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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

#641

Post by LarsDu88 »

samtheprogram wrote: post #609
pquki4 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: does Apple actually need so many people working on GenAI? Would a team with 300 people be twice as good as a team with 150 people for what Apple is going to release as products? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is going to lay off most of them.

The old Apple would've pitted two (much smaller) teams against each other. Not sure if the company culture really aligns with that type of structure now, but it's a big assumption that 300 people would all be a single team/org.

When you say "old apple" you're referring to the early 80s Apple where Steve Jobs pitted his Macintosh team against Wozniak's Apple II team to near disastrous results.

Jobs referred to the Mac team as "artists" and the Apple II guys as "bozos"

The company almost collapsed under the insane price of the gen 1 mac ($2,495, or nearly $8000 today) which lacked a desperately needed cooling fan and also didn't have color graphics.

I'm not sure if Jobs kept doing that after he came back in the late 90s, but that practice was generally not very effective from a mangerial perspective.

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

#642

Post by coldtea »

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.

>Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches

Those things were said for both music players and smart watches, by pundits and competitors alike.

E.g. re the Apple Watch, here's a Forbes summary: "In 2015, the year the Apple Watch was launched, LVMH watch division president and Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver said the Swiss industry was not afraid of Apple’s new product, because it could not be repaired in a thousand years or eighty years, nor inherited by children, nor would it ever become a status symbol. As is always the case when disruption occurs in an industry, traditional competitors are not able to see the threat, and continue to try to analyze it according to the variables that were important yesterday."

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

#643

Post by Auracle »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #605
nerdix wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more like a defensive play rather than one designed to directly open new revenue streams. In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind. In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't mov…

A "defensive play" would hardly involve investing in a technology with zero demonstrated value.

It’s insane to say generative AI has zero demonstrated value. I use it every day.

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

#644

Post by a1o »

ponector wrote: post #602
sitkack wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xiaomi is better at being the New Apple than Apple is. Apple should be selling micro transportation appliances that fit into a higher urbanized environment. Extremely small cars would be the largest thing I would rent .

Why would they do so? People wants huge premium cars. Land Cruiser! Panamera! Not many are dreaming for a luxury Fiat 500.

The electric Fiat 500 is super cool though.

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

#645

Post by ukuina »

pton_xd wrote: post #94
zyang wrote: post #33

It's insane how many companies went down the "full self driving by 2020" rabbit hole.

Now everyone's diving straight into the "full AGI by 2025" hole. Which, to be fair, would solve the "full self-driving" problem as a pure side-effect, I guess.

Low-latency multi-modal LLMs with constrained outputs can outperform most specialized prev-gen networks, so this may actually work out independent of achieving AGI!

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

#646

Post by huytersd »

jletienne wrote: post #614
maxerickson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't need to be twice as good, it needs to generate more net income.

has anyone cared about net income in decades? maybe it's about signaling to investors, "we have 100s of people working on [emergent technology]"

Just during every quarterly earning report

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

#648

Post by prawn »

MBCook wrote: post #576
ponector wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They might come out with a car that is quite expensive, but within reach of a fleet purchaser who can use it to create a turnkey Uber? /halfbakery

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

#649

Post by a1o »

andrewia wrote: post #267

I know somebody on the project. The cancellation makes sense, they were years from release and every new VP pivoted the project and lost progress. If they had committed to their original project (a bus) or the first revision (a very high-end car) they could have released on a timely schedule. But they're far too late to the game.

This is a bit sad though, a car is something more palpable than AI, I prefer Apple hardware than software. I was curious about what they would bring in this space. I can't find anything I could imagine being interesting of they bringing in AI space.

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

#650

Post by ethbr1 »

dtjb wrote: post #601
ethbr1 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers. The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product. Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain. Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry ab…

I think the risk to the carmaker is your customers getting used to the apple infotainment system. Maybe they start to see the car as less a Fiat and more an Apple car. Then the exclusive expires or needs to be renegotiated.

From Apple's perspective, yes. That's exactly the playbook that built the iPhone into what it is today.

People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands."

iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.

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