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Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

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Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#21

Post by johnrogers0 »

Theodores wrote: post #15

I wonder if this autonomous driving thing has gone off the boil across the industry. Years ago fully autonomous was only just around the corner - as in five years away - but now nobody is talking of much more than improved lane keeping assist grade safety features, stopping if someone walks in front of the car rather than navigating a whole city including small streets. The scale of autonomous has been misleading. Ei…

I never really understood how the industry was able to ensure, from a legal standpoint, the failsafeness of autonomous cars. There are bound to be errors, such as the incident last year with running over a homeless woman who was clearly visible to a real eye, but not detected.

It’s simply impossible to account for all the corner cases, especially when you have to factor in manual drivers who can behave arbitrarily (what if they purposely drive weird just to mess with the autonomous cars?).

In fact, autonomous cars may increase danger rates as human drivers become quite peeved at sharing the road with them, and try to derail them at all cost.

Maybe these are the reasons they gave up.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#22

Post by culturestate »

nostrademons wrote: post #12
pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

It reminds me of the Apple of the early 1990s. So many stupid vanity projects, some of which were actually pretty cool: Newton, Dylan, Copland, Taligent, OpenDoc, etc. And yet they couldn't succeed at their bread and butter of selling computers. There's no Steve Jobs to bring them back from the brink this time.

What precipice does Apple need to be walked back from? Certainly not the current one, where they rake in an amount of money roughly equal to the GDP of Luxembourg in a single quarter.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#23

Post by bonestamp2 »

saagarjha wrote: post #8
pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

> Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead? What is the "vanity project" in this case? I think it's pretty clear that Mac sales won't last forever, and it's not like Apple is strapped for cash and can't afford to pay for both teams.

I assume he's talking about the car project. It seems like they now have fewer than 1000 engineers on that project, so I can't imagine what they're doing with that few engineers. That would be pretty small scope in the auto sector. There's one large automaker I consult for and they've got more people than that just working on software they use internally.

So, in scale, it might seem like a vanity project, but Apple obviously knows something we don't. For example, Tesla hired a couple of chip engineers from Apple and designed their own chip (to replace the NVidia gpu they were using). Maybe Apple has something unique in the pipeline that would be applicable to machine vision or something else useful to cars and it makes sense to market that to OEMs (I highly doubt they're building an entire car with so few engineers, makes more sense that they would be supplying a component and/or software).

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#24

Post by rurban »

leesec wrote: post #9
pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

Apple has 250 billion dollars at their disposal. They can obviously have multiple efforts running in parallel.

Yes, but obviously they cannot fix the more urging problems in their core business: Keyboards, laptop CPU's and memory, macOS development. It's a desaster area every developer working with their products wants to leave as soon as possible.

And why should I trust them with an iPhone or car then, when the simpliest products were run into the ground.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#25

Post by bonestamp2 »

johnrogers0 wrote: post #21
Theodores wrote: post #15

I wonder if this autonomous driving thing has gone off the boil across the industry. Years ago fully autonomous was only just around the corner - as in five years away - but now nobody is talking of much more than improved lane keeping assist grade safety features, stopping if someone walks in front of the car rather than navigating a whole city including small streets. The scale of autonomous has been misleading. Ei…

I never really understood how the industry was able to ensure, from a legal standpoint, the failsafeness of autonomous cars. There are bound to be errors, such as the incident last year with running over a homeless woman who was clearly visible to a real eye, but not detected. It’s simply impossible to account for all the corner cases, especially when you have to factor in manual drivers who can behave arbitrarily (w…

> what if they purposely drive weird just to mess with the autonomous cars?

I got a car about 6 months ago with Level 2 Autonomy and I'd say it's even more than just trying to mess with them. Now that I know the subtleties of how my car behaves, it's easy to spot other drivers who have theirs engaged too. I can use that to my advantage when appropriate and it takes some ethics not to abuse them. For example, if I have to merge I'll merge in front of one of those cars, purely from a safety standpoint -- I know that car is going to respond and give itself lots of space. Of course, people could use that much more maliciously to take advantage of those cars "niceness".

I've never had anyone mess with my car just for the sake of it, but you can see the seasoned Tesla owners taking the opportunities that they spot. It changes the way other drivers drive if they can identify the behavior.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#26

Post by darawk »

pentae wrote: post #11
culturestate wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes the products Apple wants to make; that those product choices might not align with everyone's preferences (I'm pretty happy with my 2018 MBP, for instance) doesn't mean the company can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Particularly when they make $200 billion per year in revenue.

Well thats my point - it seems that they can't chew gum and walk at the same time. If they could, we'd have Macs that are updated to the latest gen hardware in a reasonable amount of time, and issues like the faulty keyboard would have been fixed by now after 3 years.

Or Apple just believes they can make more money not updating them.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#27

Post by saagarjha »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #23
saagarjha wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead? What is the "vanity project" in this case? I think it's pretty clear that Mac sales won't last forever, and it's not like Apple is strapped for cash and can't afford to pay for both teams.

I assume he's talking about the car project. It seems like they now have fewer than 1000 engineers on that project, so I can't imagine what they're doing with that few engineers. That would be pretty small scope in the auto sector. There's one large automaker I consult for and they've got more people than that just working on software they use internally. So, in scale, it might seem like a vanity project, but Apple o…

> It seems like they now have fewer than 1000 engineers on that project

I believe Apple has significantly more employees disclosed on this project than that. This is clearly not a "vanity project".

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#28

Post by ghaff »

Theodores wrote: post #15

I wonder if this autonomous driving thing has gone off the boil across the industry. Years ago fully autonomous was only just around the corner - as in five years away - but now nobody is talking of much more than improved lane keeping assist grade safety features, stopping if someone walks in front of the car rather than navigating a whole city including small streets. The scale of autonomous has been misleading. Ei…

A number of researchers without vested interests have been saying this all along. But they’ve been drowned out by those many who so wanted to believe, not least of which the young urbanites who so desperately wanted to believe they would never need to buy a car and would be driven everywhere all their lives.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#29

Post by saagarjha »

ulfw wrote: post #17
pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

I have no idea why you're getting downvoted. If a company decides not to produce wireless routers (which were class leading) or monitors etc anymore, all because they're non "core" to a computer/mobile hardware company then I don't see how building automotive AI is core to a computer/mobile hardware computer company that has zero core competency in either car manufacturing or AI.

> I don't see how building automotive AI is core to a computer/mobile hardware computer

I don't see why Apple needs to stay within the bounds what what you think their "core" products are.

Re: Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

#30

Post by baxtr »

pentae wrote: post #6

When you can't make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU's 2 generations behind.. Maybe it's time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

“can’t make” - that is a very general statement. I am quite happy with my MBP
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