441–450 of 992 posts
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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.
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 wish they'd put a huge FPGA on every device.
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…
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Really? really ? you think when the iPhone came out the space was not crowded? You think they defined the category? Jobs himself have put up a number of smartphones in his 2007 presentation. Yes, the iPhone was far, very far better but it was definitely not a first. Same thing with the iPod vs Diamond Rio MP3 layers. As for the Watch, gosh, I do not even know where to start. Pebble Kickstarter two years before that?…
Look at a picture of what the top 10 smartphones looked like the day before iPhone launched and then again a few years later. That is what category defining means. They didn't take whatever was out there in the market and copy it/make it incrementally better. They started from scratch and built something drastically different and better than the rest. Same for iPod (yes there were plenty of cheap MP3 players out ther…
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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.
It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.
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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.
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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.
Unless the thing is "afford housing"
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…
Right. The electric car business took a wrong turn when most of the players decided that electric cars were a premium product that could be sold with huge margins. Tesla started there, and it seemed to be working for them. This led to excesses such as the electric Hummer, a 9,000 pound vehicle with sports car acceleration and a price in 6 figures. It's a great engineering achievement but a silly product. It also led to electric versions of vehicles having a price premium around US$10,000 over the same model with internal combustion.
Then Tesla exhausted the fanboy market. Reality ensued. Price mattered. Tesla had to start offering discounts.
This is a big problem for some major car companies that bought into the high margin myth. Ford should have known better. Stellantis' CEO was running around saying that they were going to get margins like tech companies, partly by adding on aftermarket fees. That didn't work out.
Electric cars are doing just fine, and prices are coming down. That's a good thing. BYD gets this.
Having to compete on price scares Apple.
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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.
Now I'm wondering why it existed it all.
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…
>This was an idea that never made any sense to me. I mean, for Apple, it absolutely makes sense. Electric vehicles are relatively straightforward to make. Everyone and their mother are producing some sort of electric scooter/dirt bike these days with new companies popping up every month. Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance. Apple could easily outsource most of the functi…
If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.