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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

#711

Post by stephen_g »

type0 wrote: post #637
xorcist wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A connected PDA was always a thing. Palm/3Com made phones. HP/Compaq made iPaq phones. Sharp made their Zaurus. The were OEM phones you could get branded. The Qt guys had their Trolltech phone. Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like. The Apple phone was perhaps the…

> There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them

Terrible compared to what? At the time, mobile applications were universally pretty crap. Browsers were atrocious, not being able to render real CSS or anything (they’d give you a simplified broken layout). I didn’t have the first iPhones (my first was the iPhone 4) but I had a first generation iPod Touch, and Safari felt pretty magical at the time compared to anything else on the market. The capacitive screen, multitouch, being able to decently render pages - lots of stuff we totally take for granted now…

The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.

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

#712

Post by baggy_trough »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #700
KerrAvon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of latent demand; there isn't currently a viable charging network and NACS doesn't take over until 2025.

And there'd be a hell of a lot more demand if we priced the negative externality of the CO2 emitted and damage ICE vehicles do to the environment but sadly we don't.

There’s quite a big subsidy for EVs though.

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

#713

Post by adolph »

willbw wrote: post #674
skullone wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Apple products also uniformly garish and tasteless with tons of half baked features too? Glad we don't have to see what dumb ideas Apple had in store for us in the automotive realm. The m1/m2 are good chips, but macos is stagnant, iPhones have... memojis as their new feature? Apple has good industrial design for devices that fit in the palm of your hand. I truthfully cannot fathom how that could extend to a ca…

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.

> I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.

Not that I disagree in general, but the Apple Watch Edition is arguably in that zone.

Most recently, he was seen wearing a solid 18k yellow gold Apple Watch on a special gold bracelet that was never made available to the public (the same one that Beyoncé and other celebrities were also rocking). The best part though? He appears to have never actually set the thing up, instead going Andy Warhol–style, wearing it purely as a piece of jewelry.

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/karl-lagerfeld-audemars-pi...

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

#714

Post by svnt »

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…

And this truth is probably the biggest reason why they killed the program.

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

#715

Post by [deleted] »

gavin_gee wrote: post #651

IMHO This is an excellent decision by Apple. 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.

[deleted]

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

#716

Post by rezonant »

Fricken wrote: post #511
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…

The comments here are all so off-base. People who work on cars don't get moved to gen-AI. People who work on robocars get moved to gen-AI.

All we have on what this car was supposed to be was rumors, but the rumors seemed pretty consistent, that this was going to be a self driving car.

I do agree that there's a huge amount of specialization for cars that doesn't overlap with gen AI in any meaningful way.

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

#717

Post by j0ba »

dublinben wrote: post #498
freeone3000 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple cars would aim more for the (1) bracket than the (3). Apple products are status items. Same particular utility can be had much cheaper.

How can Apple products be status items when over 60% of smartphones in the US are iPhones? Is Coca-Cola a status item? Is it possible that they're just good products that deliver good value to the majority of people who buy them? Is a $1300 Galaxy S24 Ultra not a status item?

https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/lifestyle/android-users-less-a...

Hmm good question

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

#718

Post by mise_en_place »

iwontberude wrote: post #658
ein0p wrote: post #656

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.

Yeah, when you’re broke. The average American is struggling to pay for food, an electric car is the last thing on their minds.

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

#720

Post by p1necone »

Raptor22 wrote: post #539
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.

> original project (a bus) This is actually insane to me. Like bonkers, even. The MBA types are surely the source of that idea. From a brand perspective, the only car that ever truly made sense for Apple to make was something at least resembling a supercar. They could have made do with a Telsa Model S kind of car perhaps, but I'm shocked that a brand-conscious company like Apple thought a bus was the best bet as an i…

Everything Apple makes is ultimately still meant to be practical. I feel like the Apple car would be more like "Corolla, but very high end, and 3x the price" rather than a supercar.
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