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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

#361

Post by __loam »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #147

So Apple pivots from one thing that it doesn't have a natural advantage with to another. Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at. AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure. To say AI moves fast is a serious understatement. I predict that which is white hot now (LLMs) will be a blind alley long left behind in a year o…

Apple has a massive war chest of cash and the equity they give people is liquid. I think you're really underestimating their ability to attract talent and pay people.

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

#362

Post by bluGill »

notahacker wrote: post #283
melenaboija wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP See what Rimac did, it is a good example that starting a luxury sports car company and be successful is possible nowadays, and talking from the ignorance it seems to me easier than the past. If that is what apple wants or needs is a different story.

Building supercars has always been a cottage industry that anyone can get involved in but nobody can dominate in the way Apple has certain classes of electronic product. There's a lot of choice, few buyers and it's not high margin compared with mass produced electronics at industry-leading markup even if engineers at the popular companies aren't more obsessed with beauty and speed than the bottom line. What Rimac did…

Most of your cottage automotive manufactures are partners with a big brand. You can do many things on your own, but you want the large partner to supply engines (it is basically impossible for a small industry to build an emissions compliant engine from scratch - expect to spend over a billion $ in the R&D if you try - and you can only get that cheap if a lot of the engineering is done in places like India). You also buy your airbags from their supplier.

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

#363

Post by vikramkr »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #193
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…

An Apple that doesn't attempt something because it's hard is an Apple that is going to fade. There aren't many trillion dollar markets; I think attempting to break into cars was probably the most accessible of the trillion dollar markets to Apple. What were the alternatives? Oil? Real Estate? ...?

I don't think an apple that works by stack ranking existing high capex low margin markets and ruthlessly focusing on revenue growth is an apple that's not gonna fade. That sounds more like Amazon's vibe. Creating trillion dollar markets is more apples vibe but that's not exactly an easy thing to do - they're trying again with vision so let's see how that goes.

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

#364

Post by MyFirstSass »

kccqzy wrote: post #331
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #147

So Apple pivots from one thing that it doesn't have a natural advantage with to another. Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at. AI, generative or otherwise, is going to be their next failure. To say AI moves fast is a serious understatement. I predict that which is white hot now (LLMs) will be a blind alley long left behind in a year o…

I predict they are going to use whatever Google provides (Gemini) and asks Google to pay them money to make it the default. Siri powered by Gemini. Why develop a technology yourself when you have enough market clout to let others pay you to use their tech? And Google, desperate for market share and mind share, might just agree to that while paying Apple a tidy sum (probably not a whole lot).

Apple is one of richest companies in the world, already has chips most competent for AI in any widespread portable devices, and smaller teams like the one at Mistral can create something as competent as the 7b model without backing from the largest players, ie. if Apple wants it they could buy up a lot of talent create something wild.

Also Gemma is a complete joke, and gemini is still not on par in my view.

If they drop the ball it's organisational - like the way they have ignored any documentation for the Neural Engine and just started with MLX now, Ferret etc. But they are moving!

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

#365

Post by matwood »

passion__desire wrote: post #351
bluGill wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody is interesting if you get talking to them. You just think the guy who collects your trash is uninteresting and never talk to him (or do you?). Sure not everyone has the same background, and so they are interesting in different ways, but they are all interesting.

Interests must align. People must know common jargon which convey high density information faster. I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

You must be fun at parties.

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

#366

Post by jjtheblunt »

stevev wrote: post #90
MisterPea wrote: post #10

Cook's best trait is being reactive very well. What he lacks in the Jobs "magic", he has in the ability to react to industry incredibly well and do better than most. I have little doubt Apple is going to be a major player in AI, especially in the non-Nvidia hardware space after playing around with MLX

I disagree. They had a leading edge with Siri but failed to invest in AI over a car. This move is just correcting a vital mistake in time past. They’re playing catch up.

How would one know how much they invested in AI, if they've not discussed such?

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

#367

Post by input_sh »

bradgessler wrote: post #263
itronitron wrote: post #249

It's shocking/hilarious how much/many people believe that there are any economic prospects in generative AI. By definition, if something is generated by an AI then it's worthless if for no other reason than supply and demand. There's also a reason it's called a singularity, it sucks everything in that touches it but otherwise has very little influence on anything else.

Have you tried talking to Siri? Compare that to ChatGPT and you'll see that it's much better. The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases, which when connected to "plugins" means we'll all have our own personal assistants. That's worth something.

Why would they want to run LLM queries every time someone asks Siri for the normal shit people ask their voice assistants: weather, timers, controlling music; on a scale of every iPhone user out there.

It'd just be waisting compute money with no obvious way of recouping the cost. Doubt many people would be interested in paying for Siri.

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

#368

Post by brailsafe »

bluGill wrote: post #323
brailsafe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue this is true of a lot of cities where you're likely to bump into anyone, depending on how narrow your scope is of what one considers interesting. Also true of probably most universities if they're doing anything right. The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram…

Everybody is interesting if you get talking to them. You just think the guy who collects your trash is uninteresting and never talk to him (or do you?). Sure not everyone has the same background, and so they are interesting in different ways, but they are all interesting.

This is exactly what I meant, but even beyond relatively common jobs, if you're likely enough to bump into open people, there's a good chance some of them will be doing more niche interesting things too

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

#369

Post by bluGill »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #151
jcgrillo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it looked to me like they were going for the supercar market (>$250k price tag, low volume) which (I guess naively) seemed pretty sensible..

It's in opposition to the brand. Apple products range from affordable to aspirational. But every line is carefully segmented so there's a somewhat affordable option - certainly not cheap, but relatively accessible. And all mass-produced in incredible numbers. A low volume $250k car would be pure luxury for the sake of it. That's not Apple's market. Apple's market would be a $50k Tesla killer with far better styling a…

A common way to break into the car market is to start with the very expensive cars. You just barely break even at best, but you learn enough in those early cars so that in 5 years you can build the next cheaper model, and so on down the line.

It isn't the only way to break in, but it is common.

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

#370

Post by __loam »

thefourthchime wrote: post #234
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…

Siri being terrible is thrown around thoughtlessly, you should try it. It's actually pretty good these days. It's shocking how many things it can respond with actual answers.

I think Siri being terrible is probably an indictment of ai now broadly, more so than people believe right now.
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