661–670 of 992 posts
> 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…
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…
Maybe cars are inherently garish and tasteless.
In all the reporting I ever read on this project it seemed to be much more a self driving project than an EV project.
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…
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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…
And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.
I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
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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 gr…
https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/28/iphone-creation-click-wheel-t...
And although we cannot really know how much that internal competition contributed to iPhone's success, I think we can imagine that if Apple had shipped an iPod control interface (wheel and click button) with a phone inside it, it would have been nowhere near as successful as it was.
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…
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…
Maybe cars are inherently garish and tasteless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe cars are inherently garish and tasteless.
Doubt it. I think good ones can be made, it’s just that nobody gives a shit, including most of the buyers.
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…