161–170 of 269 posts
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For one because there is no evidence of it. Apple are secretive but at some point you have to take a car out on an actual road to see how it fares. And get government permisison to do so. The fact that Apple has done neither leads me to suspect Google is further ahead.
Government permission was quietly granted already. It was just quietly done.
Isn't it basically impossible for Apple to surprise us with a driverless car? Surely all of the process to make a driverless car legal would be in public? Surely the production line for any kind of car at all would be almost impossible to organise covertly, all the factory space, tooling etc?
Looking back, it was still a big surprise once the details were known. So, a car? Build a roof, sign some NDAs, and do your best.
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Tesla makes 25% margin on their cars.
IIRC, Tesla has had only one profitable quarter since 2003, its founding. Last quarter, they had 1.4 Billion in cash and had a $280 Million shortfall. In ONE quarter. That's AFTER accounting for the +$350 Million-ish they brought in from the Model 3 pre-orders btw. I don't think they are going to repeat the +350ish thousand preorders at +$1000 cash per anytime soon.
The gross margin on Model S is indeed 25%, and the gross margin on Model X is also expected to exceed 25% once volume production is finished ramping up.
Come to think of it, I think I just saw a slide with it right on the single slide during the Viv presentation. I went back and found it. Here is the video URL at the time the slide is shown: https://youtu.be/Rblb3sptgpQ?t=51
It's the same thing OpenAI, HARC, and other groups are working on: creating revolutionary intelligent assistants and possibly achieving strong AI. The chance to work on that project at Apple, that I might consider a move for.
Applied AI combined with conversational or AR interfaces to create specialized personal assistants will be the next in the line of game changers such as car, flight, radio, telephone, computer, rocket, internet, cell phone, the web, smart phone, tablets, and data mining.
I've now begun to think that the increase in what everyone is calling "R&D" is just Apple become too large to any longer be efficient. Perhaps they've crossed that point mentioned in the Mythical Man Month where gains in team size decrease productivity.
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I think the phone industry just didn't think it possible that real ground breaking innovation in their industry was at all possible. They imagined a phone must have a physical keyboard, couldn't run a decent web browser and Microsoft was already selling the best mobile OS it was possible to make. It wasn't that they doubted Apple's commitment, they just didn't have the imagination. To be fair to them, Apple timed thi…
Cars are a terrible industry to get into. Building cars is massively capital and plant intensive, heavily dependent on supply chain logistics, and the market is already extremely competitive. The entire industry is well on its way to switching to electric and/or self-driving. Selling cars requires a huge dealer network rollout with huge up-front costs for training and spares. Doing it DIY would be insanely expensive,…
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I find that shocking. They are using new/expensive technology, high quality parts and low volume production methods and they are making a higher margin than a company like BMW or GM who have the benefit of scale and ability to squeeze suppliers? Not saying your number is wrong, I'm just really surprised.
BMW or Mercedes make million different models of their vehicles. Some of them make a lot of money, some of them are probably losing money and always will - M or AMG products are very expensive, but they sell relatively few cars every year - their brands keep those cars to be leaders in their sectors, not because there's a huge amount of money to be made on them(good example of that is the Veyron made by the VW group…
Does the research only apply to the Veyron? I'd be surprised if they can't use advances there in other lines of cars or get patents that they can profit from when used by other car manufacturers.
It does however speak to good marketing to say "we make this car for the love of making cars" rather than "we use this as a way of targeting R&D that we can then exploit in other vehicle lines".
/cynicism
According to this chart, Apple spent $6B in 2014 and is projected to spend just over $10B in 2016. For comparison, in 2014 Volkswagen spent $13.5B, Samsung spent $13.4B, and Microsoft spent $10.4B. [1] Apple has, historically, not been a big spender when it comes to research, tending to favor short-term, tightly focused research over long-term, curiosity driven research. Over the last few years their research budget…
Just imagine how much fun Ive would have designing an orbital space station. What's interesting is how aggressively they're moving into the car space if that's what's happening. The phone people had no idea, they got blindsided thinking Apple wouldn't have the guts, would never commit the money.
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Just imagine how much fun Ive would have designing an orbital space station. What's interesting is how aggressively they're moving into the car space if that's what's happening. The phone people had no idea, they got blindsided thinking Apple wouldn't have the guts, would never commit the money.
I think the phone industry just didn't think it possible that real ground breaking innovation in their industry was at all possible. They imagined a phone must have a physical keyboard, couldn't run a decent web browser and Microsoft was already selling the best mobile OS it was possible to make. It wasn't that they doubted Apple's commitment, they just didn't have the imagination. To be fair to them, Apple timed thi…
In fact, when I was first sold on the concept, the guy who started the company talked me through how he imagined a "home base station" that he'd use while there, and how he wanted the device to smoothly hand off to the mobile network if he took it out of the house.
The choice of a tablet over a smaller phone was about a convenient screen size, coupled with the initial devices being tied to the home anyway. But "everyone" around us had PalmPilots, and "everyone" expected PDAs and phones to merge eventually (and they did, sort of, but to see Palm giving in and going with a keyboard was a disappointment).
The challenge was that around the time the iPhone launched, people did not believe the market was there yet, nor that the hardware was ready, largely because "everyone else" had a go too early, failed, and essentially shelved the idea for the next decade as something that was way too early.
What Apple got exactly right and everyone else messed up was the timing.
E.g. we were shopping around our tablet prototype in '99 and 2000 based on a 100MHz or thereabouts 486 clone w/32MB RAM running Opera and a custom UI w/resistive touch. It was a fantastic device at the time, but the combination of not yet being able to provide a proper GSM enabled device, too short battery life, low RAM, slow, horrible resistive touch, and it was a device that would have appealed mostly to a small niche of geeks, but to work financally it needed to be a mass market device.
With the available hardware in 2006 we'd have a great starting point if we had started around then. But when we started in '99 the discussion was never "can these hardware constraints work in a way that can appeal to a mass market?" but "this is the price we need for it to work as a mass market device, and here are the tech specs that can fit within that price" and then we tried to make something that could be mass market from that... way too early.
To be clear: I'm not trying to downplay what Apple did. They made a product that appealed to a vastly larger market because they understood. But it wasn't because nobody else believed in touch enabled smart phones or tablets, but because they approached it from a usability and marketability perspective first, while everyone else were thinking like geeks willing to sacrifice usability for a "imagine if.." ideal of devices that were ultimately quite unfulfilling.
When the iPhone came out, a lot of us were pretty much "so what?" because we still did not understand the significance of that wait. We'd seen full screen touch, and we'd seen PDA's married with touch, and we'd seen larger tablet type devices (basically laptops with pivot screens mostly), and the iPhone to many people who'd been through the first round of hype around these type of devices just seemed like more of the same at first.
Until it became clear just how much of a difference the hardware advances and Apple's design had made to the whole thing.
We absolutely agree about their timing, and I think it's important not to underestimate how important it is to understand when the time is right and not get caught up in constraints that applied last year because that's when you started thinking about it.
It's very possible that we'll see something similar with cars. A lot of people have worked on driverless cars for a very long time, and the question is how much of the current designs are based on preconceptions that seemed to make sense a few years back, but where things can be done better today.