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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

#771

Post by ppljudge »

dleslie wrote: post #757
jupp0r wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho Teslas feel very much like a car that Apple could have designed. Lots of aspects of the whole experience are fundamentally different than other cars. Maybe I'm not thinking radically enough, but then Jony Ive is pursuing other career options, too.

Teslas are the Alienware of automobiles. Flashy, ostentatious, and aimed at enthusiasts with more money than taste. Apple would likely have made something that evoked elegance. It would have contrasted with Tesla in the same way a Macbook contrasts with an Alienware.

+1 good analogy

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

#772

Post by crooked-v »

demondemidi wrote: post #736
iwontberude wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe cars are inherently garish and tasteless.

They are! All modern cars look like Transformers toys. With their stupid mean-face grills. Design is awful. I appreciate early cars when people didn't know what they should look like, and were just building all kinds of weird stuff. That awkwardness was charming. Now it's just generational pandering, and my generation is left out (apparently my generation is 1920's-1930's).

> mean-face grills

I think by 2030 trucks will be about 6 feet of grill and a 6-inch eyeslit to see out of.

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

#773

Post by xvector »

dleslie wrote: post #757
jupp0r wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imho Teslas feel very much like a car that Apple could have designed. Lots of aspects of the whole experience are fundamentally different than other cars. Maybe I'm not thinking radically enough, but then Jony Ive is pursuing other career options, too.

Teslas are the Alienware of automobiles. Flashy, ostentatious, and aimed at enthusiasts with more money than taste. Apple would likely have made something that evoked elegance. It would have contrasted with Tesla in the same way a Macbook contrasts with an Alienware.

Tesla is the opposite of "flashy and ostentatious," their car designs are boring as are their interiors.

I don't know where you could possibly be getting that impression when they make the most milquetoast sedans on the market.

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

#774

Post by refulgentis »

ein0p wrote: post #656

Kinda still wish they’d have made it, or at least shown some pre-production work, just to see what a radical product re-think could look like in this space. Cars of 2024, even in the premium segment, are nearly uniformly garish and tasteless, with tons of half baked features of marginal utility accreted over the years and never perfected. Apple’s take on the category could have been a master class in product design a…

It's very easy to ship concepts, Detroit does this yearly

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

#775

Post by acchow »

mdhb wrote: post #482
internetter wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, they haven't invested any money into it (well, apparently they will for iOS 17). When Apple does invest money, however, which they seem to be doing now, there are usually impressive results. Take the M1, for instance.

Im not debating the mechanics of why it’s so shit, I’m saying that they are many years behind everyone else and that it’s not obvious that simply throwing money at the problem is going to fix that for them or that they actually have much of a track record of making good software again despite unlimited budgets and many years of opportunity to prove otherwise.

Llama2 13b runs on an m1 at 13 tokens/s. So they will be able to do this on an iPhone.

https://gist.github.com/gengwg/26592c1979a0bca8b65e2f819e31a...

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

#776

Post by davidw »

crooked-v wrote: post #772
demondemidi wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are! All modern cars look like Transformers toys. With their stupid mean-face grills. Design is awful. I appreciate early cars when people didn't know what they should look like, and were just building all kinds of weird stuff. That awkwardness was charming. Now it's just generational pandering, and my generation is left out (apparently my generation is 1920's-1930's).

> mean-face grills I think by 2030 trucks will be about 6 feet of grill and a 6-inch eyeslit to see out of.

I don't really participate in twitter anymore, but back in the day, I had AI design a truck of the future: https://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/1661577114129416194/...

Refining my plans a bit more

https://www.threads.net/@davidnwelton/post/C34NEOpLMZ5

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

#777

Post by lmm »

willbw wrote: post #674
skullone wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Apple products also uniformly garish and tasteless with tons of half baked features too? Glad we don't have to see what dumb ideas Apple had in store for us in the automotive realm. The m1/m2 are good chips, but macos is stagnant, iPhones have... memojis as their new feature? Apple has good industrial design for devices that fit in the palm of your hand. I truthfully cannot fathom how that could extend to a ca…

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.

The "touch bar" was garish. So were the G3 iMacs if you remember back that far.

They're just a company. They have good designers but they make mistakes like anyone else.

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

#778

Post by lmm »

spiderice wrote: post #665
MBCook wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone made sense to me because by that point Apple had clearly proven themselves as a consumer electronics company. It’s wasn’t as big a jump and cell phone software was largely junk. The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that n…

> But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had. I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here…

> And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.

But they were working towards that all the time. And then SpaceX didn't try to make a car, Tesla was started as a mostly-separate company to make a car. Because there's very little business synergy between those two things.

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

#779

Post by lmm »

MBCook wrote: post #492
theturtletalks wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is still waiting it out until most of the existing EV issues are resolved. Then, they can swoop in and leverage their walled garden to get buyers/users. They'll also be different than Ford, Mazda, Honda, etc since I don't think they will try to sell their cars. It'll be a subscription fee and Apple will own the car. All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not…

What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with buying a car? I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone? I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competiti…

> Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?

Yes. People happily pay an extra 1-200% for something because it's Apple, all the time. I'll probably never understand why, but I've come to accept that they do.

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

#780

Post by creer »

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…

If anyone could have created a new category for cars. And NOT gone head on against others. It would of course be Apple.

What is possible is that after spending enough effort on the project, they couldn't see what that new category could be. And that just making one more (like one more monitor perhaps) had not enough margin to bother.

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