651–660 of 992 posts
what is their differentiated value for a car?
It's all downsize. If it didn't end up being amazing consumers would see behind the curtain and judge all their products. Margins on cars are nowhere near phones. I'm not sure there is a ton of cross over benefits from manufacturing small sized electronics vs large cars. Not to mention that apple outsources all of this work.
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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…
To be honest, I'm not sure what Apple could've brought to the table in regards to making an electric car. Apple's hardware design philosophies[1] don't really align with what consumers want in a car. Apple being less minimalistic than a Tesla — which is already at an extreme — is a hard sell. [1] Examples of what I mean: - Cars use faux materials all the time for cost and weight purposes, or even just looks (i.e. fak…
My guess is an Apple Car would have nice buttons and switches rather than the atrocious touch-screen-only setup many cars have.
> 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…
If you're talking about the total employee makeup of a current self-driving company, the number might be ~10-50%, depending on the company.
But if you take the subset of employees that work on software, this number is much much larger. There's lots of typical SW dev needed for GenAI (think data pipelines) but a good chunk of ML-folks doing self-driving work can be useful on GenAI as well.
Kinda still wish they’d have made it, or at least shown some pre-production work, just to see what a radical product re-think could look like in this space. Cars of 2024, even in the premium segment, are nearly uniformly garish and tasteless, with tons of half baked features of marginal utility accreted over the years and never perfected. Apple’s take on the category could have been a master class in product design a…
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> I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP See what Rimac did, it is a good example that starting a luxury sports car company and be successful is possible nowadays, and talking from the ignorance it seems to me easier than the past. If that is what apple wants or needs is a different story.
Building supercars has always been a cottage industry that anyone can get involved in but nobody can dominate in the way Apple has certain classes of electronic product. There's a lot of choice, few buyers and it's not high margin compared with mass produced electronics at industry-leading markup even if engineers at the popular companies aren't more obsessed with beauty and speed than the bottom line. What Rimac did…