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

Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 992 posts

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

#61

Post by madeofpalk »

dougmwne wrote: post #7

I wonder if this is connected to the Vision Pro release. That’s another giant hardware fishing project that failed to meet the “vision” of an all-day wearable iPhone. Perhaps it became obvious that the car was in even murkier waters. And to dump some of the employees on image and text generators off whatever self driving computer vision work they were presumably doing before? Interesting choice.

I'm extremley sceptical on Vision Pro or AR/VR headsets in general, but I think it's too early to call it failed. I think it met exactly the vision it was supposed to - it just needs years and years of iterating to get to the final goal.

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

#62

Post by ezfe »

jcgrillo wrote: post #16
riddlemethat wrote: post #3

This is a smart move. Apple seems so far behind in generative AI it's making Google look innovative.

But what's it for? I can tell what an electric car is for, can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? A car can transport goods and people, really good non-deterministic typeahead is just.. well, I don't know what I'd use it for, do you? EDIT: what I really mean is what makes people think this is a commercially viable thing to spend time and money on? Like, say one of these companies hits some magic jackpot and dis…

Generative AI won't lead to AGI any time soon but it does make our computers at lot better at understanding us.

Simple example: Adding something to a reminder list, but the name of your lists don't exactly match the list you said to add to.

Prompt: "Add milk to my shopping list"

Siri: "I didn't find a shopping list, do you want to create one?"

ChatGPT (when asked to pick from my actual lists), properly identifies the "groceries" list as the intended list.

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

#63

Post by jermaustin1 »

jitl wrote: post #42

Meanwhile Xiaomi and Sony both have electric car projects nearing release: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/26/xiaomi-bets-on-new-ev-su... https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42400955/afeela-sony-hond...

I (maybe incorrectly) feel that Asian companies are better at this type of vertical diversification. So many of the big Japanese and Korean companies do so many different things. I'm thinking of Yamaha, Casio, Sony, Samsung, etc.

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

#64

Post by madeofpalk »

threeseed wrote: post #56
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can you tell me what "generative AI" is for? Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.

Apple already has transformer based text prediction and a model for power management. How does "generative AI" help ?

That's it. So they're not behind, they're already there.

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

#65

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

If you look at the market cap of Ferrari, it's not crazy why Apple was considering this.

They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%).

You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure.

I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.

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

#66

Post by MBCook »

jitl wrote: post #53
MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

I’m interested about the Sony/Honda joint venture car (Afeela), and I’d buy an Apple/Toyota joint venture car in a heartbeat.

I’d be far more willing to buy a partnership as reasonable, but that didn’t seem to be the plan. At most they’d find someone to act like Foxcon and built it, but not a real partnership.

And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.

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

#67

Post by AeroNotix »

MBCook wrote: post #19

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda. The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment. Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, bu…

[flagged]

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

#68

Post by init2null »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14
riddlemethat wrote: post #3

This is a smart move. Apple seems so far behind in generative AI it's making Google look innovative.

> Apple seems so far behind in generative AI Apple is a best-in-class second mover. With the clusterfuck that has been generative AI (from OpenAI’s corporate drama to Google renaming and reörganizing their products every fifteen minutes) this seems prescient, with the only savvy player so far being Microsoft.

I feel Microsoft's desperation to put LLM's into every product suggests mismanagement. Same as Microsoft's past efforts to Bing everything.

Adobe seems to be the only one with an empowered product team that's consistently finding sensible and profitable uses for machine learning.

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

#69

Post by checker659 »

gnicholas wrote: post #13

I really hope Apple continues its privacy-first ethos and offers an on-device LLM. It would also be great if they could use Handoff-like technology to let my (almost always nearby, almost always plugged-in) laptop do the thinking, instead of depleting the battery of my phone. I'd surely buy a bunch of HomePod minis if I could tie them into a local LLM.

I wish they'd put a huge FPGA on every device.

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

#70

Post by donkeykong3232 »

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…

[flagged]
Post reply on HN