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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

#541

Post by anonylizard »

acaloiar wrote: post #522

> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. This line really excited my PR-spin senses. The set of people work…

Where does it say only 5% will move jobs?

You underestimate the overlap between GenAI and EVs. Apple is not merely a software company, their AI strategy will not be merely send data to datacenter to run LLMs.

Apple has to run local LLMs heavily amongst its devices, for responsiveness, cost, and privacy reasons. This will entail a holistic effort from batteries to the neural inference chips to the AI models to the user design. Much more complicated than the datacenter only approach.

The car division would have also had people working on the battery, neural chips, UI design, etc. I would estimate 30% at least get moved to AI.

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

#542

Post by kube-system »

evan_ wrote: post #519
throwitaway222 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Toyota, Ford, Dodge, Honda, Hondai, Tesla, the list goes on... have all had that picture already, and they seem to be doing fine?

I think it's different when the brand started out as a car company. As grim as it sounds, the public is aware and mostly unconcerned with the idea that vehicles made by the Ford Motor Company are sometimes involved in accidents that kill people. I don't think that awareness is built in to every consumer brand.

I think more specifically, traditional automaker brands are boring and they garner little public discussion or attention.

Tesla I think is a good example of this -- some have a bad image of Tesla, which is probably in part to their propensity to attract media attention and public hype. When someone puts a Ford Escape on cruise control and crashes, nobody hears about it. If Apple released a car, it would have a ridiculous amount of hype, and ever darn scratch someone put on one would be front page news.

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

#543

Post by theturtletalks »

MBCook wrote: post #492
theturtletalks wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with buying a car? I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone? I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competiti…

What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with bluetooth headphones? Now, look at AirPods, simple bluetooth headphones, with tight integration with iOS. I was the one ridiculing Apple for even entering this market and I thought they looked dumb. Sony XMs looked way better.

Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.

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

#544

Post by dmd »

fiskeben wrote: post #538
coldtea wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strange thought. Neither the name or logo of famous car brands got associated or tarnished by tens of thousands killed every year... Even when some of them ocassionally made a specific "death trap" model or production run, that's simply not how people thinks of them.

At least here in Norway, if a Tesla is involved in anything, the headline will make sure to mention it.

Our local (Boston area) town police blotter always mentions if a Tesla is involved in so much as a bumper-scrape, whereas no other car brand has ever been mentioned even once.

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

#545

Post by tibbar »

acaloiar wrote: post #522

> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. This line really excited my PR-spin senses. The set of people work…

There is more overlap between the two than you'd think, specifically in producing and evaluating datasets for training and fine-tuning models. Most software engineers and ML engineers who worked on self-driving cars would do fine at working on GenAI; in fact, they're more qualified than the vast majority of engineers to work in a brand-new industry. Same goes for engineers working on compute hardware. Even engineers working on automotive controls and sensors could easily have a role working on increasingly multimodal models and applications, though I have no idea what projects Apple is actually prioritizing within that space.

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

#546

Post by k8svet »

jcgrillo wrote: post #352
k8svet wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard. But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.

I haven't owned an iPhone since the iPhone 4, I lean really heavily on autocorrect on my Pixel (is that using Gboard?). It's just an infuriating experience to me compared to physical buttons. I probably hit the backspace key at least three times as often and often when I try to type a backspace instead it comes out as an "l", "m", ".", or enter. Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into th…

I knew halfway through your comment that I was going to end up agreeing with where you were going. We're so close to having a decent Android tablet, with maybe a new Firefox for tablets, with USB-C DP out. 90% of the time I also would rather just be on a better device.

I'm sad there isn't more built around Android's AVF. I thought for sure, by now, we were going to have "Linux on Android" ala Crostini.

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

#547

Post by ClumsyPilot »

coldtea wrote: post #513
MBCook wrote: post #19

I 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…

> I 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. That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches. The average car is crap compared to what it could be - and that's without any self-driving involved either: purely the basic…

> That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches.

Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches.

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

#548

Post by sjwhevvvvvsj »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #439
CydeWeys wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m very fond of both New York City, and spending time in nature for the same reason: you just don’t know what you’re gonna see when you walk out your door.

Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?

Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?

For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.

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

#549

Post by micromacrofoot »

tr_user wrote: post #480
wolverine876 wrote: post #474

I hope it's not an overreaction to the current reactionary anti-ESG trend. We do need electric cars; they are the future.

Future of what? Reliable mass public transport is the best option for a sustainable future. We don't need car centric suburbia but with heavier and more expensive cars.

I absolutely am on board with the idea... but reliable mass public transport requires an entire country of cities to be redesigned (this is in a country that struggles to get zoning laws changed to move from single to multi-family housing in many places), we'll have self-driving cars first.

Hell, I think we'd get flying cars first. It's nearly impossible to touch anything that requires modifying suburbs or their streets, politically.

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

#550

Post by sjwhevvvvvsj »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #437
sjwhevvvvvsj wrote: post #335

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.

> 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.

And they all drive Teslas with vanity license plates.
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