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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

#931

Post by eli »

rezonant wrote: post #679
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…

> The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?

Rumor I heard at the time is Apple went to Verizon first but Apple insisted no one see the phone until shortly before launch and Verizon balked.

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

#932

Post by vel0city »

stephen_g wrote: post #711
type0 wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them

Terrible compared to what? At the time, mobile applications were universally pretty crap. Browsers were atrocious, not being able to render real CSS or anything (they’d give you a simplified broken layout). I didn’t have the first iPhones (my first was the iPhone 4) but I had a first generation iPod Touch, and Safari felt pretty magical at the time compared to anything else on the market. The capacitive screen, multi…

Opera Mobile would render pages with heavy CSS (for the time) pretty accurately.

Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it.

The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more.

When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?

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

#933

Post by dagmx »

sgu999 wrote: post #890
dagmx wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no single axis to people’s decisions though. The Japanese brands have stagnated in terms of style, features and BEV availability. Especially in the case of Honda, they’ve also lost that impression of reliability. Tesla and Hyundai/Kia are eating their market for what people’s wants have changed to: cars as an extension of the rest of their lives, not just a utility. ease of use has to be viewed in that contex…

> cars as an extension of the rest of their lives, not just a utility I don't even understand what that means. That could be a marketing slogan. Cars have been at the center of our lives for decades in most developed countries, we don't even notice it anymore. Unless you live in the Netherlands, Japan or a big European metropolis, everything has been designed for them.

What do people do the rest of their day when they’re not in a car?

They’re using apps to navigate, listen to music, entertain themselves, get support etc…

A Tesla gives them an extension of the rest of their day in car form. It’s a smartphone on a car.

That’s in addition to their ecosystem of chargers. Not having to worry as much if a charger is compatible or cross shop gas price rates.

It’s also why most buyers require CarPlay or Android auto as a must have feature.

I don’t care if it sounds like marketing. You can see people make the decision time and time again that new technology should be an extension of what they already use outside of it.

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

#934

Post by eli »

MBCook wrote: post #560
borski wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. That’s not quite how that happened. They were turned down and laughed out of the room by nearly every carrier they approached. The only one that didn’t was AT&T; but they definitely weren’t “desperate” at the time. They had lots of leverage, which is how they got exclusivity.

Sorry I meant the carrier was desperate, not Apple. That was the case with AT&T (Cingular when the deal went down). They wanted customers so bad they were willing to give up everything for a possible hit phone. And it worked out. You’re right Apple was riding high on the iPod, they weren’t in any danger of going under. They could have waited longer. I think it would have been funny if they released it in Europe or so…

The carriers were probably right to be concerned. They used to be the ones with the ability to charge an "app store tax"

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

#935

Post by eli »

ethbr1 wrote: post #650
dtjb wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the risk to the carmaker is your customers getting used to the apple infotainment system. Maybe they start to see the car as less a Fiat and more an Apple car. Then the exclusive expires or needs to be renegotiated.

From Apple's perspective, yes. That's exactly the playbook that built the iPhone into what it is today. People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands." iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultim…

The carmakers are unfortunately well aware that they can mine and sell data. They just suck at it.

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

#936

Post by vel0city »

heartbreak wrote: post #740
iancmceachern wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins. A car and a cell phone, or anything Apple has yet made, are wildly different. They may as well have had a battle tank program, or started making airplanes. Those things have screens and "infotainment systems" too.

> Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins. Were they really close cousins in 2006?

Before 2006 my phone was already my portable media player, my internet modem on the go, a quick web browser, my portable email machine, my internet instant messenger client, a mapping tool, and more. By 2007 I was even using it for video calls.

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

#937

Post by vel0city »

DinaCoder99 wrote: post #603
itsoktocry wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their trucks still sell massively and the Blackwing Cadillacs are both on many 10-best lists.

Ok? That doesn't contradict anything I said.

> GM is hardly a car brand that knows what consumers give a shit about

> Their trucks still sell massively

If they didn't know what people wanted, they probably wouldn't be able to sell a massive amount of them.

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

#938

Post by Tagbert »

pjc50 wrote: post #891
I_AM_A_SMURF wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that of all things Apple's watches are square and Android watches are round. It feels like it should be the other way around.

Historically, men's wristwatches were round and ladies' watches were square. I'm not sure why other than that humans will gender-code anything.

Women’s watches were smaller and were more likely to be integrated with the watch band. That tended to square off the case. The actual watch face was still based on hands moving in a circle.

Men’s watches when they are integrated with the bands also tend to be squarish.

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

#939

Post by pasabagi »

int_19h wrote: post #906
pasabagi wrote: post #879

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All electronics fail, and all systems reliant on electronics fail. Not all worm gears fail. This is kind of a weird take: I was reading about the Therac 25 (radiation therapy machine that killed a few people because of software bugs), and one of the reasons why they were so confident it was going to work is that software isn't vulnerable to two classes of 'bugs' that analog devices suffer from: wear, and manufactur…

Worm screws have a known and simple failure mode, however, which people understand. It can also take a very long time to fail depending on the design - longer than the useful life of the product in many cases. Software fails suddenly and unexpectedly, and when it does, it's rarely clear how to mitigate it. Witness all the "turn it off and on again" jokes...

Mechanical objects frequently fail unexpectedly, especially if you're trying to do something weird or unusual. We're just used to living in a world of machines that are in their second century of iterative improvement.

I make installation art, and from personal experience, despite being an equally shitty programmer as I am an engineer, the software is way more reliable, and there are way fewer ways in which it can fail. Anything from materials being not what they say they are, to some jackass accidentally making earth live, to stuff catching on fire - it's all possible.

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