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How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

bloomberg.com

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Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#51

Post by qeternity »

adamio wrote: post #47

I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driving kills the emotional experience that is used to sell cars.

The bigger issue is that autonomous cars make it extremely easy to massively boost utilization: driver assist still means your car sits at home, work, etc when not in use. This in turn means more cars are required by society. Autonomous cars can achieve much higher levels of utilization.

This is the real reason legacy car makers don't want fully autonomous vehicles.

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#53

Post by jrockway »

qeternity wrote: post #51
adamio wrote: post #47

I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driving kills the emotional experience that is used to sell cars.

The bigger issue is that autonomous cars make it extremely easy to massively boost utilization: driver assist still means your car sits at home, work, etc when not in use. This in turn means more cars are required by society. Autonomous cars can achieve much higher levels of utilization. This is the real reason legacy car makers don't want fully autonomous vehicles.

Wouldn't Intel not want "the cloud" for the same reason?

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#54

Post by asimuvPR »

adamio wrote: post #47

I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driving kills the emotional experience that is used to sell cars.

I feel we are witnessing what happened to the newspaper once again. Only this time there is an interesting twist: manufacturers have been bailed out. Will the government step in again? No one knows.

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#55

Post by geodel »

qeternity wrote: post #51
adamio wrote: post #47

I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driving kills the emotional experience that is used to sell cars.

The bigger issue is that autonomous cars make it extremely easy to massively boost utilization: driver assist still means your car sits at home, work, etc when not in use. This in turn means more cars are required by society. Autonomous cars can achieve much higher levels of utilization. This is the real reason legacy car makers don't want fully autonomous vehicles.

I think autonomous vehicles will be priced taking that into consideration. It is just expectation of people that they will be priced as cars and can be deployed as profit generating asset.

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#56

Post by suyash »

adamio wrote: post #47

I think Detroit and other manufactures are fearful of automation. If you ask them what the future looks like its driving assist technology. Fully automated driving kills the emotional experience that is used to sell cars.

All of the Detroit automakers are heavily investing in semi-automatic to fully automatic driving. Most of them have technology labs in Palo Alto and hosting hackatons and recruiting top engineers heavily.

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#57

Post by ben_jones »

jrockway wrote: post #53
qeternity wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger issue is that autonomous cars make it extremely easy to massively boost utilization: driver assist still means your car sits at home, work, etc when not in use. This in turn means more cars are required by society. Autonomous cars can achieve much higher levels of utilization. This is the real reason legacy car makers don't want fully autonomous vehicles.

Wouldn't Intel not want "the cloud" for the same reason?

My guess is that the cloud doesn't affect utilization that much. Auto scaling (IMO) is fickle and for the most part the same number of servers are running, in fact probably way more servers are running because their easy to provision (and then forget about).

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#58

Post by chipotle_coyote »

digi_owl wrote: post #29
coldtea wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were internal projects with no direction all the time under Steve as well. Heck there were even EXTERNAL projects with no direction, like the Apple TV (still flailing around), the Apple Cloud offerings (only got robust in the last 2 years or so, and the most touted part back then, the "office"-like iCloud apps are universally ignored), the Apple boom box, and other things besides.

I can't help but wonder that during both runs of Jobs at the helm, Apple was basically making products tailored for the wants of one man: Steve Jobs. Supposedly the iPod launched with a idiosyncratic equalizer, apparently tuned to Jobs tastes.

I don't think I've heard a story about the equalizer, but I think in general you're right. It worked out that Jobs hit on products that were successful enough of the time, but "idiosyncratic" seemed to be one of his defining characteristics. A few of Jobs's products were so wildly successful that we tend to forget or gloss over the ones that, well, weren't so much.

I think idiosyncratic also describes Jony Ive -- but as a pundit (possibly John Gruber?) put it on a podcast recently, Jobs was a better editor. He was good at zeroing on what made designs work rather than merely beautiful. If I have any major criticism of the post-Jobs Apple, it's that they seem to prioritize aesthetics over functionality. I know that's a knock that critics made against them long before the Tim Cook era, but I don't think it was really true until post-Forstall.

(And no, I don't mean losing the headphone jack. I mean more things like the entire UX of the new Apple TV, from the beautiful user interface which makes navigating through multiple seasons of a TV show an endlessly scrolling nightmare compared to the previous model's design to the thin, elegant, ergonomically disastrous remote control. Ive seems particularly drawn to the notion that thinness and symmetry are more important than usability.)

Re: How Apple Scaled Back Its Titanic Plan to Take on Detroit

#59

Post by SysArchitect »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #58
digi_owl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but wonder that during both runs of Jobs at the helm, Apple was basically making products tailored for the wants of one man: Steve Jobs. Supposedly the iPod launched with a idiosyncratic equalizer, apparently tuned to Jobs tastes.

I don't think I've heard a story about the equalizer, but I think in general you're right. It worked out that Jobs hit on products that were successful enough of the time, but "idiosyncratic" seemed to be one of his defining characteristics. A few of Jobs's products were so wildly successful that we tend to forget or gloss over the ones that, well, weren't so much. I think idiosyncratic also describes Jony Ive -- but…

What app causes you issues with scrolling through multiple seasons?

A lot of apps let you select the season from some sort of "drop down" or display a list of seasons vertically and let you scroll through individual episodes horizontally within that season...

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