I'm excited to see Elon Musk vs Apple. grabs popcorn
I would have loved to see Elon Musk vs. Steve Jobs. Personalities are quite contrasting.
Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
111–120 of 174 posts
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#112Cars are going to dictate what technology silo you end up joining. The car that works the best as a communicationpod/office will win the next major consumer battle just as Apple won the smart phone war. This is about Google not Tesla.
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Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't care. And I'm not offended or upset in the slightest. I'm simply curious. And mildly amused.
Karma actually has a real value on HN because it prevents some people from downvoting. If an Google fan keeps an Apple fan below the karma threshold then the Apple fan won't be able to shape future discussions. The system encourages people to downvote even reasonable comments that are from the "other team". You ran into somebody like that.
To do that, "the other team" person would have to make a calculation based on keeping a certain account they don't like below 500 points. I don't think it's even possible to achieve that if anyone tried, and the probability of an account being just at that limit is pretty low to begin with.
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#114I'm excited to see Elon Musk vs Apple. grabs popcorn
I would have loved to see Elon Musk vs. Steve Jobs. Personalities are quite contrasting.
Steve Jobs up ended multiple industries. Musk is no small player but Jobs basically reinvented the way the game was played when he entered an industry. Musk wouldn't have had a chance.
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#115On one hand, Apple is clearly not in their wheelhouse when it comes to vehicles - even Google has more experience than them. On the other hand, I would kill for an electric (or even hybrid) minivan. The Model-S with 2 extra seats just isn't enough room. On the gripping hand, look at how Apple played the industry and pundits on sapphire. Where is WSJ getting their info - they didn't even describe their sources.
Google has that experience because of their own research. There's nothing to say that any other company of large enough size can't do research of their own. This is especially important to consider when you think about the level of secrecy Apple has when starting an internal project. Despite all of that, it's super unlikely Apple would make a car. It's just too weird.
Google bought Thrun's self driving car startup, well after he led the team which won the DARPA Grand Challenge with Stanley; and subsequently acquired additional startups with autonomous vehicle technology. Apple purchased chip design firms to bootstrap its integrated chip capabilities, quite successfully. They've demonstrated the ability to assimilate outside technology.
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#116Apple hardware is generally beautiful and feels extremely well built, but usually makes a few key compromises of function for the sake of form, with the result that some of their gear is prone to failure after a surprisingly short period of time. Take pretty much every Apple cable ever made for example. They lack stress relief and, hence, tend to fall apart where they are stressed. Some of this can be blamed on Steve…
I respect this sentiment and am not completely dismissing the analogy, but there are certainly more safety regulations and checks on cars than on low-voltage DC power cables.
To flip that around, it's a lot easier to F up an automobile than a simple conductor!
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I thought at first too, but as I thought about it, I began to wonder. They certainly have the chutzpah to try, and they have an ocean of money to spend overseas. A longshot bet on building another trillion dollar product might be preferable to paying corporate and personal income tax on dividends.
No, I totally agree with cgusto. Building a vehicle manufacturing base is a mammoth undertaking. Tesla's been at it for 12 years and is only now putting out 35,000 cars a year. It really doesn't make that much difference how much money you start off with; that was never Tesla's obstacle. Elon has said as much on more than one occasion, that they're spending money as fast as they can and the only real limit is the amo…
Right, but the article's point is that they started working on cars. You are making the point that it would take them a long time to build it.. They have the cash and I don't see why they would be in any rush, if driverless cars are expected on the streets in 2020, or potentially 2023..
As a matter of fact, Apple's last quarterly profit was $18bn, while Tesla's valuation, is $25bn. They could buy a company like Tesla every two quarters..
Furthermore, maybe what they are trying to do is to create some in-house talent, in preparation for future purchases. Perhaps so that they can have their own employees join those of the acquired company..
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#118I tried to make this point a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8962872 Basically, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have so much money, they could take on a huge problem and "invent" the future.
1997-2000 showed us that having a lot of money is no guarantee you'll build something that anyone wants to use (or at least, that they want to pay for).
Who said anything about any guarantees? Hopefully, we're all a little smarter and if all three companies each tried a few moonshots, we'd get a few really big advances.
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is not a software house? They produce two OS's with development tooling and applications, they run some of the largest online services on the Internet, and they just released their own new programming language. What would a software house look like?
Software for a self-driving car has to be built to a standard that's entirely different from anything they've had to build to before. Lives are at stake.
Based on my experience with desktop software, I'd take the Apple software over pretty much any other vendor every day of the week. Funnily enough, nobody seems to question Google's chops when it comes to making self driving cars. Yet I have more problems with bad software decisions from Google than I do from Apple.
Re: Apple Gears Up to Challenge Tesla in Electric Cars
#120No log in. It was nice while it lasted, for 1-2 phrases though.