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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

#571

Post by MBCook »

xp84 wrote: post #270
MBCook wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be far more willing to buy a partnership as reasonable, but that didn’t seem to be the plan. At most they’d find someone to act like Foxcon and built it, but not a real partnership. And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.

> doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want. It’s increasingly obvious that Apple has ensured by their cutthroat and rent-seeking behavior in the one place they have market power (the App Store) that no sane business wants to partner with them on anything. Everyone knows Apple will leverage any partnership to get a firm foothold and then extract as close to 100% of the…

Even if you ignore the App Store, Apple’s ethos is to control their own destiny. That means they try to bring everything in house or control it with an iron fist.

And they have more money than god.

So if you parter with them, they will learn from you. And you’ll get “the Apple bump” if the car is successful.

But don’t expect to be partners in 10 years. Expect to be competitors or a new division.

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

#572

Post by dartos »

MBCook wrote: post #562
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one thought they would do VR and they did What has this VR achieved? Nothing so far. Cannibalising your own product isn’t an achievement They have never shipped a large physical product or anything mechanical in the entire history of the company, this is outright delusional.

It’s been like a month. Seriously. That’s a ridiculous hurdle to clear. “The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”

That’s what’s weird though.

A month of near 0 buzz for apples introduction to the era of “spatial computing”

Usually Apple parades around a few exemplar apps or use cases, but for the vision pro, it was just business meetings?

imo just having infinite floating screens is a better feature to show off.

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

#573

Post by hx833001 »

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…

Any of the car companies are more likely to give Apple business after this announcement that they’re not competing.

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

#574

Post by vel0city »

theturtletalks wrote: post #543
MBCook wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> simple bluetooth headphones

That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform.

Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?

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

#575

Post by chucke1992 »

Spivak wrote: post #289
chucke1992 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hilarious that people are trying to portray MSFT's moves in AI as "desperate" lol

MS got the score of the century. They're selling the shovels and access to the mines.

MSFT's main benefit their chokehold on corporate software. They can provide high priced software, deals etc. due to sheer force of Office and Azure. Even Amazon does not have that.

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

#576

Post by MBCook »

ponector wrote: post #350
MBCook wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression that Xiaomi did not target only the top end of the market as Apple tends to. I would expect an Apple card to start at $120k or more. I suppose Apple could go after the Corolla or something if they really wanted to but that just doesn’t seem like an Apple move to me.

Apple does not target only top end. New Iphone starts from under 500$.

Do you really think Apple would come out with a $25k car?

They convinced everyone to increase what they’d pay for a phone. , and to be fair a smartphone is for more capable so that’s understandable.

But they would make a luxury level car and I don’t think they’d convince much of the public it would be worth the premium. Even if everyone wanted it I doubt many would buy.

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

#577

Post by MBCook »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #486
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why were you puzzled? What is so impossible about making a car from scratch, then making money on it? I don't own any Apple products, but I know they could do it. Yes it's difficult, but a lot of the difficulty comes…

Because just being able to do it isn't the point. The real question is whether or not it's a good use of the cash they have available. OP is saying that it doesn't make good business sense for Apple to do this, not that it's impossible for them to pull it off.

Right. If Apple spent a total of $10B on this, did they get the best ROI they could have?

If they went through and released a car, would it be profitable enough for all those costs?

Or would spending all that money on insourcing some manufacturing or getting more manufacturing out of China pay off more?

Tim Cook is a finance guy, not a “what the hell we’ve got money to burn” leader.

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

#578

Post by vel0city »

theturtletalks wrote: post #502
dartos wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s some Apple fan boy cope.

Nope, just seen it in action over and over. No one thought they would do VR and they did. No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now. No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did. The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To A…

Its strange to me you have a list full of "no one thought" statements that were all things that most of the people around me at least seemed like things Apple would do. Especially the movies and TV stuff, they already had a big marketplace for movies and hardware for watching movies and TV, other competitors in those spaces were producing original content, it seemed absolutely logical for them to do so as well.

The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.

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

#579

Post by TaylorAlexander »

gnicholas wrote: post #527
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yep, I could totally see them enabling this only on Pro-level iPhones, for example. This would presumably be because Pro devices could have different chips that are designed to handle these specific tasks, as well as having larger batteries. I expect there will be a lot of iPhone upgrades this fall, as buyers will finally see a difference between their 1-3 year old device and a new iPhone.

Indeed, this is what the rumor mill is suggesting:

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/02/14/iphone-16-upgraded-neur...

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

#580

Post by MBCook »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #547
coldtea wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When Apple got into music players no one cared because they were waiting for the company to die.

When Apple got into watches there were lots of rumors they were for years first, and it made sense as an extension to the iPhone. Remember the Pebble already showed the basic idea could be useful.

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