iPad came like a decade after Microsoft's first major tablet push.

Wow, you really got their asses. Who could forget Microsoft's first major tablet push.

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

#428

Post by 015a »

paxys wrote: post #111
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple seems so far behind in generative AI Apple is a best-in-class second mover. With the clusterfuck that has been generative AI (from OpenAI’s corporate drama to Google renaming and reörganizing their products every fifteen minutes) this seems prescient, with the only savvy player so far being Microsoft.

> Apple is a best-in-class second mover. Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space. Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Airpods, Watch were all category defining rather than "me too" products. In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.

Welcome to History Revisionism.

Literally EVERY single example you listed were markets that already existed before Apple entered them (except maybe the Mac but that was so long ago who cares). MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. Wireless earbuds existed before Airpods. Tablets existed before the iPad. Smartwatches existed before the Apple Watch. VR goggles existed before Vision. Smartrings existed before the Apple Ring (just wait, its coming).

Their skill isn't in being a first mover. Their skill is being a second, or even last, mover into a space that has untapped potential, and unlocking that potential (for both their benefit and competitors).

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

#429

Post by 123pie123 »

passion__desire wrote: post #351
bluGill wrote: post #323

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.

some of my best conversations - that I still remember many many years from them - are from people who have nothing in common to me.

some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have

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

#430

Post by JohnFen »

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…

I know a guy whose job it is to eavesdrop for industrial espionage purposes. Coffee shops and the like are haunts of his, as well as taking commuter flights in and out of SV.
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