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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

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731–740 of 992 posts

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

#731
post #713
post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wouldn’t consider something that was never made available to the public a product, nor what looks like a simple gold bracelet particularly garish.

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

#732
post #729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But which one is a cargo bike? A mountain bike? A street bike? A commuter bike?

"These are not 4 separate devices"

I'm pointing out, as others have, that the bike market is highly fragmented, lots of variety for good reason. It would be hard to come put with "a" , or even "a line" of bikes. You really need a dozen

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

#734
post #59
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tesla doesn’t use dealerships.

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

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?

Actually, it was Cingular, which got purchased by ATT (I think)

Oh, it was Cingular at announcement and AT&T at launch. Interestingly,

> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.

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

#736
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.

They are! All modern cars look like Transformers toys. With their stupid mean-face grills. Design is awful.

I appreciate early cars when people didn't know what they should look like, and were just building all kinds of weird stuff. That awkwardness was charming. Now it's just generational pandering, and my generation is left out (apparently my generation is 1920's-1930's).

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

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?

Actually, it was Cingular, which got purchased by ATT (I think)

Actually, it was the other way around. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, which was _not_ part of the original AT&T at the time.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Wireless_Services

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

#738
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…

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…

Maybe the first bubble-shaped iMacs were? I always felt the translucency didn't pair well with saturated colors, and the plastic discolored in a gross way just like the 1980's putty-colored boxes of PC clones.

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

#739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Apple dodged a very uncool bullet here. Now make an e-bike, Tim Apple.

This. Ebike with non disableable airtag built into the frame as the killer feature.

This already exists: https://mfi.apple.com/

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

#740
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins. A car and a cell phone, or anything Apple has yet made, are wildly different. They may as well have had a battle tank program, or started making airplanes. Those things have screens and "infotainment systems" too.

> Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins.

Were they really close cousins in 2006?

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