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Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

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

#301

Post by sneak »

mdhb wrote: post #198
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple had a huge lead on this with Siri, and then let it stagnate - actually devolve - instead of throwing money at it to develop it further. My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system. Text/image is close to being a solved problem, video is on its way but still not great. Both will be impossible to beat from a cold-ish start. I'm not convinced Apple has the hire-power to att…

If Apple’s grand plan is convincing large numbers of people to stick a $3000 clunky ass rectangular box to their face they are in serious trouble.

Obviously, it won’t be $3000 and it won’t be clunky. The current version is basically a dev kit.

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

#302

Post by samatman »

croes wrote: post #201

Sounds like Apple is in panic mode and FOMO because they are late to the GPT game. Similar cases didn't work out for MS

Apple's playbook for at least three decades has been getting in the game late, but timing "late" very carefully so that the product they debut defines the category.

The iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, AirPods. It's the most obvious thing about the company, this is a bland truism at this point.

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

#303

Post by filmgirlcw »

gambiting wrote: post #181
filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especia…

The only way it could possibly work was always as an apple branded model under the umbrella of another manufacturer, with their support and dealership network. Think polestar being its own brand but using Volvo workshops for servicing and support, as well as using a lot of Volvo parts internally. I can imagine an Apple car that's just a really fancy version of an existing car, with their own infotainment.

Oh, this I could also see. Apple hates to partner with others, for the most part, which is why I don’t think that happened. And some of that is for good reason. The awfulness of the Motorola Rokr is what convinced Steve Jobs that Apple had to fully own and control the iPhone.

And Apple is showing off parts of Car Play that could be fully integrated by manufacturers in a much deeper way, assuming they want to give up control (which given GM’s decision to drop Car Play and Android Auto, seems like it’ll be a challenge).

There is certainly a world where Apple could be a modern QNX unencumbered by its parent company baggage and a better business model (ongoing subscription and not 50-cents a car or whatever it is QNX gets) and provide the software for all that stuff, but based on everything that has been reported, that wasn’t what Apple was doing here. They were trying to build a real car. And as challenging and interesting as that might be as an R&D exercise, I just don’t see why that would be a business you’d willingly want to enter when you are so successful in other areas and the margins are so poor.

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

#304

Post by iancmceachern »

RealityVoid wrote: post #232
vineyardmike wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embarrassingly, I was eves dropping on a (loud) woman in a coffee shop who worked on the Apple Car project. She did SLAM work. I was evesdropping because that was a core part of my thesis and I was curious. She told her dining partner she was moved to the Vision Pro team to build the inside-out tracking. Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on…

I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things. The density of talent must be amazing.

It is amazing, and happens exactly this way.

I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.

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

#305

Post by iancmceachern »

boznz wrote: post #246
RealityVoid wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things. The density of talent must be amazing.

And I am so happy I live in a place where this doesn't happen.

Please elaborate

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

#306

Post by op00to »

RealityVoid wrote: post #232
vineyardmike wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embarrassingly, I was eves dropping on a (loud) woman in a coffee shop who worked on the Apple Car project. She did SLAM work. I was evesdropping because that was a core part of my thesis and I was curious. She told her dining partner she was moved to the Vision Pro team to build the inside-out tracking. Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on…

I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things. The density of talent must be amazing.

Interesting things happen in many places, not just Silicon Valley. You simply need to keep your ears open and listen.

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

#307

Post by pests »

chucke1992 wrote: post #233
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple had a huge lead on this with Siri, and then let it stagnate - actually devolve - instead of throwing money at it to develop it further. My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system. Text/image is close to being a solved problem, video is on its way but still not great. Both will be impossible to beat from a cold-ish start. I'm not convinced Apple has the hire-power to att…

The problem with Siri (and with Alexa) is that Apple was not able to provide enough value for people to make it mainstream. Alexa at least worked for home appliances but using Siri for Macbook or iPhone? Why? Not to mention Apple was not able to monetize it.

I haven't heard someone talk to Siri in a loooong time.

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

#308

Post by brian_cunnie »

zer00eyz wrote: post #109
filmgirlcw wrote: post #18

Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. It’s one thing to create a new car company (even tho those attempts usually fail), it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins. Especia…

>>> Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business. Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc. The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of u…

> unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed

I beg to differ; when I was at AT&T in the late eighties we tried to enter the computer business, on the PC side with Olivetti, and on the UNIX side with the 3B2 minicomputers made with our own chips running System V UNIX. I even had a 3B2-200 in my house for a couple of years.

Entering a new business is hard: although the engineering was solid, we didn't have a saleforce trained in selling computers, and we didn't have a rich ecosystem (Oracle! Ingres! Informix!). AT&T didn't throw UNIX out the window, but found that capitalizing on UNIX was hard.

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

#309

Post by bogota »

epistasis wrote: post #272
boznz wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I am so happy I live in a place where this doesn't happen.

Interesting, but I can't understand why that makes you happy. What benefit does it bring you?

Some people like talking about things not related to their job when they aren’t working. The culture out in SV is very much still “work is life”.
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