Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

aboveavalon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 269 posts

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#211

Post by eric_h »

mcphage wrote: post #193
Communitivity wrote: post #164

I don't understand the confusion on what Apple's next big thing is, they've laid it out time and again. 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 i…

> I don't understand the confusion on what Apple's next big thing is, they've laid it out time and again. [...] It's the same thing OpenAI, HARC, and other groups are working on: creating revolutionary intelligent assistants and possibly achieving strong AI. I hope so, but given they released Siri in 2011, and only minimally improved on it since, it doesn't look like they're giving the field much attention. It doesn'…

> given they released Siri in 2011, and only minimally improved on it since

It's quite possible that their iterative loop on Siri and Siri-like experiments simply doesn't include the general populace. Apple does not have much of a history of touting beta software and using their customers as guinea pigs, but internally they definitely do.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#212

Post by bo1024 »

baron816 wrote: post #200

I don't like the idea of Apple (or even Google for that matter) making cars. It seems like such a weird space for a company that makes consumer electronics parts to move into. It would be almost as weird as them starting to build houses. And I don't want to buy all my stuff from one company. Either way, I'm skeptical that any company is going to make huge, monopolistic profits from selling autonomous cars. It's somet…

I don't like the idea of Apple making cars for the same reason I'm uncomfortable with their phones: you won't own the car you're purchasing, in most meaningful senses of the word "own". (We have seen this problem with Tesla already.)

To your second point, I'm not sure that autonomous tech will be easily commoditizable. Some companies will have much better tech than others and consumers will prefer them. Think about internet search engines: The easiest of all industries to compete in, yet (or "thus") full of huge, monopolistic profits.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#213

Post by blktiger »

beloch wrote: post #37

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…

In 2015 Apple had ~234B in revenue. 10B is only 4.27% of that. If you look at the percentage of R&D vs sales that's still actually drastically less than they spent in R&D up until about 2005. It could just be that Apple has decided to spend a bit more percentage wise and they have expanded the amount of things they are researching instead of indicating a focus on one specific thing.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#214

Post by ryandrake »

paulftw wrote: post #119

I think median Software Engineer Salary also followed hockey stick graph over last couple of years, as well as CA real estate prices, so it isn't that clear that Apple grew headcount at all. When iPhone came out there was no app store nor 3rd party apps; when apps arrived they had no push notifications; icloud didn't exist and so on. Products become exponentially more complex, requiring proportional growth in R&D. Th…

Is there any actual evidence showing that median salaries are anything but stagnant recently? There may be a few outlier people at a few outlier companies experiencing "hockey stick" growth, but is this true for the median?

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#215

Post by obsurveyor »

dpcx wrote: post #180
forgetsusername wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding dealerships, ever heard of Tesla? Tesla is trying this model, but I don't know whether anyone can makes claims as to its success yet. Right now they're pretty low volume and are losing lots of money. Maybe the no dealer model scales, maybe it doesn't.

Tesla also doesn't have quite the clout that Apple does. Apple could literally bully their way in to the self-sales car market...

They'd still be facing the same dealer and local legislative roadblocks that Tesla has been triggering states to create or enforce since they started and they can't just bully through that. It will require lobbying, time and possibly new legislation, none of which is fast.

Having Tesla front-run a lot of this stuff is pretty smart if they are intending to go that route though.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#216

Post by bresc »

I have to ask: Why cars? Why are Google, Tesla and now Apple supposedly investing in cars?

From the European point of view cars seem to be a dead end. More and more people live in an urban area and more and more young people use public transportation way more often, than cars. Additionally carsharing makes owning a car in a german city kinda obsolete.

So... why cars?

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#217

Post by rco8786 »

bresc wrote: post #216

I have to ask: Why cars? Why are Google, Tesla and now Apple supposedly investing in cars? From the European point of view cars seem to be a dead end. More and more people live in an urban area and more and more young people use public transportation way more often, than cars. Additionally carsharing makes owning a car in a german city kinda obsolete. So... why cars?

> public transportation

because private companies don't generally dabble in public infrastructure :)

I think at this point it's less about cars or electric cars, but more about self-driving cars(that happen to be electric). In the U.S. at least, we have a MASSIVE roadway infrastructure that's not going anywhere for a long time. Utilizing that probably looks like a much easier path to automated transportation than does building up the rather sparse network of railways.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#218

Post by ZenoArrow »

neo2006 wrote: post #209
ZenoArrow wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not naive, you just can't predict the ROI.

What I was calling naive is the fact of seeing innovation and creating products as the same thing, it's not.

In that case, you misread what I said. I stated it was possible to monetise the research results. In other words, you can take what you find in the lab and find ways to sell this knowledge. It doesn't matter whether that's through licensing or physical products.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#219

Post by simonh »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #160
simonh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

The car industry is about to go through two completely independent revolutions simultaneously. The move to electric power trains, and self-driving. This is the perfect time for an outsider to enter the market because the incumbents have no advantage in these fields relative to a newcomer. In fact as fundamentally hardware companies they have the same issues with figuring out how to develop first class software that the phone companies did.

Apple has huge expertise in both these areas. Not electric motors sure, but electronics design and manufacturing in general and specifically battery technology on the power train side and software on the self-driving side.

But the key to their potential is software. I think the main reason for Apple's success is their super high quality OS core, code libraries and software development tool chain combined with one of the greatest software engineering culture and talent pools on the planet. They have exploited this advantage ruthlessly ever since the 90s. It underlies the success of all their best products - even the iPod if you bear in mind that iTunes was built on these core advantages. Yes iTunes is a mess now, but it made the success of the iPod possible.

The key to success in the coming car revolution will be software. Computers will control and orchestrate every aspect of the internal operation of the vehicle, and that's before you even get to external operations with self-driving. Only Microsoft has the depth of software development competence and the technology platform resources to compete with Apple in this area, but for whatever reason they just don't seem to be able to get their act together when it comes to engineering complete product stacks rather than individual technologies.

Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming

#220

Post by gmarx »

bresc wrote: post #216

I have to ask: Why cars? Why are Google, Tesla and now Apple supposedly investing in cars? From the European point of view cars seem to be a dead end. More and more people live in an urban area and more and more young people use public transportation way more often, than cars. Additionally carsharing makes owning a car in a german city kinda obsolete. So... why cars?

Imagine this future in Europe: pretty much no one owns a personal car. When you want to go somewhere you order a car on your phone and within 10 minutes a driverless car arrives and takes you to your detination. Your music plays through the sound system. The back seat is comfy and you have plenty of room to work or surf the internet. The trip could be to the hardware store, or hundreds of miles to visit family.
Post reply on HN