It feels like Apple is really aimless these days.
Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
461–470 of 992 posts
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Apple’s grand plan is convincing large numbers of people to stick a $3000 clunky ass rectangular box to their face they are in serious trouble.
Obviously, it won’t be $3000 and it won’t be clunky. The current version is basically a dev kit.
It’s very literally a $3000 clunky rectangular box marketed as a premium product.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance. Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?
Tesla has many faults to it. Poor materials, lack of general reliability (door handles getting stuck, spoilers getting stuck up), NVH issues, and so on. Many people don't really care that much about those issues though, as long as the core use of the car to get from point a to b is there, and being able to top up at home is convenient, and maintenance costs are way lower.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPhone predates iPod touch, though.
Wait, you're right. I could've sworn I remember the ipod touch being first. Now I'm wondering why it existed it all.
Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.
iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.
Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.
Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.
It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hell even the most recent Apple Watch does some Siri commands, including voice to text, on device. Apple is certainly pushing low power on device processing with their own custom chips (S9 on the watch I believe).
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#466I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…
There are generally 3types of car buyers today. 1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers. 2. People who want cheap modes of transportation. This is your cheapest level sedan buyers. 3. People who want specific…
Apple cars would aim more for the (1) bracket than the (3). Apple products are status items. Same particular utility can be had much cheaper.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can make up for a lot of smartness by having a smarter model generate all the text you put in that giant context window.
Could you point me to evidence what you just wrote is true? I just asked mistral 7b to provide 5 sentences that end with Apple. It couldn't do it. I then provided 5 examples generated from ChatGPT 4 and asked it to generate 5 more. It still couldn't do it. 10 ChatGPT examples- still couldn't do it. You seem to be saying the models can generalize on the entire context size, that I should keep provided examples up to t…
I didn't say to provide examples. What it can do is search inside its window if you have an excessive amount of text.
It can do some extrapolation on tasks it's already been proven to do, but that's not every task.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
The phone made sense to me because by that point Apple had clearly proven themselves as a consumer electronics company. It’s wasn’t as big a jump and cell phone software was largely junk. The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that n…
Apple is still waiting it out until most of the existing EV issues are resolved. Then, they can swoop in and leverage their walled garden to get buyers/users. They'll also be different than Ford, Mazda, Honda, etc since I don't think they will try to sell their cars. It'll be a subscription fee and Apple will own the car.
All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.
Tesla has never supported Apple CarPlay and their sales keep rising. GM recently dropped CarPlay from new models so we'll see how that impacts sales. https://www.motortrend.com/news/general-motors-removing-appl...
I haven’t driven a Tesla, so maybe I’m way off base here, but their infotainment software seems modern and at least reasonably well designed.
Legacy automakers have thoroughly demonstrated that when it comes to making a decent infotainment system they are unwilling, incapable, or some mix of the two
Re: Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but didn't the first iPhone sell pretty well? I tried a demo of AVP in NYC the week after release. The staff casually mentioned that they had units in stock if I'd like one. I think apple is having a difficult time selling these things. I had a harder time getting a hold of an iPad pro over a month after launch. Maybe later versions will catch on though.
iPhone sold 270,000 units in the quarter it was launched. About the same as the Vision Pro.
What I've found when searching, is that is how much it sold in the first few days. It sold 1.4 million in year one.
I don't think AVP will sell that well. My guess is they won't hit their goal of 400k in the first year.