Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 992 posts

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

#431

Post by genghisjahn »

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…

I’m in Philly and about 20 years ago I sat next to an old man at a dinner for something. Neither of us wanted to be there. We talked, found out we both did tech things. I asked him what he worked on and he said “well back in the day I helped build ENIAC.” I was blown away. Had a great talk.

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

#432

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#433

Post by bradgessler »

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…

Have you read the headlines about how difficult and expensive it is to procure NVIDIA GPUs?

Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware. If software ends up being the "easy part" and hardware remains difficult, Apple is in a great spot between the volume of hardware they're already moving and their cash reserves.

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

#434

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#435

Post by [deleted] »

itronitron wrote: post #249

It's shocking/hilarious how much/many people believe that there are any economic prospects in generative AI. By definition, if something is generated by an AI then it's worthless if for no other reason than supply and demand. There's also a reason it's called a singularity, it sucks everything in that touches it but otherwise has very little influence on anything else.

[deleted]

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

#436

Post by filmgirlcw »

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…

> I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.

I hope so. That would be a great result, even if the consumer product didn’t land. That said, I would argue that sometimes you do just have to call something and move on. You’re right that Apple is one of the few places that can do research for research sake, but this wasn’t a research project. By all accounts this had a real goal of making and manufacturing a car.

It appears this project was in the works for more than a decade, had numerous stops and starts, leadership and focus changes and if your goal isn’t just research for the sake of research (which I do actually think is demonstrably different from Bell Labs or Xerox Parc which are more akin to things like Microsoft Research and Google X and the like), you need to ship at some point.

I think giving ten years to something like this is definitely a gift and I hope we see fruits from some of the work that went into it other places. But at the same time, there are other moonshots you can try if one doesn’t work out and there is arguably a cost if you keep focused on one idea that isn’t going to pan out for too long. Ten years for a project like this seems like a fair amount of time to try and a fair time to pull the plug.

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

#437

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

sjwhevvvvvsj wrote: post #335
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.

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.

> It's weird. They always travel in groups of five. These programmers, there's always a tall skinny white guy, a short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.

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

#438

Post by _aavaa_ »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #407
eli wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a car is on a different scale, but I think it's only in hindsight that a phone is obviously just a computer and that the user interface is important part.

Do you really not see how a car is a much greater departure from their core expertise than the iphone? They were already making handheld electronic devices well before the iPhone. And they were making computers pretty much for the whole history of the company. Ipod touch was a natural evolution of the ipod and the iphone was basically just an incremental improvement on the ipod touch. The closest thing they've made t…

The Mac Pro comment is an unfair comparison. It's closer to a car on cinder blocks since the wheels cost extra.

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

#439

Post by entropicdrifter »

CydeWeys wrote: post #404
spacecadet wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are you talking about, NYC is great! You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.

>You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.

Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.

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

#440

Post by fabioborellini »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #407
eli wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a car is on a different scale, but I think it's only in hindsight that a phone is obviously just a computer and that the user interface is important part.

Do you really not see how a car is a much greater departure from their core expertise than the iphone? They were already making handheld electronic devices well before the iPhone. And they were making computers pretty much for the whole history of the company. Ipod touch was a natural evolution of the ipod and the iphone was basically just an incremental improvement on the ipod touch. The closest thing they've made t…

iPhone predates iPod touch, though.
Post reply on HN