To be honest, I'm not sure what Apple could've brought to the table in regards to making an electric car. Apple's hardware design philosophies[1] don't really align with what consumers want in a car. Apple being less minimalistic than a Tesla — which is already at an extreme — is a hard sell.
[1] Examples of what I mean:
- Cars use faux materials all the time for cost and weight purposes, or even just looks (i.e. fake chrome bits, spoilers and vents that don't do anything etc.). Apple these days does not, if it looks like metal, it almost always is, same for glass, and vents are as hidden as possible.
- Creature comforts: Cars are a place people spend a lot of time in, and are usually as comfortable as possible for it.
Apple examples where ergonomics took a back seat for looks: All their mice, Airpods Max (Heavy, can't fold or turn off without a case), Vision (Heavy), Apple TV (ZERO buttons, need to unplug to reset from a crash). I'm not saying it's impossible for them to make a comfortable car, but I am saying they've prioritized looks over comfort several times.
- Apple design in general has lost a lot of it's soul. They used to be more fun and whimsy, just look at iMac designs of the past. The Cyber truck, love it or hate it, is not boring. Everything apple sells is a glass and metal slab, or as close as possible to it.
By the way, I like a lot of Apple's hardware design decisions, like premium materials etc. I just don't think it's in their DNA to launch a car that isn't a touch-screen-hell appliance with rounded corners.
Strong agree. I think even having to make compromises of their aesthetic minimalism and platonic form to something as pedestrian as “aerodynamics” would pain Apple’s hardware designers (the ones whose output we’ve seen, anyway). I almost think they would prefer a car to be a perfect sphere or cube or something. Or a big symmetrical blob with all the wheels carefully hidden underneath.
The attempt at the Personas eye display on the front of the Vision Pro strikes me as extravangantly whimsical and daring. An insane amount of effort and money went into this feature. Perhaps it will win users and perhaps it will be abandonned in later models but it's quite the unexpected feature.
Having used VR for years, I found it kind of brilliant. It’s clear Apple wants to make an AR display, not a VR headset, and they pulled off a convincing attempt with todays technology.
>- Apple design in general has lost a lot of it's soul. They used to be more fun and whimsy, just look at iMac designs of the past. The Cyber truck, love it or hate it, is not boring. Everything apple sells is a glass and metal slab, or as close as possible to it.
That's not the point I was making. I was only stating that the Cyber Truck's design isn't boring, and that today's Apple seems incapable of designing something exciting.
Yes, this is precisely why I love the design so much. I've been waiting for an "edgy" non-smooth car since the '88 Sentra...and here it finally is. Thank you Elon and Tesla, yall remain the only car maker with a sense of humor.
> I'm not sure what Apple could've brought to the table in regards to making an electric car
I, for instance, would love a minimalistic, self driving, electric car that just works. With wireless charging - no cables. That I can just hop in, say “Hey Siri, take me to target,” and it announces the current weather in Taipei; provided by the Weather Channel.
I agree with your points, but wanted to point out that the most recent iMac lineup is a bit fun and whimsy! It comes in seven different colors, and while metal it does give off a little bit of that iMac G3 feeling.
Jony Ive left Apple in 2019, but I think we're still in his era of design philosophy, will be interesting to see where Apple evolves in terms of hardware design over the next 10 to 20 years.
> I'm not sure what Apple could've brought to the table in regards to making an electric car.
At this point Apple dont need to make any thing special in order for it to sell. Lv4 / Lv5 AVs ( autonomous vehicles ) is basically lots of computer on a battery moving around. The key problem here is Lv 5 AV, as we should have all learned in 2024 it doesn't exists. Not even close. All the promise about we would be there in 2016..... 2024 hasn't been true.
Without AVs, and hence without the needs of all the computing power, there isn't anything in a Car that is adjacent to Apple's core strength.
> Apple design in general has lost a lot of it's soul.
I would argue it is not just their design, but Apple itself. Again It is Tim Cook's Apple now. Not Steve Job's Apple.
Another big untapped thing in the autonomous vehicle space is having a strong remote teleop game— basically when you hit roadwork or snow or whatever other unforeseen condition, an operator elsewhere can seamlessly take over, either in full (literally driving your car) or in part ("choose that lane, avoid that obstacle").
Starsky Robotics understood this but AFAICT the lesson hasn't really sunk in across the industry; the big money is still chasing a mythical computer-only Lv5 solution.
Anyway, I don't think Apple would be the right company to pull off that kind of thing either, all of which is to further reinforce that trying to make an electric, autonomous car was always an odd choice for them.
I’m not so sure the comfort criticism is fair with Vision Pro.
They seem to think the amount of computer power in this first product is a kind of MVP for their vision of VR/AR.
Given this amount of compute with today’s technology, using metal is a hard requirement for long term comfort.
Plastic doesn’t conduct heat well. Using metal lets you conduct some of the heat away from the face.
I haven’t used AVP myself, but I’ve seen others comment that they find Quest gets hotter, despite having less compute power.
Perhaps future iterations will use titanium and/or piezo fans to reduce weight while keeping thermals manageable. But I don’t expect them to move to plastics.
By 'less' minimalistic than Tesla, assume you meant you believe Apple would be even 'more' minimalistic. But I always imagined Apple would be able to be the Tesla without the Musk tradeoffs. That is yes, certainly far minimal than typical cars, but less minimal than Tesla who seemed to think it would be cool to have door handles retrack, and other missing common features, because they seemed cool. But then he never took enough feedback to others to realize while cool, not practical. Apple I believe would have been able to pull back and find a better balance I believe. And if they did overstep, they would be less stubborn in pulling back in a following version than Musk.
Though the market of cars from makers like Lucid and other premium options means Apple can only differentiate so much. And people critize every tiny detail of things the size of watch or a phone, imagine a car. The abilities for people to criticize things would be endless. And the fact that cars crash, no matter how well designed, and there would be an endless number of people finding creative ways to exploit any vulnerabilities to make it look as dangerous as possible. The risk for Apple seems unbelievable vs the gain.
Where is with AI, that intertwines everything they already do, with far more manageable risks. I'm very doubtful on their AI prospects, but certainly would prefer to see Titan level budgets spent towards AI. I'm looking at you Siri!
I don’t hate the Apple Watch, but I was pretty seriously disappointed at how it looked when it came out. Great! They made a watch look like my phone, cool
Not really - watches are historically round because of roundrel clock faces. A square is a better form factor for literally everything else that an Apple Watch does. So it is the Apple move to shape the watch to perform best at 95% of its tasks, and a Google move to shape the watch to perform best with a subset of available watch faces.
This isn't even new. Casio etc have designed digital square watches for decades because they don't need to be round without clock arms.
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.
Do not get me started on the gender coding of children’s clothes and accessories. Judging by pictures of me and my little brother in the 80s, and comparing that to the clothes for sale now, manufacturers spent the past 40 years learning how to avoid making anything that would be purchased for a girl being suitable to be handed down to her little brother.
If anything Apple has been bringing buttons back, or innovating on them. Touch Bar was reverted to buttons. The iPhone Pro replaced a switch with a haptic feedback button (many Android phones simply have no equivalent button or switch.) Vision Pro got the “Digital Crown” from the Watch, which has that and a button rather than just a touchscreen.
My guess is an Apple Car would have nice buttons and switches rather than the atrocious touch-screen-only setup many cars have.
All my examples are current, and the list would've been much longer if it included their obsession with thinness on their previous set of laptops and phones.
Anyway, I was trying to illustrate that Apple's obsession with minimalism has resulted in a very sterile and boring design language that wouldn't necessarily translate to success in the car world. Vehicles are considered very personal expressions of taste (Which is subjective, I know).
Shiny chrome bits and fake air intakes etc. are added because consumers want them. Car companies do everything in their power to shave a penny here and there, yet time and time again they add these in because that's what consumers generally like. High-end cars are littered with shiny bits, bodywork creases, and even crystal (BMW). Stuff like this is the antithesis of good design at contemporary Apple.
Even the iPhone 1.0/2.0 had a fake chrome rim, and their old Macs had clear plastic and pin stripes!
I'm not saying fake chrome bits etc. are good/bad design, I'm saying consumers have spoken, and the most boring cars are all at the low-end with even lower margins. Teslas seem to be as minimal as the general consumer is willing to tolerate, and even they have something relatively exotic with the Cyber Truck.
Apple's current aesthetic isn't suited towards high-end cars, and they haven't proven otherwise with recent releases. I know some would love a minimal Apple car, but it would still be a very niche, expensive, and not very profitable proposition.
Sure, but the color and design of something are different things? Apple still sells iPads/iPhones/iPads in various colors, but there’re literally all a variation of a featureless slab. Back when Apple made translucent devices, it wasn’t just color, but their interior arrangement and texture (pin stripes behind the translucent plastic).
Car color is also somewhat pragmatic for several reasons not involving design: A lot cars sold are just low end appliances that are great at taking people from point A to B as cheaply as possible. A gray toyota corola is a perfect example of this and has great resale value. Speaking from experience, some colors hold up better over time than others (clear coat peeling), especially silver and white.
You honestly believe Tesla is minimalistic? I see it as bloatware. I have to click through three dialogs to open my glovebox? How many servos and sensors are necessary to make the flush door handle pop out? And still not work in cold weather? I have multiple layers of menus to stare at dialogs to tell me how to basically use the car? Come on.
You don't like their mice? My Magic Mouse is the single most comfortable mouse I've ever had, and the only one that doesn't give me wrist or finger pain after a day's work. I've tried dozens from Logitech and Microsoft and SteelSeries and Razer, including ergo ones and track balls and track pads, but keep coming back to the Magic Mouse for its simple comforts.
Similarly, the Airpod Pros are so incredibly comfortable it's hard to imagine going back to anything else. (Even though I have an Android and it doesn't support all the features, just basic Bluetooth.)
It's not always that great though, of course. My M2 MacBook Pro is so much heavier than my old ThinkPad, and its keyboard is much much worse. The touchpad has terrible palm rejection and keeps jumping the cursor around. Overall I still love the machine but mostly use it docked.
I do miss the old iMacs, but the new ones are gorgeous and elegant in their own way. It was the first time I was tempted by a desktop in a looooong while.
I've used my Magic Mouse exactly 5 times. It forces me to both "arch" my hand because of the shape (too flat), and hover over the buttons to not accidentally trigger the gestures. For me, it's like the most uncomfortable mouse ever made, and I've ended up with cramps every single time I've used it.
It's amazing to me how they were able to make both the best trackpad and the worst mouse ever.
To each their own I guess but it's very weird to me that someone could consider the Magic Mouse comfortable, maybe something to do with the size of hands?
Good point. I have tiny hands and they're perfectly supportive for me, contouring perfectly in my palm. I did turn off all the gestures aside from scrolling, though.
Being able to left click by pushing the entire top down (two fingers) is what really saved me. No other mouse I know does that.
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, but why would an OEM choose Apple instead of others they’re used to and are likely far easier to work with.
Unless they went highly left field for the US, like tiny city cars more like Smart, I just don’t get it. And if they did that… well Smart isn’t breaking records in the US are they.
The initial idea seemed to be self driving cars, but for individuals you have the problems above and for fleets why would they want to buy from Apple? So unless Apple wanted to be Uber that doesn’t make much sense either.
To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
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 need something of a dealer network the way a car does (existing Apple stores wouldn’t cut it). And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.
If they a fully self driving car by 2018 and beat everyone by 7 years maybe. But as time went on it went from little to almost no sense.
I enjoyed following it for that reason. But I never thought it would happen.
> And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.
The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product.
Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain.
Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry about any of your infotainment solutions? We'll build the unit, in exchange for owning the exclusive app store it uses. And you'll get to say your cars are powered by Apple." Win/win.
Instead, they dicked around until the automakers figured their consoles out (mostly... still looking at you angrily, Nissan) and Apple was left without a key differentiator.
Hell, the mind-numbingly obvious reason for Apple -- do it at a loss for the real-time mapping and traffic data!!
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 ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.
> 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 we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
Hmm I don’t think the SpaceX metaphor works super well here.
One is an established tech company trying to do business in a space it’s unfamiliar with. It has existing forces pulling it in a certain direction because it already makes money in those ways. Google is the perfect example of how this hampers innovation. It’s one of the reasons the concept of Alphabet exists.
SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
> SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
Apple used to be organized differently than other big companies, and more like multiple startups. Just look at the trajectory of other PC builders of the 90’s.
> 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.
> Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
That cash ironically is an obstacle to Apple being able to innovate. Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is nothing but a “phone company” with a bank attached, which is fine, it will continue to operate, but it won’t continue to grow and innovate.
>Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status.
Apple is rather frugal with acquisitions and hires and somewhat frugal with salaries.
I saw Huawei cars being sold in Huawei stores in China. (Huawei stores are like Apple Stores). They were incredibly normal, beautiful cars. In contrast, Apple would have to make a gamechanger. Too big of a risk?
> 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 something where the carriers weren’t in control and then told Americans “call your carrier, sorry, they wouldn’t let us”. Not that that would have ever happened.
I'm not sure if the GP here was edited to be substantially different, because your response doesn't match what they are saying.
AT&T wasn't desperate, and I'm sure Jobs would have preferred to skip on exclusivity, since that really didn't serve iPhone.
"Desperate for more customers"? Well sure, but I'm sure Verizon was even more desperate for more customers considering they were so close to being number one (AT&T was number one at the time, by a slim margin). After all, Pepsi literally bought restaurants and forced them to serve Pepsi in order to force consumers to drink their sodas from the runner up spot.
I don't have any reference for this, but just on its face it would make sense that if Apple needed to sweeten the pot for a carrier to allow it, exclusivity was a way to do it, and it would have been in Apple's best interest to pick the carrier with the biggest market share at the time, which was AT&T.
EDIT: Others corrected me that at the time the deal was signed in 2005 and during the famous 2007 keynote, the partner was Cingular. Through a series of M&A Cingular became what we know of as AT&T, and by the time the phone launched in July 2007, it was AT&T who held the deal.
Interestingly,
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
In Jobs' keynote he referred to Cingular as the #1 carrier with 58 million subscribers. I think the logic above still makes sense given that.
> 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?
Oh, it was Cingular at announcement and AT&T at launch. Interestingly,
> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
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 convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.
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 competition.
>Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?
Given that 30k is the difference between an entry level and mid level car, sure. The premium brands would definitely want to get Apple's branding under their wing, and those buyers are already used to paying a premium when they can buy a $30k car.
The problem is I think Apple would want to be premium above existing luxury cars. I don’t think it would be 60k. I think they would be 90k or even 120k.
Sure Apple’s $60k car is better than a $30k Honda. But is it better than a $60k Acura or BMW or Lexus?
> 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.
What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with bluetooth headphones? Now, look at AirPods, simple bluetooth headphones, with tight integration with iOS. I was the one ridiculing Apple for even entering this market and I thought they looked dumb. Sony XMs looked way better.
Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.
That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform.
Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?
Maybe an enhanced version of CarPlay or something more nefarious like cutting off other auto makers from using CarPlay anymore. People that are used to CarPlay might be inclined to jump ship. Trust me, Apple will find a way to leverage their walled garden, to my chagrin. Just look at how they’re maliciously complying with the EU DMA law. I want to leave Apple’s walled garden myself, but can’t deny it exists.
Subscription would be odd. All my other Apple gear I've bought for cash.
Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.
Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.
I think it’s a lot more simple than that. They’ll probably buy an existing EV company when they’re serious about entering the market. That’ll give them a head start and they won’t be reinventing the wheel. The acquihire will help bring in talent as well.
Before they released the AirPods, they bought Beats. It would along the same lines but with a way more complex machine.
>Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist?
Same as the rest of apples brand: "it just works". The seemless, polished integration of their products gave them a devoted fanbase that pays a huge premium over competition.
Not my point. Why doesn't Apple start manufacturing airplanes that "just work"? Fridges that "just work"? TVs that "just work"? (they did try and give up on TVs because it made no sense) Their brand marketing focuses on creative people; why don't they start making grand pianos? Those make as little sense as a car, and are just as far from Apple's competencies, competitive advantages, and market as a car. Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.
>Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.
Sure they do. Facebook was so confident in VR they rebranded their entire company. Elon Musk got his horrible bluff called out and he owns the largest social media site (for now). It's not business related, but the CEO of Amazon owns a national newspaper.
Apple car didn't come out of nowhere. They and Google were working on Car Os's for years and we both know Apple cares hough about vertical integration to shun off Intel and Nvidia in order to make their own chips. Regardless of my confidence in the idea, the act itself is consistent with Apple.
No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now.
No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did.
The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.
Its strange to me you have a list full of "no one thought" statements that were all things that most of the people around me at least seemed like things Apple would do. Especially the movies and TV stuff, they already had a big marketplace for movies and hardware for watching movies and TV, other competitors in those spaces were producing original content, it seemed absolutely logical for them to do so as well.
The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.
Apples strategy is to wait and see they are rarely first to put money into something where they can't learn from mistakes of others. iPhone wasn't the first mass produced smartphone and I'd argue Apple is a software company first and foremost, the hardware part is just the means to lock you in.
Cannibalizing your own product is an achievement when done correctly. You don’t see Apple running to add a touch screen to MacBooks because that would cannibalize the iPad.
Let’s take iTunes. People were clowning Apple for releasing Apple Music because they had millions of people buying Music on iTunes. Spotify showed it could work but they weren’t exactly making money over fist.
It’s been like a month. Seriously. That’s a ridiculous hurdle to clear.
“The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”
A connected PDA was always a thing. Palm/3Com made phones. HP/Compaq made iPaq phones. Sharp made their Zaurus. The were OEM phones you could get branded. The Qt guys had their Trolltech phone.
Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like.
The Apple phone was perhaps the most anticipated device in years. What surprised people wasn't that they released one, it was that they went all in on a capacitive touch screen, which was novel tech, and that it didn't have real mobile data or native apps. There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages but people were still skeptical.
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, multitouch, being able to decently render pages - lots of stuff we totally take for granted now…
The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.
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?
To be fair, Symbian apps were quite okay-ish. I had Nokia 6600 and it had a lot of great games and apps. Of course, when Apple finally launched the Appstore, and apps there were able to use iPhone's touchscreen, it was over for Symbian.
Not really the point. Apple succeeded because they applied their strengths, product and user interface design, to what is essentially a small computer.
Apple have always developed core products that are essentially a computer.
Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.
> Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.
Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.
I agree that a car is on a different scale, but I think it's only in hindsight that a phone is obviously just a computer and that the user interface is important part.
Do you really not see how a car is a much greater departure from their core expertise than the iphone? They were already making handheld electronic devices well before the iPhone. And they were making computers pretty much for the whole history of the company. Ipod touch was a natural evolution of the ipod and the iphone was basically just an incremental improvement on the ipod touch.
The closest thing they've made to a car is those wheels for the mac pro.
Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.
iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.
Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.
Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.
It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.
> Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.
Yep. Well said. The cost of a full phone + expensive plan is a lot.
Plus kids wanted the apps (really games) the iPhone had. Apple wanted to sell them games.
And besides that parents were far more hesitant to give young kids phones than (for better or worse) than today.
The final reason I’ve heard is the number of hand-me-down phones given to kids now that smartphones are ubiquitous means sales slowly fell to ver little compared to when introduced.
And further, buying your kid an iPod Touch at the time served the same purpose (for Apple) as buying your kid an iPad today. It gets them into Apple's products space, develops brand affinity and trust, and gets them familiar with iOS so that they are more likely to buy an iPhone.
It would be surprising if we had stats on iPad versus non-iPad kids and what percentage of them ended up being iPhone users, and those stats didn't show a strong correlation.
Turn your thinking around. The only reason we still call it a phone is because that's what the original function was. They are pocket computers in everything but name. A significant percentage of the population doesn't even use them for voice calls anymore.
And yet we're fine having the draconic business model of phone carriers from the 90s and early aughts carried into the modern day, just wielded by Apple instead of AT&T.
Computers run software the user asks for, phones run the software the phone manufacturer allows it to.
I think that’s why they were a bit more interested when the original idea was to skip all that and do all automatic driving.
But as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option I don’t understand why they didn’t just give up and instead seemed to try to shift towards a more normal car.
The problem is that smartphones had very little consumer uptake before the iPhone came out.
You had your Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, which were popular among hardcore turbonerds, but normies weren't interested in them. And that goes double for the US; there was more uptake of WinMo and Symbian in Europe, but very little in Apple's home market. The closest thing to a "normie" smartphone before the iPhone was BlackBerry, but most people who had one were business users who had their device issued and provisioned by their employer. And enthusiasts always pooh-poohed BlackBerries as "not a real smartphone" because it was basically just a messaging and groupware beast with limited general-purpose capabilities.
So there was a big gap to be filled. Enthusiasts had their market segment, business users had their market segment, but the ordinary consumers had nothing. And Apple gladly swooped in to fill this gap.
The problem is that cars are already ubiquitous, especially in the US. What can an iCar offer that a Toyota can't? Hell, even if you specify electric cars, other companies still have this covered. What can Apple offer that Tesla can't? And if you look internationally, it's even worse. You start selling electric cars outside the US market, you're going to end up going head-to-head with Chinese giants like BYD that are already kicking Tesla's ass outside the US.
The only real path forward for an iCar that does to cars what the iPhone did to phones is if Apple were to perfect true Level 5 self-driving. If they could actually pull off "Siri, take me to work", it would change things enough that normal cars would look like dumbphones compared to the iCar. But that's a pipe dream. Our roads are too chaotic for Level 5 to be feasible for a long, long time. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the reason this project lasted a whole decade was because Apple was throwing everything they had at Level 5 self-driving, and they canned it because after an entire decade they still couldn't make it work.
>To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola
Not true. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank before and after iPhone's launch. If anything, Apple was the one company that had the technology and market credibility to immediately make a splash in the market despite being totally foreign to it.
>and that US carriers would never give them enough control.
We did think that there was a real possibility of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. But this was again out of belief that Apple had the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, not because Apple—of all companies—could not get what it wanted from carriers.
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.
Yes. Anything that has machined and injection molded housings, a screen, pcbas and software/firmware. Basically all consumer electronics are cousins in this context. Time doesn't matter here, industry verticals do.
Cars are wildly different, 50 years ago GE would have seemed like the one that would make a phone, not ford.
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.
1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.
2. People who want cheap modes of transportation. This is your cheapest level sedan buyers.
3. People who want specific utility and are willing to pay for it. This is the largest group of buyers that ranges from people wanting the convenience/novelty/technology of an electric vehicle, to people who want the safety/robustness/cargo capacity of a pickup truck. Apple car would definitely fit in here.
> 1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.
I don't disagree with what you're probably trying to say here, but I disagree with how you're stating it.
First, "car enthusiast" != "performance enthusiast". There are plenty of people who like cars for reasons other than going fast, and sub-interests in the car enthusiast community that are not performance oriented.
Second, people who actually do enjoy the art of performance driving don't have to do it on the road. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US that have driven on race tracks.
Third, there are certainly performance cars that people do take to the limits on the streets, often in violation of some traffic rules. Not every performance car is a 911 GT3. Probably a very high percentage of Miata owners have approached cornering limits on the street on cloverleafs.
There are an extremely small number of car enthusiasts that are in it because they like working with their hands to make performance mods to try stuff. The rest is all about status. I know this because I used to be solidly in the car world back in the early 2000s , my friend from college had an Integra Type R that he raced in the Honda Challenge that we both tracked and worked on, and I got to experience pretty much all of car culture first hand.
People who are into modifications for power to roll race on the street do it solidly just to show off how much money they can spend.
People who drive "hard" on the street really arent even close to performance capabilities of their car. Give me most any ~250 hp sedan, no matter which wheel drive, Ill redo the suspension and stick on good tires, and I can keep up with any 911 on twisty roads. The culture in this regard is pretty evident because I will be seen as a poser if I do this.
As for the track, there is a separate subculture that happens at the track. Sure there is a minority out there to just have fun in their regular cars, most everybody including them are oogling the expensive track toys, and nobody is paying attention to actual driving skill of the people. At one point and time, a husband and his wife pulled up with a mobile home towing a garage with 2 Ferrari Challenge cars, with the entire setup costing more than I have ever made in my entire life even now 10 years later, and of course they were not any faster around the track, but they were the stars of that day.
Racing series are also literally about who can spend the most money, until you cross the bridge of being good enough to run sponsors. Not even on the car parts either, for example, we would camp at the track, while other people would pull up in their trailer homes and get a much better night sleep with AC, which gives a huge advantage come racing.
I know, I've been to the track with a couple of my cars too.
My point is that you neither have to reach the limits of a car's performance, nor do you need a high performance car, to appreciate cars for what they are. Many of the people who ended up on the track in the 00's and 10's are people who enjoyed whippin' 90s shitboxes around country roads, but couldn't afford the track. These are hardly people who buy cars for status.
I don't think that changes the parent's point at all. Whether the focus of your enthusiasm and status is performance or luxury is irrelevant if you're spending more than you "need" to for your vehicle.
It's like custom PCs - some go for EATX systems with Threadripper and dual graphics cards and NVMe RAID 0 while others go for 4L ITX systems or fanless configs. But a Dell tower is functionally very similar.
Someone buying a S-class Mercedes probably isn't doing it for the V8 but for the comfortable interior. They're still spending $100,000 when a Camry could do a similar job.
How can Apple products be status items when over 60% of smartphones in the US are iPhones? Is Coca-Cola a status item? Is it possible that they're just good products that deliver good value to the majority of people who buy them? Is a $1300 Galaxy S24 Ultra not a status item?
"I spent 50-200% more on an item of similar utility" is a status statement, even if every other guy can afford it. Bonus points for a new iphone every time one is released.
You can make your own conclusions about people who are affected by such status statements.
In order to be in 1, Apple car has to be a complete package with performance as well. While Apple can build an electric car, you can't outsource design of something that feels sporty.
Your categories are largely correct, but #1 is way bigger than you think and not just about performance (unless it's the performance of being seen owning the car). For example, most pickup trucks are status symbols and lifestyle choices, not purely for function. If they were purely for function most of them would be transit vans.
Apple car would have absolutely been a pickup truck-like status symbol for highly urban people.
> I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini.
Jaguar is owned by Tata motors, Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary, Lamborghini's ownership is Audi -> Volkswagen, so not really small makers in any sense.
But generally I agree, I think Apple making the full car is an odd choice. I think so much of their DNA, though, is "hardware and software working in concert together", and that's probably what they thought this was a good idea to begin with.
Don't have a source ready but if I remember correctly they never planned to build the car themselves. There are plenty of contract manufacturers out there that build for a variety of brands (Magna Steyr in Austria is a typical example). Then Apple adds it's custom electronics and AI driving assistants and voila you got an iCar.
I believe you’re right, but I thought the plan was to design it all themselves as opposed to buying/licensing an existing platform as skinning it + their electronics.
But then again they’ve changed things so many times according to the rumors maybe both were true at various times.
Xiaomi is better at being the New Apple than Apple is. Apple should be selling micro transportation appliances that fit into a higher urbanized environment. Extremely small cars would be the largest thing I would rent.
Not everywhere is the US. Xiaomi doesn't appear to enter the US market. European sales of the smaller car would likely outweigh a Land Cruiser lookalike.
I was under the impression that Xiaomi did not target only the top end of the market as Apple tends to. I would expect an Apple card to start at $120k or more.
I suppose Apple could go after the Corolla or something if they really wanted to but that just doesn’t seem like an Apple move to me.
Do you really think Apple would come out with a $25k car?
They convinced everyone to increase what they’d pay for a phone. , and to be fair a smartphone is for more capable so that’s understandable.
But they would make a luxury level car and I don’t think they’d convince much of the public it would be worth the premium. Even if everyone wanted it I doubt many would buy.
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.
> doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.
It’s increasingly obvious that Apple has ensured by their cutthroat and rent-seeking behavior in the one place they have market power (the App Store) that no sane business wants to partner with them on anything. Everyone knows Apple will leverage any partnership to get a firm foothold and then extract as close to 100% of the possible margins for Apple, leaving them with crumbs, or possibly just losses. And the whole time, Apple’s corporate personality seems to genuinely believe that all of this is not ruthlessness, but just Apple being fairly compensated for their great work.
By the way, this doesn’t make them bad, lots of companies are known for margin extraction, like Walmart famously did with its suppliers. Apple are very good at Doing Capitalism in this way, but competitors are rightly going to defend themselves by ruling out anything that could help Apple expand further.
Even if you ignore the App Store, Apple’s ethos is to control their own destiny. That means they try to bring everything in house or control it with an iron fist.
And they have more money than god.
So if you parter with them, they will learn from you. And you’ll get “the Apple bump” if the car is successful.
But don’t expect to be partners in 10 years. Expect to be competitors or a new division.
The "car" part would have been subcontracted and must have been seen as inconsequential as say phone screen suppliers. I'd speculate there were some hard realizations in both the car part and the robot part.
I'm more surprised they haven't bought a smallish car maker with proven automotive engineering experience that is already making EVs and then focus on the software and self-driving aspects. Polestar would have been a nice fit and Apple could easily afford it.
As a subsidiary of Geely it seems unlikely Polestar would be available, but perhaps one of the US-based EV startups like Rivian, Lucid or Fisker would be interested. I am not sure how that would work with the Apple brand though.
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.
I was trying to pick brands that we’re both expensive and low volume. If I don’t think Apple could get the sales of some of those makers then I definitely don’t think they could target numbers like BMW.
Lamborghini may be a little small for that list, I don’t really know. But I would think they would stay pretty boutique due to output size.
To develop patents to license and further develop CarPlay maybe. If they hit it big with the right patent they could become the Qualcomm of the carspace.
Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.
You'd think so... GM has stated that they're doing away with CarPlay and Android auto in favour of their own thing, which will most likely suck on large ways.
Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.
I’m pretty sure when you hand in the paperwork for creating a car company, there’s a little pledge you have to take: I will make the crappiest possible OS to include in my car.
It is really bizarre that they insist on continuing to try. Just give us AUX in (stereo or usb). Cellphones can do it all now anyway. The car’s entertainment system should be about as complex as a pair of headphones.
One of the pain points that CarPlay and Android Auto solve for is that any car I rent or buy has the same media controls and all of my presets. When I travel for work, I try to always pick a rental vehicle that is compatible with my phone in order to reduce cognitive load of learning a new vehicle's unique controls.
In my mind Tesla is sort of special because they offered something no one else did. For a long time the only other electric cars were the volt/bolt and the leaf. None of those are performance cars in the slightest.
As other brands get more and more popular in the US I wonder if the CarPlay issue will really start to hurt them. But we won’t know for a while.
I’m certainly very curious to see what happens since GM was dumb enough to remove CarPlay. I expect that’s gonna hurt. But maybe I’m wrong.
I haven’t driven a Tesla, so maybe I’m way off base here, but their infotainment software seems modern and at least reasonably well designed.
Legacy automakers have thoroughly demonstrated that when it comes to making a decent infotainment system they are unwilling, incapable, or some mix of the two
Agreed about Tesla's software being modern and most other automakers' being garbage, but I'll take physical controls for things like climate, turn signals, windshield wipers, and lighting with a side of crappy infotainment software, over slick software with everything being crammed onto the touchscreen and few (capacitive) steering wheel buttons. I don't understand how it's legal for Tesla to delete the turn-signal stalk and replace it with a pair of buttons on the steering wheel...
> 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.
Why were you puzzled? What is so impossible about making a car from scratch, then making money on it? I don't own any Apple products, but I know they could do it. Yes it's difficult, but a lot of the difficulty comes from a lack of resources, not something Apple is worried about.
I find it really interesting that you (and those who did not contradict you) choose to form this opinion. I suspect Apple shares it. But to me it's a missed opportunity combined with a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's probably the lack of this very characteristic that makes Elon so successful. He never lets FUD get in the way of his goals.
There are some companies out there who don't seem subject to these artificial limitations, at least, at certain points in their history. For a while Mitsubishi made both cars and televisions. Panasonic made both batteries and bicycles.
I think what really separates winners from losers when it comes to developing a product and selling it is the willingness to set aside artificial limitations and really commit to beating the competition. Core competencies matter more for companies who are no longer interested in growing. Apple definitely wants to keep growing. So if Apple really was putting R&D money into cars and then quit, then I see this as a failure of Apple leadership. Apple can make a great car, and people would buy it.
Because just being able to do it isn't the point. The real question is whether or not it's a good use of the cash they have available. OP is saying that it doesn't make good business sense for Apple to do this, not that it's impossible for them to pull it off.
The world doesn't need another tony, luxury car. The world needs an affordable (preferably electric) "folks" car (and I don't see that as Apple's market).
>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.
That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches.
The average car is crap compared to what it could be - and that's without any self-driving involved either: purely the basic car functionality has seen little thought UX and convenience wise in 50+ years.
>Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches
Those things were said for both music players and smart watches, by pundits and competitors alike.
E.g. re the Apple Watch, here's a Forbes summary: "In 2015, the year the Apple Watch was launched, LVMH watch division president and Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver said the Swiss industry was not afraid of Apple’s new product, because it could not be repaired in a thousand years or eighty years, nor inherited by children, nor would it ever become a status symbol. As is always the case when disruption occurs in an industry, traditional competitors are not able to see the threat, and continue to try to analyze it according to the variables that were important yesterday."
When Apple got into music players no one cared because they were waiting for the company to die.
When Apple got into watches there were lots of rumors they were for years first, and it made sense as an extension to the iPhone. Remember the Pebble already showed the basic idea could be useful.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I know somebody on the project. The cancellation makes sense, they were years from release and every new VP pivoted the project and lost progress. If they had committed to their original project (a bus) or the first revision (a very high-end car) they could have released on a timely schedule. But they're far too late to the game.
Not so sure about that. You need battery and 4 x electric motors to wheels.
The idea is much simpler than regular combustion engine car.
Less parts that wear out.
Idea is actually so simple that all the manufactures compete on putting as much nonsense into cars as possible, insted of making easily replaceable battery and car which would last 50 years and accelerate like Ferrari.
During the hayday, we saw new companies come up with new cars all the time!!! And then they slowly went belly up. Part of me thinks that the endless number of regulations prohibited new car companies from entering.
You can import a car from china in a crate that fits on the back of a pickup. But it won’t be legal on roads until it gets things like a DOT approved windshield.
I think Apple's power has always been to make unpopular things be suddenly cool. They could have aimed a bit lower and made some kind of urban transport a al e-bikes or Segways only more Apple. It's a market niche that was available and close to their strengths.
This is a bit sad though, a car is something more palpable than AI, I prefer Apple hardware than software. I was curious about what they would bring in this space. I can't find anything I could imagine being interesting of they bringing in AI space.
This is actually insane to me. Like bonkers, even. The MBA types are surely the source of that idea. From a brand perspective, the only car that ever truly made sense for Apple to make was something at least resembling a supercar. They could have made do with a Telsa Model S kind of car perhaps, but I'm shocked that a brand-conscious company like Apple thought a bus was the best bet as an initial product.
First impressions are vitally important. In my opinion, a car brand can go from making high performance cars to more "practical" vehicles once they've established their brand, but not the other way around. Slapping an Apple badge on a Corolla isn't going to work. Steve Jobs said it best, paraphrasing "We want to build computers that customers would want to lick.". If Apple wants to be a legitimate car company that enthusiasts like, they'd have to build a car those people would lick. Not a bus...
Everything Apple makes is ultimately still meant to be practical. I feel like the Apple car would be more like "Corolla, but very high end, and 3x the price" rather than a supercar.
Why a supercar? The apple watch (except the v1 "edition") was never going to compete with luxury watches. Airpods Max are in the higher end of consumer headphones, but a downright bargain compared to "luxury" headphones. Apple doing a lux-lite iteration of a common consumer good makes way more sense.
I agree with your thoughts about the bus, but I started thinking about how many car brands started out selling practical cars, and now have, if not supercars, very high end sports cars - it's a lot of them. It's also kind of how Apple has done stuff in the past. They've marketed their "lesser" products by also making sexy, "pro" products. They could have easily done the same here. Release a practical, functional, Apple product, stuffed with Apple's attention to detail, followed up with the supercar. The keynote would look just like any Macbook lineup update, with the $20k model saved for the end.
My long held feeling: A fleet of autonomous busses traveling predetermined inter/intra-city routes. Think, greyhound replacement. They were never going to be operated by humans.
A bus achieves what with some morality the profit other manufacturers seek via in-car purchases. GM, Rivian, and Tesla don’t want CarPlay for that reason.
A bus network would provide recurring revenue for the actual thing a vehicle is for, instead of DLC headlight patterns.
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 and attention to detail, if nothing else.
What if, hear me out, the wheels were on the sides and not front and back. It uses gyroscopes to keep itself balanced. Instead of twisting the handle or pushing a button like a savage you lean in the direction you want to go! This is a totally new idea and not a product that was released over 20 years ago and since discontinued.
I'm pointing out, as others have, that the bike market is highly fragmented, lots of variety for good reason. It would be hard to come put with "a" , or even "a line" of bikes. You really need a dozen
My long-standing hobbyhorse is that Apple should buy Brompton.
Miniaturisation? Check. Lightweight metals? Check. Battery technology? Check. Premium design-centric product? Check. Product small enough to be sold through worldwide network of Apple Stores? Check.
Then add in what Apple could do with UX around bike navigation and you have a perfect fit.
There was a gyroscope based motorcycle which I thought was more the Apple Style. I was imagining single person cars just like they make all their devices single user. Get one auto-driving bike for each member of the family and you would ride laying on your back so you could take a nap if you wanted.
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).
“Good” is subjective. My idea of a good car is something that can get me from A-B, can hold dogs and be cleaned up easily, can tow a few thousand pounds in a pinch, doesn’t get stuck in the steep and muddy hills around my house, doesn’t break the bank, and it would be nice if it didn’t spy on me and have a giant shiny console in my field of view.
One of my hottest takes: cars look dumb. Even the fancy muscle/sports cars. Watch the suspension kick in as a car drives over a speed bump and remember it’s just a box on wheels.
I think cars only look good relative to other cars. But as an object themselves, they don’t add to the landscape.
Look at all the concept renderings of future apartments or idyllic European countryside’s. There’s always only a few cars or one car. Together, they are an an invasive organism.
Coincidence, I'm afraid; I am not familiar with such a meme. Merely observing that the median American has a household income only about 75% that of the average American, and therefore spends proportionally more of the household budget on groceries, thus feeling the 25% increase in grocery prices over the last four years rather more keenly. Whether that constitutes "struggle" seems like it must be a personal judgement.
Noticing a price increase isn't "struggling." The median American could double their food budget and would be just fine.
Your analysis is all wonky. The % of average income and % increase in food price is completely irrelevant - food is a fixed cost and the median American has many times the cost of food left over in disposable income.
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.
With the notable exception of Cybertruck I like to think of them as “conservative AF, but with fewer buttons and knobs”. Sort of like the iPhone. The visual similarity of the onboard computer to iOS design only reinforces the impression.
Apple would have made a car without keys that you open with your phone and that has a big touchscreen with UI that doesn't have multi second latencies and hardware from 8 years ago in a brand new vehicle?
Flashy? Ostentatious? I mean, regular people with no particular interest in speed or flashy interior/exterios also buy Tesla's. The Tesla 3 is pretty plain and just very functional - works great. I don't have one but I know several people with Teslas, they seem super happy with their vehicles.
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 car, simply makes no sense. Where would they make them?
They only have like 2% of the PC/laptop market, so not many people think they're that attractive. I like my M1 MacBook itself, but hate the aluminum chassis. I find it brutally garish, sharp and uncomfortable (hurts to type on, hurts my wrists where they rest on a sharp edge, so it's basically a desktop with an attached keyboard and mouse)
Do most people buy a laptop based mainly on appearance? I always thought that most people buy a Windows laptop because that's what they need for work/school (or what they are most familiar with from work/school).
> I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.
Not that I disagree in general, but the Apple Watch Edition is arguably in that zone.
Most recently, he was seen wearing a solid 18k yellow gold Apple Watch on a special gold bracelet that was never made available to the public (the same one that Beyoncé and other celebrities were also rocking). The best part though? He appears to have never actually set the thing up, instead going Andy Warhol–style, wearing it purely as a piece of jewelry.
My point exactly. It is such a locked down platform, that I cannot for the life of me understand why people fawn over iphones. They were first to market, but market mover advantage is gone, Apple has not made a good iphone value proposition in years. Especially if you hold it wrong.
“Hold it wrong” was an antenna issue on the iPhone 4, released in 2010 and discontinued more than 10 years ago in 2013. Might be time to move on from that one…
It’s also interesting to point that specific one out because it’s a somewhat widely held opinion that outside of that specific flaw that the iPhone 4 was one of the best industrial designs of the time. Everything else about the design was very iconic, long lasting, and influential to future generations of devices both inside and outside of Apple
Maybe the design was iconic but the all-glass design made it fragile as hell. I replaced six screens/backs in the year I had my 4 and I was really happy when they switched to aluminum backs in the 5.
Apple deserve a lot (LOT) of credit for that one, but always with the caveat that it was incomplete in its own way - features were lacking while the experience was smooth and user friendly. Through the early 2010s (when I was also risking my cell phone store job by being on TV praising the introduction of a competitor...) it was always a toss up between the better functionality of Android and CE6 vs an interface that wasn't dropping every 10th frame even on flagship hardware.
Maybe the first bubble-shaped iMacs were? I always felt the translucency didn't pair well with saturated colors, and the plastic discolored in a gross way just like the 1980's putty-colored boxes of PC clones.
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.
This is not true at all. I would recommend reading a bit on Apple’s privacy practices and how they differ from other players in the space to arrive at a more informed understanding here.
From Apple’s legal page [0] for e.g. maps: “Individual usage metrics are associated with an identifier that rotates multiple times per hour, and is not tied to your Apple ID. This means Maps cannot search for information about you based on an identifier linked to you or your device.”
That's not true you can have complete end to end encryption. By default. iCloud is not encrypted, but you can encrypt it and nobody but you can get access access your data.
It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.
Can and do are two vastly different things. The assumption that data privacy can only be accomplished by no one having any access to data is ridiculous.
Of all the companies that exist right now, apple does a fair bit of work regarding data anonymization and access restriction.
There are lots and lots of rumors suggesting an LLM-driven Siri 2.0, as well as broad integration of minor LLM-driven functionality like locally creating smart playlists.
And I hope the reverse. Most of my data I am happy to entrust to Apple, and I don't want them to release substandard not-very-smart products just because they're limited to AI models that only take a few gigs of RAM and can run on a single phone processor.
Please just use some huge models to make actually smart products and run them in the cloud if it isn't feasible to run them on-device. Perhaps have an 'offline mode', which runs small models (the google assistant already does that - and it's very noticeable that the online mode has very accurate speech recognition, whereas offline mode can only recognise basic words reliably).
I am sure Apple leadership agrees with your overall idea of on-device, but don’t see how this could compete with big GPUs in a data center for “actually doing a good job.” Apple is a distant last place in everything to do with AI today, so I’m skeptical that they can suddenly make an impact with both hands tied around their back (in other words 1/100th the TDP, one iPhone chip on battery vs farms of GPUs).
I’d honestly more appreciate the ability to choose “best quality with theoretical decrease in ‘privacy’” over “best that you can do without hurting the tiny iPhone battery but perfect privacy.” I’d always pick the first one if given the choice.
I think the way they could compete is by having on-device handle a limit universe of queries, and then use some souped-up Siri for the rest. Currently iPhones can do some Siri commands even when offline, for example.
Hell even the most recent Apple Watch does some Siri commands, including voice to text, on device. Apple is certainly pushing low power on device processing with their own custom chips (S9 on the watch I believe).
Yep, I could totally see them enabling this only on Pro-level iPhones, for example. This would presumably be because Pro devices could have different chips that are designed to handle these specific tasks, as well as having larger batteries.
I expect there will be a lot of iPhone upgrades this fall, as buyers will finally see a difference between their 1-3 year old device and a new iPhone.
For all Apple's flaws, I trust that they could disrupt the AI industry once they enter it. Their decisions are all highly calculated, and they employee vast swaths of researchers. I would not be surprised if they entered the market with a well functioning local LLM
Have you actually used Siri? They are absolutely garbage at anything even remotely resembling the basics of AI/LLM related after spending a decade on it.
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.
It's pretty clear they made a conscious choice to keep Siri simple (as frustrating as that is). But this does not reveal anything about their capabilities with LLM based systems.
It feels like it's too late. Microsoft, Meta and Google all beat Apple to the punch with highly usable and competitive local inferencing frameworks. Apple could release a Tensorflow-style library with full-fat CUDA and Linux support tomorrow, but they would just be Another Competing Solution next to ONNX and Pytorch.
The hardware side doesn't look much better. Apple's biggest userbase is located on iPhone, which poses hardware constraints on what kinds of model you can realistically deploy. The Mac has a deeply-ingrained audience, but it's unlikely that the AI will be a selling point to commercial customers (who have Nvidia) or PC users (that have other models).
Honestly, I believe AI research would be a wasted investment relative to supporting third-party libraries upstream and welcoming Nvidia back onto their platform.
> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.
This line really excited my PR-spin senses. The set of people working on automobile R&D who are good candidates to work on "generative AI projects" is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning. "Many employees" will be moving to jobs within Apple only insomuch as ~5% of 2000 people is arguably "many" (or whatever the size of the autonomous vehicle software team is).
I understand this line as a large layoff announcement that reads more like an internal team reassignment.
> "Many employees" will be moving to jobs within Apple only insomuch as ~5% of 2000 people is arguably "many" (or whatever the size of the autonomous vehicle software team is).
I would expect the majority of the people on that team to be working on autonomous driving. So the software folks would be a good fit for genAI and most of the remainder would be mechanical and electronics folks working on the sensors who also have very transfer skills in a company that builds their own hardware.
From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch, so most those 2000 employees weren't focused on designing a car.
> From all the rumors I've heard Apple was never planning on building this car from scratch
One theory was that Apple started their own car project in the mid-2010s to retain their top UX and SWE (and AI) talent because Tesla was poaching them all (and it shows: Tesla's visual UI designs is very Apple-ish: clean, consistent, tasteful, especially when compared to the mishmash you get on a Ford, Toyota, or even BMW); and I don't think it's a coincidence that Tesla's self-driving project really took-off after Siri started getting worse...
The other plausible theory was that ever since Apple launched CarPlay, they realised how inept the bulk of the carmaker industry is when it comes to software/high-technology and they saw an opportunity to make their own self-driving software platform and then license it out to automakers, and using CarPlay as a beachead into the carmaker industry; I want to believe this because it does make the most sense... excepting how those same automakers tend to be very protective of their brand identity: we've seen how GM and others clearly resent having to share their platform with AndroidAuto and CarPlay, so there's no way they'd publicly license Apple's tech - though still, some might. I speculate that had this plan ever worked Apple would have spun-off the company rather than try to put the Apple brand on it - but I don't think Apple has really spun-off any companies since ClarisWorks.
At the other-end of the plausibility spectrum, I noticed a lot of people (MacRumors' forums, et al) wanted to believe Apple was somehow going to ship a one-size-fits-all "iCar", with styling right out of the Bondi Blue iMac G3 book - and as the 1990s jokes go - it would only work driving on Apple owned highways, require an proprietary EV charging connector on a cable that gets frayed after only a few months, and if you get a chip in the windscreen you have to replace the whole thing.
There is more overlap between the two than you'd think, specifically in producing and evaluating datasets for training and fine-tuning models. Most software engineers and ML engineers who worked on self-driving cars would do fine at working on GenAI; in fact, they're more qualified than the vast majority of engineers to work in a brand-new industry. Same goes for engineers working on compute hardware. Even engineers working on automotive controls and sensors could easily have a role working on increasingly multimodal models and applications, though I have no idea what projects Apple is actually prioritizing within that space.
The question is: does Apple actually need so many people working on GenAI? Would a team with 300 people be twice as good as a team with 150 people for what Apple is going to release as products? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is going to lay off most of them.
The old Apple would've pitted two (much smaller) teams against each other. Not sure if the company culture really aligns with that type of structure now, but it's a big assumption that 300 people would all be a single team/org.
When you say "old apple" you're referring to the early 80s Apple where Steve Jobs pitted his Macintosh team against Wozniak's Apple II team to near disastrous results.
Jobs referred to the Mac team as "artists" and the Apple II guys as "bozos"
The company almost collapsed under the insane price of the gen 1 mac ($2,495, or nearly $8000 today) which lacked a desperately needed cooling fan and also didn't have color graphics.
I'm not sure if Jobs kept doing that after he came back in the late 90s, but that practice was generally not very effective from a mangerial perspective.
I imagine they are actually referring to the internal competition Jobs orchestrated leading up to the introduction of the iPhone, which I've never heard described as "disastrous" though plenty of people's feelings were presumably hurt.
And although we cannot really know how much that internal competition contributed to iPhone's success, I think we can imagine that if Apple had shipped an iPod control interface (wheel and click button) with a phone inside it, it would have been nowhere near as successful as it was.
"net income" may be a bit simplistic for the moment, but agreed that it doesn't need to be twice as good. it simply needs to be the best. just because the marginal value of adding people goes down, doesn't mean you shouldn't keep adding them.
just tell investors to look at adjusted net ebitda. you'll be fine, they won't even notice (sarcasm because you need this stuff spelled out for you)
It called the fully adjusted number “community adjusted Ebitda,” by which it subtracted not only interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but also basic expenses like marketing, general and administrative, and development and design costs. Those earnings were $233 million, WeWork said.
Wow, skimping on 150 people for the biggest change to the tech industry in since the invention of the computer.
You understand Apple spent like billions for this electric car industry that never produced anything? Why would they want to starve the AI project now?
You understand how many people in Microsoft and Google are working on AI adjacent projects? Even if they aren't AI researchers, there's tons of work just to put the models in useful applications.
I’d argue the internet is much bigger to date. In the future, who knows — anything getting closer to AGI would be bigger possibly but still built on the backbone of computers and the internet.
>You understand Apple spent like billions for this electric car industry that never produced anything? Why would they want to starve the AI project now?
Interest rates? I'm sure self driving cars will also shift society one day. But money isn't free anymore And in the case of R&D they can't amortize the costs of devs either. it shows how many companies really care about "changing the world".
“Man-Month” can be mythical, then again sometimes you’re making a very big omelette and could use the extra hands - if only to handle tooling, prep work, or other distractions.
You underestimate the overlap between GenAI and EVs. Apple is not merely a software company, their AI strategy will not be merely send data to datacenter to run LLMs.
Apple has to run local LLMs heavily amongst its devices, for responsiveness, cost, and privacy reasons. This will entail a holistic effort from batteries to the neural inference chips to the AI models to the user design. Much more complicated than the datacenter only approach.
The car division would have also had people working on the battery, neural chips, UI design, etc. I would estimate 30% at least get moved to AI.
> The set of people working on automobile R&D who are good candidates to work on "generative AI projects" is so small that it's hardly worth mentioning.
Maybe the entire, most valuable part of the team is working on synthetic data, since at least 2020, and maybe as early as 2017.
Apple’s Hypersim dataset is a good example of how essential it is.
Synthetic data delivered Sora. It delivered Parallel Domain, an autonomous driving data startup. It’s been the state of the art idea for longer than GPT 3 has been around.
As someone who works on both, this is just not the case. If you're talking about general automotive R&D, sure.
If you're talking about the total employee makeup of a current self-driving company, the number might be ~10-50%, depending on the company.
But if you take the subset of employees that work on software, this number is much much larger. There's lots of typical SW dev needed for GenAI (think data pipelines) but a good chunk of ML-folks doing self-driving work can be useful on GenAI as well.
I thought the skills for building an engine and those for building software were largely the same? /s
Yes. They'll be letting a lot of people go. This smells like a controlled leak to signal that the company isn't experiencing cooling sales / services when that happens.
If I were running a successful company I would stay as far away from selling cars as possible- it can't imagine how bad it is for PR (not to mention your psyche) to suddenly have "Family killed by drunk driver" headlines with a giant color picture of your flagship product, blood-stained and mangled below it.
Our local (Boston area) town police blotter always mentions if a Tesla is involved in so much as a bumper-scrape, whereas no other car brand has ever been mentioned even once.
People don't think that way generally about cars where humans have historically been in complete control, because we associate that with our own driving experience and we're conditioned to it. When it comes to a car brand where crashes occur due to autonomous driving that's different.
It's all about timing and the brand.
Apple coming into the car market will have the same media scrutiny as Tesla. There might be 1000s of Toyota motor vehicle accidents weekly, but if there's one involving a Tesla and particularly one driving autonomously, you can bet it will be on the front page.
It's an enormous PR challenge for Apple if one of their cars kills someone, especially in any autonomous mode. They likely won't be about to stop that from happening completely but either way it's still a challenge they will need to deal with.
Finally, Apple historically have not been associated with building high speed vehicles that can kill people. That is an inherent risk if you are entering the market as purely a car maker.
> Working in software I didn't sign up for something that people will put their lives in the hands of
It really depends. I think it happens more frequently than you thought. From life supporting software and automated planes which are obvious, to suicides caused by buggy software (see the British post bug) but also all the harm that social algorithms or private data leak can do.
In fact, there is a lot of things that can go very wrong with most software systems.
Nobody is excusing the car companies, because there is nothing to excuse. It’s not Toyota’s fault is someone drives drunk and nobody associates the two.
I think it's more than just the coders, it's just like... you know there's going to be a news story about an Apple Car running over a toddler and then right next to it there's a banner ad for the newest iPhone. Bad vibes.
I think it's different when the brand started out as a car company. As grim as it sounds, the public is aware and mostly unconcerned with the idea that vehicles made by the Ford Motor Company are sometimes involved in accidents that kill people.
I don't think that awareness is built in to every consumer brand.
I think more specifically, traditional automaker brands are boring and they garner little public discussion or attention.
Tesla I think is a good example of this -- some have a bad image of Tesla, which is probably in part to their propensity to attract media attention and public hype. When someone puts a Ford Escape on cruise control and crashes, nobody hears about it. If Apple released a car, it would have a ridiculous amount of hype, and ever darn scratch someone put on one would be front page news.
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. Especially when you could just have a higher-margin business selling software for other people’s cars.
What surprises me is that it took this long to kill the product. And while I feel bad for the engineers and researchers who worked on this project, this really does seem like the best outcome.
>>> 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.
Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc.
The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed to avoid more anti trust issues is often forgotten. Apples products are built on legacies. "Resting on the shoulders of giants" is probably true in this case.
Apple is now an AT&T, its now a Xerox, it is now the company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS). Apple, unlike google, knows how to make a consumer product, and one of these moonshots could make it even bigger...
I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.
Embarrassingly, I was eves dropping on a (loud) woman in a coffee shop who worked on the Apple Car project. She did SLAM work. I was evesdropping because that was a core part of my thesis and I was curious. She told her dining partner she was moved to the Vision Pro team to build the inside-out tracking.
Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on R&D but that’s how the game works.
I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things.
The density of talent must be amazing.
South Bay is just like a giant company town, it’s actually pretty boring - 60% of people work at the same handful of giant companies, the other 30% work at a startup, and the last 10% serve the first group fair trade coffee.
The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.
> It's weird. They always travel in groups of five. These programmers, there's always a tall skinny white guy, a short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.
>You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.
Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.
I’m very fond of both New York City, and spending time in nature for the same reason: you just don’t know what you’re gonna see when you walk out your door.
Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?
Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?
For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.
Yeah, but you don't have to "no-life the right hobbies" to be satisfied in NYC because there's SO MUCH to do. You can just be a normal person who isn't hyper obsessed with one particular hobby.
You mean besides drinking and dining and spending outrageous amounts of money on 13$ beer and overpriced bland food? As a european I dont like the city at all. The only thing going for it is the vibe and the energy of the people. If it werent for the high salaries, people wouldnt be moving here.
It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.
NYC is way better than Barcelona, sorry. Let me know when y'all can figure out how to make sidewalks that you can walk straight along to your destination, rather than having to go diagonally along a big asphalt parking lot at every single intersection.
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 where you actually do bump into and communicate with new and stimulating people.
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
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.
Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.
> Interests must align.
That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.
some of my best conversations - that I still remember many many years from them - are from people who have nothing in common to me.
some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have
I’m in Philly and about 20 years ago I sat next to an old man at a dinner for something. Neither of us wanted to be there. We talked, found out we both did tech things. I asked him what he worked on and he said “well back in the day I helped build ENIAC.” I was blown away. Had a great talk.
These are the moments in life to cherish. As Ferris Bueller once said "Life moves fast, if you don't stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it".
Incidentally, one of the scariest things about the volatility in the housing market and in my (lack of) career, is that I may at some point be forced to abandon the neighborhood and city in which I've adopted as my home and in which I've befriended many of these random delightful people of all ages, and they might have to too. They're my community, I see them at the gym, the coffee shop, walking down the street, or at the park. A 1 bedroom condo starts at around $650k CAD, and most of the people here who haven't already owned something for a while depend on renting basements.
It can be alienating to move through the world in spaces where your work is everywhere you go. It's a thing I appreciated moving from San Francisco back to the midwest. Every once in awhile, I bump into someone with a Github sticker or whatever, and it's a happy surprise, but for the most part the world I inhabit has nothing to do with my work. Everyone has different things to talk about.
I love not having to think or talk about work when I go outside.
If some one asks what I do they'll say "that's neat, must be nice to work from home!" and that's the end of the conversation, we can talk about hobbies or something else instead.
The benefit of being a part of the actual human world, where real people live. Where not essentially everyone is obsessed with their careers and/or comparative wealth. That sort of thing.
Different strokes I guess. How long have you been…working? The vast vast vast majority of people want a little more variety in lives as opposed to more more more of the stuff they spend 40+ hours a week doing as it is. The exceptions to this rule are almost always unhealthy workaholics / people that’ll learn about the benefits of work / life balance the hard way. It doesn’t make them some higher tier of world-class engineer like some (often including themselves) expect.
I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.
What part of it is confidential? Its existence? Obviously not. The fact that it uses SLAM? Not confidential, of course it does. That a person was transferred from that to the Vision Pro? Probably also on their linkedin page.
Nothing that OP described this person as saying sounds "stupid" or confidential. Sure, maybe they also said something that was confidential in addition to what was described. Maybe they also insulted your mother. We don't know.
Is that an official, Apple-specific policy written down somewhere? That doesn't seem right, and doesn't match other similar companies.
I've known people at Facebook and Microsoft who were working on upcoming not-yet-released products and were free to talk about the products and their roles on them. These people, much like the person we're discussing, worked on upcoming projects which had already been publicly announced.
Of course publicly discussing a confidential project that no one knows about could get someone fired, but that's not the scenario we're talking about.
Apple never announced a project to build a car. Nor did they announce the cancellation of a project to build a car.
Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.
Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.
More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.
People also do that to get insider info to trade on or for industrial espionage/competitor spying. They'll hang out in the lobby of a building, coffee shops nearby, appearing to work while eavesdropping and taking notes.
At my last bigco job, I was advised not to discuss company matters outside of the office.
Yes, I also don’t work I computer vision but played with it just a tiny bit—I think somebody saying they worked in SLAM and are moving to a Vision Pro project is not a huge leak or anything. It is like a chemist saying they work in lithium ion batteries and are making the same move. A very broad and fundamental concept.
Maybe the fact that they were moved away from the car project would have been a leak though, depending on what else they said.
I know a guy whose job it is to eavesdrop for industrial espionage purposes. Coffee shops and the like are haunts of his, as well as taking commuter flights in and out of SV.
There's always going to be the debate between entrepreneurship vs "intrapreneurship". Whether large companies can successfully develop what amounts of startups in-house with separate R&D labs vs buying startups.
The solution the follow up book to this one ^ was to build isolated teams that are flush with the resources/capital of the parents but aren't at the whims, or constant meddling, of the parent company's management class / stockholders / old ideas.
For all the effort Google/Apple/Meta/Xerox/Bell/etc put into their internal moonshot divisions the whole concept mostly hasn't been very successful.
But at the same time they also haven't been great at buying young up and coming startups either, often ruining them the second they arrive by the same impulses which demands R&D moonshot teams be isolated from the host.
Large companies often are significant investors in small R&D moonshots. Because they own a large part of the startup they can choose to buy it if the product turns out profitable, or they can sell. And since it is a separate investment when things go south they can stop investing and thus save money without appearing to let anyone go.
> unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed
I beg to differ; when I was at AT&T in the late eighties we tried to enter the computer business, on the PC side with Olivetti, and on the UNIX side with the 3B2 minicomputers made with our own chips running System V UNIX. I even had a 3B2-200 in my house for a couple of years.
Entering a new business is hard: although the engineering was solid, we didn't have a saleforce trained in selling computers, and we didn't have a rich ecosystem (Oracle! Ingres! Informix!). AT&T didn't throw UNIX out the window, but found that capitalizing on UNIX was hard.
When Ma Bell existed, Wall Street wasn't as myopic and short-termist. The stock market tolerated private-sector R&D because it mostly consisted of investors rather than speculators. These days, if something doesn't bear immediate fruit, the Masters of the Universe want no part of it.
company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS)
I'm curious what makes you say that about MS? Out of three, I'd actually put MS first and Apple last if for nothing else than Microsoft Research which is like a separate entity in its own strong right (judging from the outside). So many things useless to Microsoft business from them, yet so many many things..
Yeah, I absolutely believe that Apple can bring something to car industry - I remember Elon once said that Teslas hidden strength that no other car manufacturer caught on to was treating the car as technology akin to an iPhone with incremental updates and improvements pushed over the air. I've owned a Model X for a few years and I see that approach but don't think Tesla has perfected it. Apple has the potential to innovate there. Cars, even ones that look like "traditional" cars, have been computers on wheels for a long time - for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes. I have no idea what that would look like, and as someone who thought the iPhone was a worse version of an iPod and that the iPad filled a non-existant need I don't think I can speculate. But it just feels like an area that lags behind in terms of UX, which Apple often excels at.
Edit: I'm a dumb dumb and the brakes example was bad. I don't edit my mistakes in forums so peoples replies make sense. I still think the rest of the point is valid.
With power brakes, there's a brake booster (usually vacuum powered) which applies most of the force. When the engine is off (or if you have a broken brake booster) braking is entirely on you.
Indeed. The brake boost works one or two times right after engine power down, it's kinda funny - I like to push the brake before getting out just to feel it harden.
>>for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes
I'm sorry but you're getting it completely wrong. Brake by wire isn't legal anywhere in any market of the world and consequently there are zero cars implemented this way - every car currently on sale everywhere has to have a physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes.
Throttle by wire on the other hand - sure. Nearly all new cars only have an electronic throttle.
Steer by wire is making progress, with Lexus making the first road legal car that has a steering wheel that's fully disconnected from the steering rack, with only electronic control.
Lexus has a backup mechanical link it engages when a fault is detected. The Tesla Cybertruck is the first vehicle on the road with no such backup. They rely on redundancy of motors, power, and compute instead
There isn't a mechanical connection of any kind - the car just relies on triple(!) Backup for every component, including three fully independent power sources.
> there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes.
I don't think this is true for most vehicles. Skoda Octavia 2020 for example still has hydraulic brakes. I was going to suggest that no mass-production vehicles use a brake-by-wire system but I would have been wrong, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire
I wish more comments were like this.
Misjudging the iPhone etc probably just comes down to a lack of information about broader needs. Its not always a bad take.
I think Apple can provide an emphasis on modularity for the car manufacturers. What if you literally had a place to slip in an iPad as your display? What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets - if not for the drivers, then the passengers. What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements). Another car company could make the shell and the power train. Apple would handle the "experience" and integrate it into its other offerings. Cloud Cars.
> What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets
Or what if the people who wanted that just bought their headset of choice?
> What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements).
Question: when you get into someone else's car, is the first thing you notice the lighting, or is it how clean it is?
The accelerator likely would have been a better example. I'm not sure that any car currently shipping has a direct connection between the accelerator and a throttle.
It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good. Bell Labs was part of the public good - and why they employed multiple physicists and materials scientists whose employment involved basically researching whatever they wanted as long as it had some link back. Shannon was hired after his master thesis (which basically created the field of information theory) and, among other things, had a side project involving the application of computers to chess. They constructed the New Jersey lab specifically to encourage watercooler conversations and deliberately had greenhorns to work with the most senior researchers like Shannon. Bell Labs solved engineering problems needed by AT&T and Westinghouse, but they had the financial security to spend money on incredibly theoretical projects like transistors, operating systems (unix), and programming (C). Those pie in the sky projects would both benefit AT&T through automation, and covered the public good requirements of their monopoly.
AT&T (owner of Westinghouse and Bell Labs) then proceeded to take their monopoly and patent factory, and started buying up competitors and new small companies. Eating their golden goose in this way is what caused the government to break them up.
Bell Labs was independent for a few years doing... Stuff. Spent their remaining prestige on falsification scandals because of the publish or perish culture this new profit motive created. They were bought by Nokia a few years ago (now called Nokia Bell Labs) and now only employ a couple theoretical physicists last I read. The lab that put into practice the foundations of modern tech (Unix and C are in almost every non-consumer-facing device) just does some Nokia product development nowadays. What a loss.
> It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good.
It wasn't an unspoken agreement. It was an explict one, the Kingsbury Commitment.[1]
> I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.
I hope so. That would be a great result, even if the consumer product didn’t land. That said, I would argue that sometimes you do just have to call something and move on. You’re right that Apple is one of the few places that can do research for research sake, but this wasn’t a research project. By all accounts this had a real goal of making and manufacturing a car.
It appears this project was in the works for more than a decade, had numerous stops and starts, leadership and focus changes and if your goal isn’t just research for the sake of research (which I do actually think is demonstrably different from Bell Labs or Xerox Parc which are more akin to things like Microsoft Research and Google X and the like), you need to ship at some point.
I think giving ten years to something like this is definitely a gift and I hope we see fruits from some of the work that went into it other places. But at the same time, there are other moonshots you can try if one doesn’t work out and there is arguably a cost if you keep focused on one idea that isn’t going to pan out for too long. Ten years for a project like this seems like a fair amount of time to try and a fair time to pull the plug.
The problem is that the companies that can do that are rarely also the company's that are willing to do the hard work of productionizing those moonshots. Lots of people have nice salaries and jobs that depend on pumping out ideas and PoCs, but few have a clear dependence on getting it to market.
But the really big stuff all requires working like your future depends on it. They can't do that, so they usually just end up with laundry lists of fancy PoCs.
Even when they work, the rollouts can be glacial at best (eg, Waymo).
If anything of !35 years of cyberpunk input - and output building shit that spies on you:
Apple is Ono-Sendai and your iPhone is your deck. - the real battle is going to be how much agency does a Human Being have over all PII - all their data?
Your jack-in is your screen. Your data is your ID. But, who are YOU?
I think this made a lot of sense circa 2011 when it looked like autonomous vehicles were about to rapidly reshape the world around us.
While it may yet happen, the "about to" part of course turned out wrong. There was no AV revolution in the late 2010s, and Apple reportedly pivoting away from self-driving a couple of years ago was probably the actual death knell for the project.
Apple making an AV in the middle of the self-driving revolution makes sense; Apple making just a nice EV in a very crowded market does not.
The only time it made sense to me was the idea they had some proprietary or trade secret 10x battery efficiency breakthrough from their work on computers and had a massive opportunity to utilize it in electric car space. Otherwise struck me as as a "tesla is doing this so we should too" move.
The only way it could possibly work was always as an apple branded model under the umbrella of another manufacturer, with their support and dealership network. Think polestar being its own brand but using Volvo workshops for servicing and support, as well as using a lot of Volvo parts internally. I can imagine an Apple car that's just a really fancy version of an existing car, with their own infotainment.
Oh, this I could also see. Apple hates to partner with others, for the most part, which is why I don’t think that happened. And some of that is for good reason. The awfulness of the Motorola Rokr is what convinced Steve Jobs that Apple had to fully own and control the iPhone.
And Apple is showing off parts of Car Play that could be fully integrated by manufacturers in a much deeper way, assuming they want to give up control (which given GM’s decision to drop Car Play and Android Auto, seems like it’ll be a challenge).
There is certainly a world where Apple could be a modern QNX unencumbered by its parent company baggage and a better business model (ongoing subscription and not 50-cents a car or whatever it is QNX gets) and provide the software for all that stuff, but based on everything that has been reported, that wasn’t what Apple was doing here. They were trying to build a real car. And as challenging and interesting as that might be as an R&D exercise, I just don’t see why that would be a business you’d willingly want to enter when you are so successful in other areas and the margins are so poor.
I think I know why GM and the others fear CarPlay and Android Auto, but it's just so dumb to me.
It makes sense for companies like Netflix to shy away from the Apple "walled garden." They want to deliver a unique experience with exclusive content, not just be another content supplier to the Apple experience. They don't want to wind up like the record companies.
But car manufacturers? There's a whole lot of stuff going on w.r.t. your driving experience. Like driving. Hundreds of physical things. Etc. Unlike the media industry I can't think of a future where the car companies eventually find themselves subsumed by allowing CarPlay integration.
Then again, I can't tell what's the main fear... if car companies are scared of getting iTunes'd, or if they really just want that revenue from 5% of car buyers paying for the Premium GM Infotainment Experience Recurring Subscription or whatever.
From my past discussions with car executives (that are ~10 years old so grain of salt), I really do think it’s as simple as that recurring infotainment subscription revenue.
The small margin GM gets on its cars is buffered by the revenue splits it gets with Sirius XM and the various call for assistance services. Sirius revenue is on the decline because everyone listens to Spotify on their phone. The GPS revenue stream died with Google Maps on phones. So they have to try to lock in those fees where they can. See also: BMW selling a subscription to unlock features like heated seats.
Now, I think this backfires for GM. I think way more people will not buy new cars if they lack Android Auto or Car Play than they think. I also think that it will be harder to maintain the apps and services than GM thinks. When Ford was doing its partnership with Microsoft 15 years ago (and then they took it in-house because Microsoft Connect or whatever it was called was buggy as hell), I think that made a lot of sense. But it was also expensive to do and so you saw the car companies offload a lot of those details to Apple and Google via a QNX or other middleware layer. Tesla built its own software as sort of a foundational part of the car experience, and I think it has worked well for them. I don’t have the same confidence in GM.
The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system. But I bet Apple and Google would insist on 30% of that revenue (at least).
The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car
subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance
or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would
complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second
versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system
Would you pay it, or just avoid GM?
I really can't imagine significant numbers of people paying for it and I don't know that a 5G bundle makes any sense. I don't understand why anybody would want their car to have it's own 5G connection when they already have their 5G phone in their pocket.
Even my elderly borderline-technophobe parents are able to understand (with some effort) the concept of CarPlay since it's more or less the existing phone interface that they're used to.
Maybe the real killer issue is that on one hand, clearly many people value CarPlay enough to pay for it. But it has always been free, and will continue to be free from quite a few other auto makers, and that's a big obstacle to getting anybody to pay for it. That has historically been difficult for any sort of good or service...
I suspect Ioniq 5 and 6 were supposed to be those models, up until Hyundai exec leaked negotiations to media presumably thinking it'll somehow give them advantages. Timelines match up.
> requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business
I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.
I was going to say. If anyone knows how to quickly create and expand a network of dealerships and post-sales support, it's Apple. They literally wrote the book on this with computers and phones and all their accessories.
Cars are different both for sales and more importantly for support. Apple is best in class for a turnkey consumer experience. But if you’ve ever had to deal with Apple Care Enterprise, which is a lot more similar to the sort of support you have to do for luxury cars, in my experience it just isn’t the same. It is fine, but it isn’t the same experience that a consumer gets (I’m unsure of what the experience is like for people that shell out the money for the on-site support from IBM or whoever the contractor is now).
And that’s the thing. Apple does really well at attainable luxury consumer goods. I think it does less well the higher the price point and market segmentation. Hence why the $10,000 Apple Watch didn’t work (and that was for lots and lots of reasons, first and foremost I think a misunderstanding of why watch enthusiasts spend so much on watches).
But putting that aside, partnerships (dealers) make up the car market for everyone with the exception of Tesla, and although with enough time and money, Apple could absolutely build out their own network, unlike Apple Stores, where they had a solid 5 years to a decade to really grow (coincidentally timed to Apple’s rise as a consumer giant) into that infrastructure, they’d need to have that basically day one for a car. Which is my whole point about it being overhead/capital intensive. Even Tesla had a chance to grow over time as it was a new company and not expected to sell and service cars everywhere. Apple would have a difficult time, I think, releasing a car and saying it could only be bought and serviced in select cities. The stakes are higher the bigger you are.
It isn’t that I don’t think Apple could do these things. It’s that I don’t think Apple could do them at the scale and margins at which it has based its business on. Especially if the net result is growing $100b in market cap. Apple added $1T to its market cap in 2 years (2018 to 2020) and another briefly in 2023 (current is $2.82T). I think there are far less intensive ways to add $100b to the bottom line than to become a car company.
They didn’t though. They piggybacked off of the existing network of phone carriers. They did slowly build out Apple Stores. But they aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as resellers and carriers for selling devices
> So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen tech startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.
I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build.
Lucky for Apple, generative AI doesn’t need to work for 100% of the cases to be successful, unlike autonomous vehicles, so maybe Apple has a better chance to be successful this time.
I get what you're saying, however I don't think that's true:
> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle
Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.
It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.
Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.
In 2016 the Lyft cofounder predicted that by 2021 the majority of their network would be fully autonomous. The general public was led to believe that the technology was close to fruition. Apple execs having similar aspirations at the time makes sense. But we now know that that prediction isn’t coming true any time soon.
I’m not sure why everyone thinks that Apple only wanted to create an EV to compete with Tesla or BYD. Given that the Apple execs thought that fully autonomous driving was achievable, it’s possible that Apple wanted to introduce a mobile entertainment pod-type product which may have been relatively lucrative as a premium luxury product at first and later could have become a good product for keeping mindshare when the general public used it for their daily two hour commutes.
But after COVID started the work from home movement, Apple pivoting to a product like Apple Vision Pro makes more sense when the importance of commuting lessened. Peering backwards in time the decisions that Apple made look logical. Now whether Apple can monetize generative AI by leveraging their iDevices market share will determine whether they can make it to a 4T market cap. Apple has a tough mountain to climb going forward since none of these products are sure hits like the iPhone was.
> It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.
Probably, but who knows with Apple. I suppose they could have created a cheap Citroen Ami type thing with some cool tech and just doubled the price because it's Apple. I would assume they got into it because they saw a product with good margins.
If you think about it cars are poorly designed for the average journey. They tend to be designed for that one time you actually need to drive 300km, or the one time a year you need to fit 5 people in the car, or the one time you need to load 3 suitcases in the boot. And in America they're also way too big for no good reason.
Apple more than anyone might have been able to experiment with the conventional car design perhaps.
But we don't really know what they were trying to do do we? I think you assuming that they were just trying to create another low margin electric car company to compete the likes of Tesla and Ford is probably wrong though.
I’m guessing that most of Ferrari’s market value comes from the brand compared to future revenue or IP. Apple is just not that elite of a brand, I don’t see how selling million-dollar vehicles would significantly change their brand (assuming an Apple logo hood ornament).
> 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 was partner with big automotive OEMs for research joint ventures and sell a tiny number of cars and a relatively large amount of battery and drivetrain tech to other OEMs. Difficult to imagine anything less like Apple's business model than that.
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.
Aren't they? Their entire business is pretty much based on brand. Apple products aren't actually better than the competition (often they are worse, like the iPhone not letting you install apps outside the app store). But it doesn't matter because people think Apple is cool. I don't see why that wouldn't translate to cars.
I love how Apple haters don’t understand the phenomenon. Look, I bought Sony headphones, some reference like xixikxixkklkxwx. I now have tinitus. Everyone tells me it’s because I didn’t buy the xixikxixkklkxwii, which were obviously better. The entire PC market is like this. Intel sells i7, but it’s not the same as the i7 of 20 years ago. LG sells screens where you have 90% chances of buying shit and get told “Well they do make good screens, you should have bought the other reference. What did you expect. You noob.” The entire Android market is like this. You buy Samsung and you get OEM preinstalled shit. “Yeah everyone knows you should gave bought the Pixel, not the Samsung.”
So now, instead of buying things twice because the one was shit, I just buy Apple. I don’t buy “the iPhone”. I buy “iPhone”. It could be 99% more expensive, it’s still less than buying things twice.
I don't know why you think one needs to buy Apple in order to get good products. I research and find out what products are good, buy them, and am happy. If you're happy with Apple then good for you, but don't kid yourself that it's because they are just better. They aren't.
61% marketshare for phones in the US doesn't sound like a luxury brand to me.
They might position themselves as an aspirational brand outside the US, and by keeping retail prices close to the same as in the US, no matter the local purchasing power, I can see how they can be perceived as an upscale brand in some markets.
Or they could launch some much lower hanging fruit and wait for stock price to appreciate by that much or more. A car company, no matter how small, is very, very hard.
But I guess my question is, why would you bother with only making 4,000 cars a year, if you’re Apple? Especially if the initial cost of making that $100b market cap (which a solid iPhone quarter alone will net you) is more than $100b (not accounting for R&D tax rules fuckery because I’m not versed enough in how all that works and what the current rules are) on development work.
I have similar concerns about the Apple Vision Pro, given its small yields and current high ASP/muted demand, but at least there you can see the vision (pun unavoidable) of how it could eventually be an iPad-sized business or greater. A car only works if you do go after Tesla and Mercedes and BMW, etc.
I just don’t see any reason Apple would enter any business if not to take it on as a mass market player. Selling a $10,000 variant of a $500 watch is one thing (and that strategy failed, for what it’s worth), selling a low quantity machine that you still have to maintain and support that isn’t part of your core competency as a company is something else entirely.
But Apple's M.O. is Toyota volume with Ferrari margins. No way would they be happy selling 4k of anything. And Apple's required margins is why I never thought they would release a car - there isn't enough money in it.
Ferrari's value is driven more by merchandising than by car sales. Even if a hypothetical Apple car did well, that wouldn't drive billions in sales of Apple branded jackets, hats, luggage, shot glasses, etc.
Ironically this was something Apple used to be good at but they killed off all the fun things with apple branding on them, now all you get is two campus exclusive shirt designs.
I'd love some retro apple "lifestyle" gear, throwback porsche racing jacket would be clutch right now with the yoots
I never understood why each of the flagship Apple stores don’t have custom merch.
I’ll admit that I’ve stopped at plenty of Apple stores while traveling, simply because they’re nearby. They’re usually in very nice locations for tourists (5th av, grand central station, etc) and I can totally see them dramatically improving brand appeal and catering to fanboys with localized tee shirts or Apple Watch bands or polishing cloths or any number of other gimmicks.
Oh and their retro stuff would sell out in an instant. Their 80s stuff was cool.
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 and build quality and some attempt at a game-changing killer feature, all bundled with cross-marketing for other walled-garden products.
I'm not surprised that turned out to be impossible - for now.
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.
> 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.
Right. The electric car business took a wrong turn when most of the players decided that electric cars were a premium product that could be sold with huge margins. Tesla started there, and it seemed to be working for them. This led to excesses such as the electric Hummer, a 9,000 pound vehicle with sports car acceleration and a price in 6 figures. It's a great engineering achievement but a silly product.
It also led to electric versions of vehicles having a price premium around US$10,000 over the same model with internal combustion.
Then Tesla exhausted the fanboy market. Reality ensued. Price mattered. Tesla had to start offering discounts.
This is a big problem for some major car companies that bought into the high margin myth. Ford should have known better. Stellantis' CEO was running around saying that they were going to get margins like tech companies, partly by adding on aftermarket fees. That didn't work out.
Electric cars are doing just fine, and prices are coming down. That's a good thing. BYD gets this.
I just don't see how they can make any more money with "generative ai" than a useful tool that actually can get me around. Seems like chasing after fool's gold.
Seems more like a defensive play rather than one designed to directly open new revenue streams.
In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind.
In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't moved the market much. But the risk is that generative AI is a paradigm shift that will unlock some game changing capability that could catch Apple off guard.
Same story with Microsoft and Copilot on the desktop.
If your two primary competitions are doing similar things then you start paying attention.
For a strictly vibes-based technology bubble, it can be valuable to invest a little in vibes, if not necessarily technology. Claiming you're assigning employees to a buzzword is very affordable.
There are very few businesses which can add 1+ Trillion to a companies market cap. To grow at pace with the S&P, Apple needs to find a new 1 Trillion dollar business every 2-3 years.
Cars were a good candidate, but it sounds like AAPL now thinks that GenAI is a better bet. ChatGPT is such a basic product, that it sounds reasonable that there will be bigger and better products in the future.
Apple probably envisioned not a car company but a revolutionary personal transportation industry that highly integrates compute power in the form of self-driving AI. Remember, Steve Jobs famously poopooed the Segway. It doesn't surprise me that they got into it and then took their time. With advances in robotics and more powerful AI on the horizon, I can see a reasonable internal debate on whether to stay the course on R&D or not.
Apple started work on this car when vehicles were still reasonably priced.
I’d wager this cancellation is purely due to there being no chance in hell Apple could get the Apple premium for it when vehicle sales are stagnating due to massive price increases.
The much-overstated “Apple premium” largely reflects that they don’t compete in the lowest end of the PC/phone market. They’d be competing with BMW, not charging even more.
As a current owner of a BMW 5 series, buying anything non-electric for the price of an EV sounds ludicrous to me. The moment your warranty expires, BMW takes ownership of your wallet and never lets go, and there’s _a lot_ of expensive maintenance and repairs you need to do. I know they also make EVs, but just based on my current experience with their dealers buying anything from BMW would be insanity. Whoever overhauls the ownership experience will make a ton of money. In the meanwhile my next car will be a Tesla. My wife already has a Model Y, and in 3 years we paid $0 for maintenance and the car has been in the shop 0 times.
IOW Apple could easily charge their customary 20-30% margin and create fierce brand loyalty by just looking at whatever it is BMW is doing and doing the opposite in nearly every situation.
Agree, repairing a recent-gen out of warranty MacBook at Apple is nearly as expensive as servicing a car. Why wouldn't Apple want those margins from premium cars as well?
You probably haven’t had your car serviced in a while. My BMW is currently is at the dealer, to replace water pump and thermostat. The invoice is $4.5K. The winning strategy for a newcomer is not to charge for repairs, but to create a car that doesn’t need repairs or maintenance.
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? ...?
A self-driving car is not something that Apple has any relevant expertise at building. They can't even make siri work well. They had zero hope to make a self-driving car.
That's far from true. They have world class expertise in design and supply chain management. That would transfer over to the car market a lot easier than it would to pretty much any other trillion dollar market.
Shipping a billion iPhones and shipping millions of cars only reasonable each other at a surface level. Apple does not have much expertise in maintaining the same supply chain and logistics, and certainly not in design.
They could hire people with the expertise, but Apple is allergic to growing engineering expertise outside of Cupertino.
I doubt that's Magna Steyr's fault though. They've produced 10k cars, but Fisker have only delivered half of those, and from everything I've seen, it seems to be well-built from a hardware standpoint.
They could easily buy Volkswagen sized company from the reserve cash they have and still have quite a good amount of reserve left. I don't think car experience is something that is the limiting factor.
Or let's bet 2% of valuation to create another high margin business in one of the only sector that could give us trillion dollar more. I am just saying that few 10s of billions are enough to get all the tradition car makers talent, so if they are serious about car this is not the blocker.
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.
Healthcare is even more heavily regulated than the auto industry.
Generally, the closer you are to "people will die if this code has a bug," the more regulated the industry.
People that don't work in a heavily regulated space vastly underestimate the constraints. It's hard enough to create a product that's beautiful and works well at a price point that the market will bear, but it's often near-impossible to do all this while also complying with all the regulations of all the markets in which you intend to sell your product.
It takes a tremendous amount of commitment, money, and time, and companies that aren't used to working within snail's pace regulatory environments quickly lose focus and the projects sputter out.
And apple successfully got wearable health monitoring in their watch to be a thing and got 510(k) clearance as a class 2 medical device etc. They're already big players in health even if not marketed that way.
I agree with your entire comment but have some nuance about one point:
> It’s one thing to create a new [lower-margin business], it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins.
While I agree that this plan didn't fit with any of Apple's strengths, as a general principle good companies plan for margin erosion. In fact failure to do this is a classic failure described in The Innovator's Dilemma, where you're leaving room for a disruptor to grow. Or as Sun used to put it: "if someone's going to show up and eat our lunch, it should be us who does that"
>This was an idea that never made any sense to me.
I mean, for Apple, it absolutely makes sense.
Electric vehicles are relatively straightforward to make. Everyone and their mother are producing some sort of electric scooter/dirt bike these days with new companies popping up every month. Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.
Apple could easily outsource most of the functional development and design and certification, and then focus on their core competency which is aesthetics and marketing and integration into iOS ecosystem, which would be a winning combo economically.
>Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.
Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?
Tesla has many faults to it. Poor materials, lack of general reliability (door handles getting stuck, spoilers getting stuck up), NVH issues, and so on. Many people don't really care that much about those issues though, as long as the core use of the car to get from point a to b is there, and being able to top up at home is convenient, and maintenance costs are way lower.
Having worked at a car company, this is categorically false. Cars have thousands of moving parts (even EV's), are expected to operate reliably for a decade, represent the second most expensive thing most people will buy and any mistakes will kill people.
If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.
Thats the list of moving parts. Dunno where you got 1000 moving parts from. Most each one of those has reliable manufacturers that have figured out how to build them correctly.
You also have the cars power steering system, AC unit, tons of additional pumps, doors / locks / handles, relays, etc. Not to mention each of these parts has bearings, joints and brushings within it.
Reliable manufactures? Auto suppliers are notorious for being unreliable - the supply chains are exceedingly complex, there's constant pressure to drive down cost and quality control lapses are a constant issue.
Not to mention each vehicle has hundreds of different suppliers and an issue in any one of them will grind your manufacturing line to a standstill.
Apple has the data on how many iPhones are being used by drivers, while moving, and how many are involved in accidents. It's almost like if you had a handgun that had a camera on it that knew children where on the other end of the barrel, and had the ability to not fire when the shooter pulled the trigger. Apple knowingly put a tremendous amount of senors on a device that distracts drivers. The class action lawyers haven't figured this one out yet, but give it time.
You mean have the cameras constantly be activated if the device is moving greater than x speed? Wouldn’t that drain the batteries a ton?
And what characteristics does the phone look for? It could just be sitting on someone’s lap or held in a way that cannot see the outside or the steering wheel.
Why? Plenty of companies and products kill loads of people or at least are involved in slave labor and environmental damage and their stocks are through the roof and their products fly off the shelves. See Saudi Aramco, Chevron, BP, H&K, BAE, and Nestle.
Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?
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 agree. The only two examples I've seen of embedded AI that "works" is Bard in search results, and generative AI in Adobe's. Everything else feels tacked on.
Edit: And on my iPhone, the offline photo categorization and image OCR
They are oversaturating their products with internet-based LLMs. It is a desperate attempt to milk all possible potential value from their smart investment.
A careful plan for a product would be less hamfisted and include more flexibility to deal with the backlash.
MSFT's main benefit their chokehold on corporate software. They can provide high priced software, deals etc. due to sheer force of Office and Azure. Even Amazon does not have that.
This is true, but most big AI companies are the ones selling shovels, and tons of money is pouring into the field because everyone wants to get in on shovel selling... but I don't know if it's yet determined that there are enough motivated shovel buyers.
Microsoft haven't really taken any deep interest into the (say) Office suite in decades so now they have no intuition at all for where its value is, thus the "umm copilot?"-ing everywhere.
Yeah its kind of insane how many times Apple can pull this trick yet we still get people saying "they're late, they look like morons, Apple is finished".
Apple can arrive last to a product market. They can take six years of iterative releases to refine their vision on a product market. They will still dominate that market. Cue the "they can't keep getting away with this" meme, because this happens with EVERY PRODUCT THEY RELEASE and these people still keep thinking this time will be different.
The whole "Siri sucks" thing is also hilarious, because you have to ask: So? So what? Apple, Google, and Amazon invested billions upon billions into these systems (Amazon especially). Then LLMs came around and are absolutely eating their same lunch ten times faster. Apple, again, looks like a genius (intentionally, or far more likely, not). They didn't over-invest. They're not laying off a thousand people from the Alexa division [1], or removing a ton of Google Assistant features [2], or releasing hardware no one is buying. They built exactly enough of a voice assistant to be competitive throughout the 2010s, and now its time for the next generation of all these things anyway.
The issue here, although easier due to moving second, is that Apple don't seem to really have a software culture, and this is pure software in multiple limits.
Possibly. On the consumer side, they’re in their own niches. What will get interesting is how Apple lets developers hook into the on-device AI, or one that’s running on its own metal.
> Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space.
I would say that only one of the examples you gave was unambiguously the first mover in a brand new space. I will give you "category defining", though.
For example, the iPod had tons of competitors already in the field when it launched.
Airpods were not even close to the first wireless earbuds.
One of the Apple Watch's major competitors (fitbit) launched 8 years prior. The first smartwatch that could sync with a computer came out in the 80s.
The iPad came like a decade after Microsoft's first major tablet push. ATT and Sony/Magicap and Apple all released "smart tablets" in the early 90s.
The iPhone was not the first capacitive touch screen smartphone, and certainly not the first smartphone - over a decade late to that game.
The Macintosh was (sort of) a sequel to Apple's own Lisa, which itself was also not a first mover. The Mac was incredibly innovative and successful, but was preceded by the LISA, PERQ, Alto, various Lisp Machines.
> In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.
iPhone has basically defined a category of mutli-touch screen devices. It essentially created the whole foundation how all the mobile phones went. It was a completely new consumer category of devices.
Apple Watch was a success because it used iPhone as a moat. iPad was built upon iPhone's foundation.
Back in 2007 it was not seen as a completely new category or truly original. It was a variation within an existing category. At the time we did not think it was revolutionary, but of course it became the new standard.
Before they became an "iPhone company" they were an "iPod company", and that was also an existing category when it launched.
These are all classes of device where existing options hashed out many of the growing pains before Apple released something more polished or attractive to buyers - the definition of second-mover.
you think when the iPhone came out the space was not crowded? You think they defined the category? Jobs himself have put up a number of smartphones in his 2007 presentation. Yes, the iPhone was far, very far better but it was definitely not a first.
Same thing with the iPod vs Diamond Rio MP3 layers.
As for the Watch, gosh, I do not even know where to start. Pebble Kickstarter two years before that? Two generations of the Samsung Galaxy Gear came out well before the Apple Watch.
"No handset polarised opinions during 2007 more than the Apple iPhone. Although it has many good points, the list of bad points is equally impressive. The iPhone lacks 3G, the camera is only two megapixels and lacks autofocus and flash, you cannot send MMS messages, third party applications are not allowed, the battery is not replaceable and it is absurdly expensive."
Look at a picture of what the top 10 smartphones looked like the day before iPhone launched and then again a few years later. That is what category defining means.
They didn't take whatever was out there in the market and copy it/make it incrementally better. They started from scratch and built something drastically different and better than the rest. Same for iPod (yes there were plenty of cheap MP3 players out there, but none of them were comparable), Airpods and all the rest.
Literally EVERY single example you listed were markets that already existed before Apple entered them (except maybe the Mac but that was so long ago who cares). MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smartphones existed before the iPhone. Wireless earbuds existed before Airpods. Tablets existed before the iPad. Smartwatches existed before the Apple Watch. VR goggles existed before Vision. Smartrings existed before the Apple Ring (just wait, its coming).
Their skill isn't in being a first mover. Their skill is being a second, or even last, mover into a space that has untapped potential, and unlocking that potential (for both their benefit and competitors).
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 discovers "AGI".. then what? Is that worth money, somehow?
Does a computer understanding me make it better? I find that attempts the computer makes to understand me, "delight" me, etc. just end up pissing me off. It's a tool. All I ever want a tool to do is be completely invisible and become an extension of my body, which enables me to get a task done. Computer software which does anything other than exactly what I tell it to fails at this, because it instantly breaks my connection to the task I'm trying to do and refocuses my attention on the software itself.
I wouldn't dream of trying to use a Siri, it sounds absolutely maddening. All I expect is that when I press a key on the keyboard the character I commanded with my key press shows up on the screen before I can blink, and does so exactly once.
That's great, and I don't begrudge you, but most people want to be able to tell their computer what to do and not need to understand the discrete steps it took to get there.
Taking a completely different type of example, image editing. Let's say you ask your computer to remove a blemish in a photo. A professional could remove it, maybe better even, without AI. They know the tools to use, the keys to press, and effect change. Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
It's not here yet, so yes you're right that Siri IS maddening to use.
> Regular people don't give a crap about that, they want to circle the item (or otherwise identify it) and click "remove." When the computer removes the selected item they're happy, and generative AI is working on THAT type of solution.
This feels dangerously close to a lack of empathy for the user. I understand that's not your intention, in fact the opposite. But in order to accept the notion that users actually want an intelligent employee instead of a tool I have to believe that everyone truly wants to be a manager instead of an individual contributor. I don't believe it.
Take a simpler case, hammering in a nail. What I want from my hammer is for it to disappear and become an extension of my arm. I just want to hammer in the nail. I don't want to negotiate with the hammer about how it's going to strike the nail, all I want is to hit the nail. There's no amount of "clever" the hammer can be which will help. Cleverness can only hurt my user experience.
In your example, what recourse does the user have if the AI didn't do the job the way they wanted? Removing something from an image implies (probably? or maybe not?) that the void is "backfilled" somehow. What if they're not happy with the backfill job? Do they have to argue with the tool about it? Will the tool take their feedback well or will it become a fight?
I think, generally, giving users tools that scale like hammers is the way to go. A hammer in the hands of a skilled carpenter, blacksmith, or cobbler with 30yr experience is no different than the same hammer in the hands of a 2yo child learning to drive their first nail. But that hammer's utility will scale with that child's skill for their entire lifetime. There's no "beginner" vs "advanced" distinction. What makes us (as computer hammer builders) believe that we can distinguish between "beginner" or "advanced" computer hammers? Or "regular" vs "special" users?
EDIT: or maybe we're not building hammers, instead we're building dishwashers. Dishwasher users aren't supposed to be skilled beyond loading and unloading the dishwasher, and hitting the start button. Do "regular users" really want an appliance, or do they want a tool?
EDIT: another way to phrase it -- are computers "bicycles for the mind" or are they just a bus?
That's very true, I dislike how Apple, etc. don't uncover the manual controls for things. So when the smart tools stop working it gets frustrating because there's no manual way to continue.
I love watching my friends and family use Siri. Maybe 20% of the time it does what they want first try. 40% of the time they end up unlocking the phone and tapping the screen.
Sounds infuriating to me. (To be clear, I don't have any always-(maybe)-on mics in my life, I doubt Hey Google or Bard or whatever is much better.)
But none of those things are Generative AI, which is a big part of WHY they're infuriating to use.
I use Siri to add stuff to my grocery list and set timers. That's it. It's useful when I'm in the kitchen to just say what needs to go on this list instead of remembering to write it down later.
The day when Siri or Google or whatever can make the corrections I mentioned in my higher post will improve it vastly.
Even if all it did was improve Siri’s capability to understand requests and add the ability to ask clarifying questions with no other functional improvements, it’d make Siri vastly more useful.
This, but it is really exciting because for the first time, you can just tell your computer what to do. Not just a given set of tasks, but e.g. "go to my gym and book a slot with my personal trainer"; "contact Shauna and set up a meeting to talk about X, then book me tickets to get there".
Think about how much monkey-work we all do with our smartphones. We might look back in 10 years and laugh at the idea that we had to press buttons all the time.
I had this 15 years ago when my blackberry had a keyboard on it. It had buttons, and when you press them it makes the character you commanded go onto the screen. If they'd just put buttons on the phone instead of trying to draw a fake one on the screen you wouldn't need a statistical model to make the keyboard work
I can type significantly faster with GBoard, swipe or not, than I could on any physical phone keyboard ever. Blackberries, the G1, Droid OG. No way I'd ever take those over GBoard.
But iOS users don't really know what they're missing from GBoard, so.
I haven't owned an iPhone since the iPhone 4, I lean really heavily on autocorrect on my Pixel (is that using Gboard?). It's just an infuriating experience to me compared to physical buttons. I probably hit the backspace key at least three times as often and often when I try to type a backspace instead it comes out as an "l", "m", ".", or enter.
Most of the time I just wish I could plug my full sized keyboard into the phone, that would fix it completely most of the time (except, obviously, when I'm not near my desk).
An ideal compromise would be physical buttons on the device for when it's necessary and the ability to easily use my workstation's external keyboard (dock + switch maybe?) the rest of the time.
EDIT: Now that I think of it.. let me plug in a mouse too and give me a real OS (maybe in a container like you get on a Chromebook) and i can just replace my workstation with the docked phone. But then I would buy only half as many computers and wouldn't need all that GPU compute to train a bunch of statistical models so I guess that doesn't work for the computer companies.
I knew halfway through your comment that I was going to end up agreeing with where you were going. We're so close to having a decent Android tablet, with maybe a new Firefox for tablets, with USB-C DP out. 90% of the time I also would rather just be on a better device.
I'm sad there isn't more built around Android's AVF. I thought for sure, by now, we were going to have "Linux on Android" ala Crostini.
You can indeed just plug in your full size keyboard into your phone! You may need a USB A to C adapter, but your phone will happily support an external keyboard
> 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?
It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.
I think you're right, it'll be interesting to see whether the next AI winter brings a market crash with it. It would be one thing if it seemed like there was some commercial application beyond "neat nerd toy" but so far there just isn't that I'm aware of? That smells a lot like tulip bulbs.
If AGI is defined as a AI that can replace most humans at most tasks, it would be worth money if it's cheaper than paying humans. So instead of a Marvel film costing 100 million to make, if an AGI can do it for 30 million it's worth tens of millions of dollars. Of course society might eventually collapse from mass unemployment, but corporate owners would live like kings until that finally happens.
There are two possibilities- one is what the PC largely did. Nobody really lost their jobs even though one accountant can do the work of 40 that just had calculators. We can just do “more” now.
On the other hand there’s what the washing machine, mechanized farm equipment, etc. did. A slow shift in how many people are required to do a job. There were no absolute jobs lost, just a shift in the economy.
This comment is really odd to see on HN. It’s like if a group of computer enthusiasts (in person) had a guy saying “I don’t understand what the big deal is with this so-called internet.”
The Internet was (is) a totally transformative technology which has changed how people work, play, shop, and interact worldwide. Your claim is that generative AI will do this? How? I recall a few months ago the Web 3.0 people saying a similar thing. Is it different this time?
That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.
Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace?
EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
Do you understand the concept of individual productivity? If you have 5 people working for you, and a new technology makes each 25% more productive, you can fire one of them.
The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do.
The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
Has anyone been made measurably more productive with this stuff? Is even 25% achievable? I'm a software engineer, and I spend less than 25% of my time typing out code. So even if copilot could write every single line of code for me it could not improve my productivity by 25%. In order to make me 25% more productive it would also have to somehow speed up everything else I do at work as well. Has this been demonstrated?
Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
Yes, I wrote a small app in kotlin to scratch an itch. Chat gpt 3.5 gave me code that in the past would have taken me weeks to figure out from the mountain of verbiage in Google docs for the ever changing APIs. Normally googling for this stuff just leads to loads of things that don't work and I have to figure out why. With chat gpt I just pasted whatever error and it gave me the right answer the second or third time. I now have my (private) app that does what I need. Without gpt it would have taken me several weeks (real time, it's a hobby).
I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
They actually did but mainly with Google play. So far it feels like Microsoft is moving faster in that regard and getting partnerships with various automakers with AI at least.
I would rather they focus obscene amounts of effort to making the keyboard text “correction” not utter trash. Ridiculous how frequently it will completely change the intention of my writing.
I think because if they don't, they'll be in the position of depending on someone else's platform to provide AI features for their products. This is just an analogy, but it would be like if you were an app developer, and instead of being able to control your distribution, you had to use someone's centralized store to sell everything, and then pay whatever they demanded, or be cut off at any time. Very dangerous!
i agree with your general sentiment but for Apple I do believe it makes sense to focus on AGI as they could incorporate it within their OSes and products to make them more productive for the users.
Apple has a reputation to uphold, of being bleeding edge and having the best, latest, greatest tech. Their "AI" is a not-so-great scripted bot over a decade old at this point.
They are laughably behind the curve. Android should see widespread deployment of Gemini baked into the next generation of phones, and this could have a significant impact on Apple.
> Apple has a reputation to uphold, of being bleeding edge and having the best, latest, greatest tech
Their reputation is of being the best. The most polished. The most accessible.
It’s never been to be on the bleeding edge. Apple’s brand is that of the perfectionists. Even in their hackiest 80s lore, the elements that rise to myth are those about resourcefulness and design.
> Apple has a reputation to uphold, of being bleeding edge and having the best, latest, greatest tech.
Quite the opposite.
The iPod was panned by tech commentators; famously, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
The iPhone saw similar reactions; https://www.fastcompany.com/40436054/10-of-the-most-interest.... "There is nothing revolutionary or disruptive about any of the technologies."; "The real elephant in the room is the fact that I just spent $600 on my iPhone and it can’t do some crucial functions that even $50 handsets can."; "That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone."
I can't imagine how apoplectic Gates was over the iPad's success after a decade of trying to make a Windows tablet sell.
They haven't released anything yet it's unfair to say how far behind they are. I don't expect them to catch up with Open AI but perhaps they could be on par with Google.
Apple's advantage is always been superior hardware and processing. My guess is that they try to do some on device LLM. It's currently possible to run Mistral 7B on your phone (MLCChat app), which is quite decent for a small model but is pretty terrible compared to the largest / best models.
Weird thing to say about the company that will be the definitive LLM once Pro 1.5 is available with its million tokens. I can’t even imagine what ultra 1.5 will bring.
You're kind of contradicting yourself. If a high token count tells you all you need to know about how smart a model is Ultra 1.5 would be just as good as Pro 1.5.
The fact of the matter is it remains to be seen how smart either model will be.
Could you point me to evidence what you just wrote is true?
I just asked mistral 7b to provide 5 sentences that end with Apple. It couldn't do it. I then provided 5 examples generated from ChatGPT 4 and asked it to generate 5 more. It still couldn't do it. 10 ChatGPT examples- still couldn't do it.
You seem to be saying the models can generalize on the entire context size, that I should keep provided examples up to the token limit because this will make the model smarter. Is there evidence of that?
As a former google fanboy (and current genAI enthusiast that keeps being disappointed at all the models that claim to rival gpt4 and then don't even beat gpt3.5), I'll believe it when I see it.
Do we actually know if they're far behind or if they just haven't released something publicly because it's not perfect?
I mean looking at Google and the various daily AI dramas they get, it seems like everyone else has rushed to market and is dealing with the negative fallout of that.
After having gone through decades of adopting the "latest and greatest" tech, I've gotten to the point where what I really want is the least-complex thing I can find that does the essential job I want done.
For a computer, I want something with SeaBIOS, a stripped-down kernel, and a handful of packages from the Debian Stable repository. I want it hackable and repairable -- something like a Framework. Nothing like a MacBook. For a phone, I want something that can run Signal, Fastmail, a music/audiobook player, Syncthing, and Organic Maps, more or less. Minimal connectivity to Cloud services, and nothing about it vying for my attention. Nothing like an iPhone.
For a car I want hackable and repairable. Again with minimal complexity. I don't want it spying on me. I don't want computer glitches rendering the car unusable. I want the parking brake attached to a cable that I engage with a lever. I want to be able to shift it into neutral by pressing down on a clutch pedal and pushing a stick. If my 12v battery dies I want the car to be fully functional after a jump. I want a spare tire in the rear hatch with a jack I can use on the roadside. I want to be able to easily fix most things that can go wrong with the car with parts I can find at a common automotive shop or junkyard. Nothing like what an Apple car would have been.
Given the number of people on HN with iPhones and Teslas I guess I might be running counter to hacker culture. I don't know. But I'm thinking I might not be the only person around thinking this way about technology these days.
A lot of people want (as you describe) the “least-complex thing I can find that does the essential job I want done”
But what you then go on to describe is the antithesis of other people’s definitions.
People want an experience that works out of the box. That they don’t have to think about package managers or maintenance. That’s low complexity for the vast majority of people.
People want something that works out of the box and keeps working without additional maintenance or annoying you all the time.
The post you are replying to has a stronger focus on the second part but still wants the same thing.
Same reasoning for getting debian instead of windows. The preinstalled option seems easier at first sight (someone else prepared the box for you), but then windows has McAfee trials, hey sign up for this, oh you don't want updates right now... too bad, your microphone does not work in Skype and you have no clue where to even look to fix it. I don't have the time or patience to deal with this, so debian it is.
I understand what the person I was replying to wants. I was replying to their point that they don’t understand that other people don’t want the same, when they do but they just value other forms of simplicity.
And how does being on Debian meaningfully change your scenario? You’ve just shifted the issue elsewhere to something that you are subjectively more familiar with and subjectively more willing to debug.
Let’s be real. Most people aren’t going to do that. The year of Linux on the desktop would have come by now (and let’s not trot out the steamdeck which hides that away)
Any vanilla option with millions of users and some reputation for quality works for this. Windows works just fine out of the box. As does mac os. As does debian.
With windows you ofc run the risk of purchasing your kit from a shitty vendor - so that for sure is a slight extra hurdle.
> People want an experience that works out of the box.
I hear this since 30 years. Yet absolutely nothing works out of the box. Everything has a learning curve, sometimes only for the sake of change (see Windows, iOS, etc)
A lot of things work out of the box. Hairdryers. Cooking stoves. Fridges. Coffee machines.
It's just as soon as a company wants to make everything into a full-blown computer (to get that sweet data), that's when the problems start. The system becomes complex, feature creep and lack of engineering effort do the rest. Maybe not everything needs to be a computer.
> A lot of things work out of the box. Hairdryers. Cooking stoves.
I wish my cooking stove worked out of the box. After the control panel died a technician who didn't know what they were doing replaced it and then neglected to push a new firmware version into the Linux box running in my stove. That messed up the communications between the control unit and the power board, and my oven was perpetually 25F cooler than what I had set it to until I called another tech back to figure that out.
That was actually a food safety issue, as one might assume that if you cook your meat at a particular temperature and time then it will be safe to consume. The cook top also seemed to only be able to cook at settings 6 or 7; the lower settings seemed to be way too weak.
Fortunately I had the sense to buy an oven thermometer just to make sure.
I have always hated how almost everywhere I go I get told “no one can know everything/no one cares how a plain works so long as it works” for me that’s fundamentally untrue.
But I have heard it said so many times and seen so many people simply agree with it that I believe that for many many people out there, it is true.
Why do a lot of technical people own iPhones and use Mac’s? It’s not because they can’t understand the technology and it’s not because they don’t like to tinker.
It’s because they don’t want to carry that constant burden of thought with them. Maybe some do, but a lot of folks like the base state to be one where they can just chill.
> It’s because they don’t want to carry that constant burden of thought with them
With me it's the thought of how it's going to prevent me from doing what I want because "it's not the Apple way" (but that applies to more than just apple). It's the main reason not to use those.
I want my iPhone to connect via cloud with my Mac, because I can scan documents with the iPhone and open them there. Without me doing anything to connect the devices apart from first install.
I want to experience new things like new music hence why I use Spotify to get something new washed in (but in the past it worked better).
All the gain but without the pain of fixing it. I already have to fix packages during work time and debug through software. Not in my spare time please.
I bought into the "it just works" ideology after using Android since my first smartphone. Not only is the UX really confusing and lacking any sort of help to understand what you can and cannot do, but the "It's not the Apple way" is really getting in the way of the most basic stuff.
Apple gave iPhone users "Automation" yet it's so lacking you cannot do things automatically when you receive a text message for example, without requiring manual action. Apple CarPlay doesn't seem to have been tested with people actually driving and using it, exemplified by receiving a call while trying to use map navigation and the receiving call covers the navigation. There are so many examples like this, while what I thought I would get would be something that excelled in every way.
There are so many examples of UX that is lacking of thought, that this is my first and last iPhone.
I had exactly this experience! I’m so frustrated people convinced me to buy an iPhone, because it was so expensive I can’t justify switching back. I have been using a Pixel 6 for some drone photography and everything about is nicer than my iPhone 14 Pro.
I found out long ago that it's easier and more cost-effective[] for me to change my habits than it is to try to shove the square peg of my habits to the round hole of the tool I'm using.
The final part of my comment got cut off by my tab switching behaviour but it was along the lines of “I find it hard to believe that even the most passionate hacker or tinkerer could become an adult and not have realised most people aren’t like that.
Was going to say this. I went from what he describes as the solution, to what he describes as the antithesis, for the exact reasons he went in the opposite direction. Funny eh?
Tesla (and Apple) don't just work though. The latest Tesla issue I have is the navigation system which caches nothing and often takes 2-4-10 minutes before it updates the map WHILE I'M DRIVING and trying to find a new route. I end up having to take out my phone (more dangerous) and search there. This happened often in both SF and LA. Say you're driving, you want to zoom out a little to get some idea of where you need to be, which exits it's picked, etc. You zoom out and the tiles at that zoom level don't fill in for minutes. And, if you want to them to fill in you need to keep fingers on the screen, otherwise it auto-zooms back to the default level and throws away whatever data it started downloading. It's infuriatingly bad
I didn’t say they were perfect. I very much do think there’s room for improvement but the stock experience in a Tesla is miles ahead of other companies. The only thing that would be better IMHO (and much better) is if they allowed CarPlay or Android auto.
Let’s not miss the forest for the trees with equating flaws with what the original topic was: hackable. All their examples require up front knowledge and patience. They’ll still have flaws after all that.
Most people don’t want that. They’ll put up with flaws if they can skip the up front mental energy and friction.
Okay so it's not just me. I feel like the map issues have been absolutely infuriating recently. There are also offline maps that are downloaded as well so I don't understand how the maps are so awful. I don't remember it being this bad in 2019/2020.
> People want an experience that works out of the box. That they don’t have to think about package managers or maintenance. That’s low complexity for the vast majority of people.
> That’s why people are going for Apple and Tesla.
Agreed. that I think why some here prefer the more stripped down but more actively operated products is that, in contemporary versions of Apple (or similar) products is that the surface level simplicity of those products comes in exchange with a far more complex business model of DRM, product ecosystems, subscriptions, IOT nonsense etc.
Ironically Apple's appeal used to be the buy it and forget it product, where Toyota today remains one of the last champions of the buy it and forget it practice.
by similar, I mean firms that take a page of Apple's book with sleek, consumer friendly design and decidedly consumer unfriendly business (Peloton etc).
Not what I meant. "People want an experience that works out of the box."
That experience of a car just working out of the box, doing what it is supposed to do, and never having any issues whatsoever, is more typical of Toyota/Honda than it is of any of the EV makers. Even though electric vehicles as a category should be better in principle (fewer moving parts).
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.
> 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.
For iPhones, I’ve been meaning to try out Assistive Access as a “minimalist mode”. It gives you a big icon launcher becomes a dumb phone, more or less.
Unfortunately it's much more limited than an actual "dumb phone" because of some weird choices Apple made. In particular:
1. You can only receive messages from numbers that are in your contact list.
2. You can only send messages and make phone calls to select numbers that are in your contact list, and which have been additionally whitelisted under Assistive Access.
3. The Settings app (which lets you configure the whitelist) is not available.
I am not against technology "that just works" and you dont need to do much... but it comes at a cost, being your freedom (lack of configurations)
I am not here to point fingers and anyone. I just like to have control over my technology, or it is relatively easy to repair (or pretty cheap if I pay someone else with more experience to do it)
For laptops and desktops, I do not have much negatives about using GNU/Linux. Some people mentions the bad experiences they have but that is not the case for me. I say this for many years, now.
For phone... yes, I have an Android. Before that, I had a Firefox phone for 5 years... and I honestly enjoyed it. A bit clunky at times but worked really well. I do keep an eye of OpenSource-esque phones from time to time. I remember the openmoko phone which must have been 10 years ago, now. Today I know about Librem or Pinephones. I would like to move over to one of these babies... but maybe leave it another 5 years.
As for my Car, I like Polo, Corsa, Fiesta type Cars. I will leave it there.
Imagine the mountain of electronic waste if everyone needs a separate gadget for every task.
A screen is a screen. In theory, a single general-purpose computer with a screen is the simplest solution of all.
The real problem, as I see it, is that it has become very hard to make a general purpose computer with good UX and decent privacy. All the forces are working against it. But we should not give up trying.
You’re enumerating all kinds of failure cases and how the most important thing about the product is how fast/easy to rectify them but you should really consider the probability times the effort (plus some risk penalty for increased risk).
Isn't hacker culture about being able to hack and repair things? I.e. you aren't running counter to hacker culture. You might be running against the mainstream, but that's all right.
What you're looking for is 'Basic Premium'. I got that way after burning out on tech enthusiasm. Now I just want the best I can get of the things I need.
On the subject of electric cars, I would argue that the _components_ in an electric vehicle are far simpler than those in an internal combustion engine.
From the wheels, working inwards -
1. Brakes are used less because of regenerative braking, so less wear and tear.
2. Brake vacuum is provided by an electric pump, cheap part to replace. If you use an iBooster you eliminate master and slave cylinders - much less complex.
3. You don't need a gearbox of any kind because you don't have to keep the engine RPM in an optimal torque band - it's all constant torque.
4. Therefore no clutch required. Even if you want to keep a gearbox, you don't need one because an electric motor has so little rotating mass that you can clutches shift.
5. The motor is vastly simpler. No combustion, no timing issues, no fuel delivery issues, vastly less wear and tear, less fluids.
6. Vastly less heat generated means simple, easy to repair coolant system.
7. No gas tank, no fuel lines to block or corrode.
8. Battery is a single unit, if you've got a good BMS, cells are protected so you can replace bad cells.
9. Controlling all of these things need not use zillions of wires which are impossible to trace. Either these components work just fine in failover mode (i.e just give them power and they work) or are simple to control with CANBUS. Canbus is scary because it is unfamiliar. It's generally an eminently hackable system, and you just need to route 2 wires from the CANBUS spine to the component. It's actually waaaay simpler than, say, Ethernet.
All in all, I would argue that an electric motor is a vastly better technology to base a _simple, repairable personal transport solution_ on top of. It's just that no EV producer has identified 'repairability' as a market need.
All the electric tech is raising car prices and blocking the right for repair ( eg. You can fix the LED light, but need a 10 k. Branded diagnose machine to indicate you fixed it).
We calculated the prices from an official shop and came to the conclusion that they billed us 150€ for basically a walk to get a 2€ part.
I feel as though a lot of newer EVs include a ton of code complexity just for the sake of having a ton of code complexity. It's as if the culture of "value-add" went into hyperdrive for some of these newer car manufacturers.
For me to return to the EV market I would require that I be able to source a third-party battery pack, at the very least. I'd be fine with government regulations to block the cheap packs that catch fire. I just want the option of swapping out the pack on my own terms if I want in the future, including getting next-gen battery tech that can increase range with less volume and weight. I'd also insist that they have a "do not phone home" mode of operation, along with buttons and knobs and a small screen. And a pull-brake. And a charging infrastructure that works. And that I can use with cash.
nothing wrong with buying a frameworks laptop and a 1996 miata.
most folks don't know what a BIOS is, but care if it takes more than a couple days to replace their device. nice thing about apple is you can basically walk in with a damaged device and walk out with its memories and soul ported into a new body.
What you describe are simple systems. Most people confuse simplicity and intuitiveness. The Apple Car or the iPhone are intuitive to use but far from simple, because of the abstraction level. I like simple systems, which are maintainable, because they lack high abstractions.
All electronics fail, and all systems reliant on electronics fail. Not all worm gears fail.
As someone who has worked in tech my whole life, and who currently runs a technology-centric company, I generally detest the state of technology these days. I have reached a point in my life where I consciously limit my use of technology, and make it a point to steer clear of purchasing and making use of devices and services with "superfluous technology" unless their are no alternatives.
Many (if not most) modern technology systems are far too complex to be properly tested, especially when taking into account integrations (via "standard" interfaces) with third party technology systems. As technology systems have become more complex, their reliability as tools to accomplish an intended goal has drastically decreased while the telemetry capabilities of the systems have been drastically improved (without me knowingly realizing any benefits thereof). As such, I have learned to rely on technology less and less as I have aged.
There are surely many reasons for the inverse relationship between complexity and reliability of technology systems, but a cursory list of suggested root causes that come to mind include:
- use of (necessary, in modern software development) automated test tools;
- use of programming languages too-abstracted from technologies employed within the system;
- a likely growing percentage of developers lacking a working domain knowledge of the systems they are developing;
- the corporate / financial pressure to needlessly upgrade or evolve technology systems--even in the absence of flaws or demand for the upgrade--in the name of maintaining / increasing shareholder value (see also: planned obsolescence, etc.)
Two immediate examples of "too much technology" that come to mind, because I have experienced them within the past few days:
1) Bluetooth is soon to be 26 years old, yet my model year 2022 smartphone cannot reliably communicate with my model year 2022 vehicle's head unit via Bluetooth to play music or relay audio during phone calls. I cannot tell you how many point releases of smartphone software (or vehicle head unit software) have been released since I have owned both the phone and the via Bluetooth, but Bluetooth has never worked correctly on any of them. Why?
2) On some recent releases of macOS Sonoma, the OS can read FAT* formatted USB media without issue, while other releases (to include 14.3.1) cannot read FAT* formatted USB media. Regarding 14.3.1: on 14.3, I could read and write to FAT* USB drives just fine, but I could not type an email longer than a couple of lines without the UI overlaying text on top of other text in the email, making the entire text of the email illegible. When 14.3.1 (with the text overlaying issue fixed) was available, I applied the update right away. Now I can write emails without issue, but I cannot read FAT* formatted USB drives. Why?
I've had nearly flawless Bluetooth support across several different car brands and devices in my cars for well over a decade. Pair it once, and it just works all day every day. I truly don't understand people saying Bluetooth is unreliable, I've personally never experienced it and I use Bluetooth across several different devices every day.
Even now, my phone's Bluetooth is my key to the car. I don't normally carry any other key.
> 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 manufacturing defects.
I mean, they turned out to be wrong, but they have a point: physical devices are subject to entire categories of bugs that software can be reliably proofed against. All worm screws will ultimately fail, while software can (if done correctly) run forever. All manufactured devices are unique and have unique defects. Software can be reproduced without any defects whatsoever.
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.
Mechanical components becoming lines of code improved reliability and performance greatly, but at the cost of massively increasing complexity and making modifications impossible unless you are willing to reverse engineer.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but shortly after I relocated in the dead of winter to a place that's further north my driver's side window wouldn't roll back up after I rolled it down. It's not fun trying to transport your family around with a window stuck open in freezing temps.
If a crank-based mechanism would have made that less likely to happen, or at least if it would be easier for me to get the window back up with simple tools, I would have been all for that at the time!
Most failures of windows I've seen are the glass falling off the track or the track getting physically jammed or out of alignment. There's a good chance whatever failure you had a hand crank wouldn't have prevented it.
Even when its like "the motor burned out", well what caused the motor to burn out? The lift was way out of alignment and would have been dang hard to turn by hand, and probably would have just broken the gearing.
It seems like a lifelong journey to find and customize your stuff to be exactly what you'd like it to be. Realistically I'll never get "there" without making some pretty big compromises, but the hacker in me enjoys trying.
My phone is a Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS. My laptop is a Thinkpad T80s running Debian Stable, and I'm waiting for my Framework 16 to ship. My vehicle for out-of-town trips is a GR Corolla, but for around-town stuff I use a custom steel frame e-bike.
When I have the time and energy I try to protect my privacy. For the GR Corolla I followed some steps* that might have done the job, but I can't say for sure. This summer I hope I have time to play with the hardware, up to and including replacing the headunit with something OSS-based.
It seems almost like they kept the rumor of an Apple car going to ensure a stock price tailwind during the EV boom. That’s over, now layoffs and AI are the new hotness. This move hits both of these. Seems to be working, stock is up on the news.
An Apple car wouldn't be attractive without autonomous driving. The real (and unsurprising) news here is that Apple has given up on autonomous driving. They are far, far behind Waymo and don't want to compete with them, just like how they didn't want to compete with Google for search. They simply lack the expertise to do it.
They have no servicing model anymore. Replacing the stock like for like for each and any issue isn’t going to scale for a car. At least not in a way that makes any sustainability claims total greenwashing.
This reminds me of the oil curse. After a country discovers it has lots of oil, it nukes every other sector of their economy. Why? Because there's nothing you can invest your money in which would give you a larger return than oil. It sucks the lifeblood out of every other sector.
Apple just didn't invest in its electric cars enough to let them develop it fast enough, and now with China coming online, the window of opportunity has past.
Same reason why Google didn't productize its deep learning R&D.
The only company which has ever ben able to escape from this trap is Intel--when the Japanese chased them out of the memory chip market, they switched to microprocessors. And now, when ARM chased them out of microprocessors, they are switching over to building fabs. The chip architects I know over there are watching their budgets being switched over. Only the paranoid survive.
To be clear, Intel aren't moving away from uarch design. Gelsinger has stated the economics of their fab business don't make sense without a large guaranteed customer like their processor business.[0]
Of course they are not going to announce they are getting out of CPUs before their new business is fully in place!! Everyone would instantly stop buying Intel CPUs and their revenue would go to zero.
But make no mistake, Intel knows when to hold 'em and knows when to fold 'em. You heard it here first.
> The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea.
It sounds like this means the official end of SPG, the group that Tony Fadell took over to eventually build the iPod (among other things). A storied history, to say the least.
I don’t think the market can take what would probably be a very expensive EV, at least not at scale. EV sales in the US seem to be stalling, in part because the charging infrastructure is not fully there, and in part because of cost. The price to get mass adoption would have to be significantly lower than current offerings, and Apple is not known to undercut on price. Vision Pro is 3.5x Meta Quest Pro, for example.
In the EU the EV adoption is mostly on the heels of BYO cheaper EVs, with the exception of Norway and other northern countries. I assume Teslas are only luxury items elsewhere, and EV adoption is also based on cheaper Chinese builds.
So this is not like when the iPhone was a step function in quality, functionality and price over a commoditized mobile phone market. This is a market that is still mostly luxury, with some attempts at commoditization. A 3.5x price would be over mostly Tesla prices.
Maybe Apple realized they would take too long to achieve scale if they went to market anytime soon?
Granted it's already been several years since Apple reportedly abandoned self-driving as a priority for its car project, but I wonder if this signals a larger shift.
A decade ago, the popular sentiment was that autonomous vehicles were going to completely reshape our built environment in the coming decade. And yet here we are in 2024, with the industry leader still only running limited trials in two markets, the next two woefully behind, and everyone else out of the market.
Perhaps AVs have entered the realm of fusion, something that may yet be transformative, but on a much longer time scale than initially thought.
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.
Now everyone's diving straight into the "full AGI by 2025" hole. Which, to be fair, would solve the "full self-driving" problem as a pure side-effect, I guess.
Low-latency multi-modal LLMs with constrained outputs can outperform most specialized prev-gen networks, so this may actually work out independent of achieving AGI!
I believe Musk once admitted on camera that ~"full self driving basically requires AGI." If anyone could help me identify that video, I would appreciate it.
> I believe Musk once admitted on camera that ~"full self driving basically requires AGI." If anyone could help me identify that video, I would appreciate it.
I think it makes sense if consider the fact it “solves an actual problem”, would have a massive adoption rate and has a massive market, and the potential value of developing a product like that is easily in the 100 Billions if not Trillions
It's all downsize. If it didn't end up being amazing consumers would see behind the curtain and judge all their products.
Margins on cars are nowhere near phones.
I'm not sure there is a ton of cross over benefits from manufacturing small sized electronics vs large cars. Not to mention that apple outsources all of this work.
Future of what? Reliable mass public transport is the best option for a sustainable future. We don't need car centric suburbia but with heavier and more expensive cars.
Even if the US and other car-centric countries started a serious effort on that today, it would take decades. During which people continue to use gasoline cars, and emitting more CO2 we will need to undo in the future. Electric cars make sense right now regardless of your perspective on trains (I like trains, and dislike cars, and I am sympathetic)
I absolutely am on board with the idea... but reliable mass public transport requires an entire country of cities to be redesigned (this is in a country that struggles to get zoning laws changed to move from single to multi-family housing in many places), we'll have self-driving cars first.
Hell, I think we'd get flying cars first. It's nearly impossible to touch anything that requires modifying suburbs or their streets, politically.
We already have car centric suburbia and its going to take decades to change that. We might as well switch to electric cars which are quieter and produce less air pollution rather than wait for thousands of homes to be rebuilt.
except that mass public transportation is never going to happen on the needed scale in the US; electric cars is the next best thing and much preferable to the current status quo
you don't even need to agree on 'never' as 'not in the next 25 years' and 'never' both look the same for the timeframe we have to decarbonize personal transportation.
whether we have a world of 3 billion cars (doubling) or a world of 750 million cars (halving) in 2050, they all need to be electric.
AI has given a lot of people a lot of cover to kill projects which are going nowhere. Rather than "this was a terrible idea, we've wasted a bunch of money" they get to say "AI is transformational, we have to allocate resources to it and hence we are cutting X, Y, Z".
This is not the question Apple is trying to answer.
If you're trying to expand the market of a company with such a broad reach already there aren't many markets big enough to move the needle on revenue. Real-estate, food, fashion and automotive are the only ones really significant enough to tackle, and of those, automotive isn't an unreasonable one to explore.
Tesla makes the exact same car that Apple would have made (simple sleek style, proprietary port, proprietary UI etc), so we already have the Apple car.
Apple has the cash, just buy Tesla, fire Elon and make it so only the iPhone can be the phone key for the car; and voila, the Tesla Model 3 Performance becomes the Apple iCar 3 Pro Max.
you would need to buy the iPad separately and could use the air Dash if you are not willing to fork over the cash, and then you unlock it with your face and wave frantically to get the operation.
This decision makes sense. Apple failed to establish a good relationship with the existing car makers and they couldn't even begin their very first manufacturing process over 10 years. Which means even if Apple gets a magic wand to bring all the technologies that it needs, it would take another decade to ramp up the business.
Actually, I think I would rather them work on an electric car.
I know a car was not a realistic idea, but I'll say it: Apple's software stinks. They used to take bold risks with hardware, but this is going to be another dollar-store ripoff of another popular product.
They absolutely did. Microsoft was late to web and now we have O365, Azure, etc.
I'd say, however, that this is less FOMO and more employee-retention. A team shifting from electric cars to generative AI sounds more like a directionless hype squad where you park flight risks who can still add value to other departments while they play with the newest shiny.
That's silly. Desktop Office is a '90s product and O365 is there smart rebuild for the 2010s and beyond, fully embracing the web and SAAS and finally shedding cardboard boxes with CDs inside.
Car engineers working on computer vision and sensors or autonomous driving should be able to slide into Apple hardware and software spaces without too much effort if they're wedded to Apple or Apple makes it lucrative for them to park there while they figure out how to better utilize the talent.
It's almost like you've never been involved in any of this kind of thing but nevertheless needed to participate and be heard. I appreciate that. it happens. But your reply was actually mindless.
The issue with MSFT is they missed a lot during the era when they had to deal with regulators. It took away basically their whole decade starting from early 2000s.
It was because they were breaking the law, got found guilty, and settled with the DOJ agreeing to that decade of dealing with regulators enforcing a Microsoft authored consent decree.
And thank god their hands were tied for decade so others could come up and we weren't all stuck with MS for another decade or longer.
Apple's playbook for at least three decades has been getting in the game late, but timing "late" very carefully so that the product they debut defines the category.
The iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Watch, AirPods. It's the most obvious thing about the company, this is a bland truism at this point.
The billions they plowed into a cancelled automobile project was a good investment because 400,000 nerds will buy a strap-on dorkbox of a face computer this year with slightly improved hand tracking and other signal compositing? Not sure investors will see it that way, certainly not after the silly AVP is cancelled and Cook can get back to fiddling around the edges of Job's iPhone legacy with a few more fashionable accessories, maybe yet another pair of headphones.
Was the project Titan - the Apple car project - actually initiated by Apple execs & from the strategic PoV? I read the book "After Steve" [1] and I remember reading a section in which there was a lot of grumbling from employees about how Apple is not working on the latest & greatest R&D project and one of them was self-driving cars. Not sure how "strategic" it was and I guess the question is "What would have Steve done?" My call is he would've never jumped in the car game.
I'm kinda surprised it took this long. On a broad level, there's nothing that Apple really brings to the table that would help them build a successful car. They don't have the internal expertise necessary to help with the practical elements necessary to build a car, like fine tuning a suspension or manufacturing brakes that work. And they don't have the logistics infrastructure necessary to handle actually manufacturing a car.
The main thing Apple had that could help them build a car is a lot of money. But they could also use that money to get into food delivery or manufacturing CNC machines. Realistically, if Apple invested their cash into car manufacturing, they'd just end up with a whole lot less cash.
I still think it's reasonable to have Apple consider building a car. Their core competency is in design, integrated platforms/ecosystems, and outsourced manufacturing.
Assuming that they could use their supply chain expertise to simplify and outsource manufacturing, the cars of the future likely looks more like a software enabled consumer electronics device than a consumer mechanical device, and there are some really neat things you could do in that ecosystem that only apple could pull off (cutting edge design coupled with high end finishes, and a software ecosystem with a self-driving car as a new platform).
That said, it's likely not the right market timing for Apple to bring an electric car to market.
the thing about regulation is you don't get good at it. You get good at a specific area of regulation but that rarely transfers to some entirely different set of regulations from different authorities in different places.
Saying "they're getting good at regulation" is like saying a paleontologist is "getting good at science". Sure some concepts cross, but actual understanding and competence needed to do the new job at hand don't.
NOOOOOOOOO it’s been literal DECADES. I am literally heartbroken. “Did you know Apple has a secret car project” has been a fun fact for my entire life, and I’m just supposed to walk away like it never happened?
Sorry for the not-professional comment but jeez. Dark days.
The most obvious possible conclusion. A car has absolutely no connection, relevance or benefit to their core as a business. It seemed like one of those random fake factoids people would make up "hey did you hear Apple is making a car"
I think this makes sense. Right now Apple can focus its energy on something that they can more easily compete in and is absolutely overflowing with money and margins. In a few years, if Apple wants to get back into EVs they’d likely be able to just buy a smaller manufacturer with good margins (sort of like what they did with Beats). Right now Apple is the only company who can compete with NVidia (besides AMD) because they can afford to buy up TSMCs shiniest new node capacity. Until Intel does a reverse AMD and jettisons its chip design business from its fab business, being able to buy up TSMC capacity is a massive advantage.
They have large low level software teams with compilers, runtimes and what not. They also have great hardware teams to develop whatever custom hardware is needed for purpose. I think they can do a full stack thing for AI.
If Siri goes from being complete garbage to half as good as chatgpt while doing all processing on device they will sell 100mil+ new phones in a quarter
The bar has been set so low with Siri. Almost seems like a smart move
I hope this means that CarPlay gets some more focus, because I would like a CarPlay integration where everything I have configured in a car is stored in a profile on my phone. This is what I imagine: When I get into a car, I just have to connect my phone, and the seat automatically adjusts, the radio has my favorite stations configured, and the UI is set up as I prefer it. When I find myself in a car model that I haven't driven before, the phone is able to make a good guess of how to configure things based on my setup in other cars.
The idea that Apple had any business making cars was rooted in overconfidence and business school nonsense.
It was overconfidence to think that the shipping of tens of millions of smartphones meant the company was well-suited to make heavy machinery.
It was business school nonsense that birthed the idea. Consumers never needed Apple to make a car; the car presumably was to 'diversify' and placate investors worried about smartphone market saturation.
Tim Cook, and whoever else had a part in scrapping this dumb project, are probably mourning its death, but they ought to congratulate themselves.
Apple couldn't commit to self driving car development. They never really figured out if they were developing a Robotaxi or just an EV with automated features. (L5 is still science fiction.)
Google/Waymo has been working on level 4 for 15 years. They never strayed from their original goal. If they ever really get it to work profitably and at scale they will have no competition.
All potential competitors have fallen by the wayside or are faltering. The self driving car race is an ultramarathon.
Is this also the end of their autonomous program? I've enjoyed reading the DMV reports of people crashing into them all over the Bay Area. Seemingly Apple are alone in testing on freeways.
I'm questioning whether cars align with their business strategy in the first place. Their approach seems to focus on creating an ecosystem where users are deeply integrated into their suite of products and services. Introducing cars, which inherently need to appeal to a broader demographic, might lead to a disconnect from this model. (Sarcastically: Were they considering a car that's unusable without an iPhone?)
Many companies are shifting away from electric cars right now. As someone who doesn't pay much attention to the industry, is it about capital costs, battery material shortages, consumer behavior, loss of subsidies, general competition, etc? It feels like we made a lot of promises about a shift to "all electric" in certain places by 2030 and I see those promises being rolled back or weakened.
There must be some incredibly interesting internal documents in Tim Cook's email archive discussing the business, product and financial strategy of this whole project.
We can only hope that one day it leaks or we get some glimpse on how this vision evolved. It would be particularly interesting to see the inception and early days of this project and if it ever overlapped with the Jobs era.
All the latest AI products, as great as they are (and I love them), make me overall less optimistic over the "older" AI products which we were promised one day, because now I see how fickle and very wrong they can be.
Today I am the least confident that I will ever sit in a self driving car with my family. So this news doesn't come as a big surprise to me.
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.
Interesting. If this happened to almost anyone else I would have pegged this as a result of the zero interest rate policy. Apple has buckets and buckets (and boatloads and boatloads) of cash though.
Perhaps waiting another decade for benefits does come at a cost if the cash could be deployed elsewhere.
I wish they would get into medical devices, especially for consumers. Apple is really good at making interfaces for technology. Imagine an Apple version of a CPAP or a diabetes sugar monitor/artificial pancreas.
Hopefully some of the SPG group was/is/will be working on this.
Apple making cars was an interesting play when they had a bunch of cash overseas and good relationships with Chinese manufacturers. Tax law changes made bringing money back to the US less punishing, and manufacturing in China is becoming problematic.
Always found this pursuit completely absurd and a sign of some issues at the company. The fact they even researched spherical wheels at one point really makes it seem like they have no self-awareness anymore.
Surely this must be a hardware focused move? I can't see generative AI benefiting Apples core software. Rather I'd be interested to see what I can do with some specialized, custom hardware on their platform.
The market is being flooded by Chinese brands... all with deep pockets thanks to subsidies from the state. So many brands in Europe right now: xpeng, honqchi, MG, nio, byd, maximus,... the list goes on and on.
I cannot think of a more defining moment for this age than the premier company of its time pivoting from making "a thing" to focusing on infinite bullshit generators instead.
It takes balls to cancel a project that has probably taken large resources and is probably at late stages of development. Or it was going to be too late and too expensive.
It's a strategic, capability building project for Saudi Arabia.
They want to turn the country into the AI / advanced manufacturing / software development hub of the Middle East and they need an innovative brand that can help to attract talent and foreign investment.
Crafted from the fruit of the earth and driven by a worm, the Literal Apple Car embodies the principles of renewable resources and minimal environmental impact, setting an imaginative precedent for eco-friendly design.
If I was a 10000 IQ Apple exec 10-15 years ago this is the exact project I would pitch, so that when the economy became shaky I would have a $100b+ project to cancel.
Obviously not really, but even HAVING that amount of cash to blow on a moonshot is crazy. And being this many years in and cancelling is commendable.
I do wonder what this means for the self driving industry in general. Most news from that industry has not been peachy recently.
maybe they realized that handing over the sales to private dealerships, which they HAVE to do in their biggest market, would not be worth all the hassle with the development.
i am aware that they have/had "authorized resellers" in Asian countries before their physical presence in that region.
Replacing an ICU with an electric car reduces carbon output. Training an AI model costs a lot of carbon in manufacturing chips and in electricity. I'm worried that this will negatively impact their goal of being carbon neutral by 2030.
Cruise has given up, but Waymo is doubling down I don't see how either is/was a "threat to Apple" though, people aren't going to replace their iPhones with Waymo rides.
Disappointing to hear. It seems every car manufacturer has settled in to their niche, and they are now working to become software companies, adding a bunch of “smart” functionalities to their cars. I was very curious as to whether it was easier for an automotive company to get good at tech, or for a tech company to get good at automobiles. Perhaps this result is a good indicator.
I was really wanting to drive a car that would unapolagetically don't care about any preconcieved ideas of what a car is and what it should have. The car's most well desigend engine would know where to park and ...
it's tiresome, $AAPL is going after the wrong horse. I'm sure they could pull making the ideal smartiCarAppleOS (tm c R), but as a v1 it would be a tremendous risk to embark in actual full car manufacturing. I mean, given the size of their warchest they could maybe afford a $TSLA or 3, or a smaller car maker and try tp Sink Diffrent (tm) upendding market dynamics of distribution, maintenance usw.
I'm going all over the place to boil down the following, Apple should likely double down on ar/vr/?R and leave something that is up to 2 ton metal heavy to the existing car industry.
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 or two.
How are Apple going to attract the talent they need to pull of something decent in AI? Their share price can't have the upside of hot startup or even a sleazy non-profit for that matter. I predict they buy something fairly pedestrian from some large player at some point.
Apple is a huge cash cow and with Cook at helm it will remain so but will slowly fade over time and resort even more to extractive behaviours on their customers and suppliers.
In a lot of Apple's hardware, the fastest way to inference is to ignore the built-in Neural hardware and use Metal Compute Shaders. Suffice to say that simply shipping dedicated silicon is not equivalent to accelerating everything well, or supporting it upstream.
SMOB (simply matter of bytes) as they say. Will they finally invest in AI software? My take from this announcement is that they will. Dedicated silicon with a dedicated hardware stack shouldn't be so hard for Apple. They can throw considerable resource at the problem.
It would be great to see, if they pull it off. I suspect that Apple's desire for control and curation (as well as limited liability) will prevent them from making an effective "one size fits all" model, though. Considering that local AI isn't a paid service or a system-seller, it makes more sense for Apple to double-down on software support rather than trying to Sherlock the world with their own model.
Time will tell what the future holds, but I sincerely believe it's too late for Apple to ride the AI bubble. The iPhone is their last stand; they need to deliver a competitive AI experience, ideally one that's open and supports older hardware models. Their work is cut out for them.
I think they'll be training-agnostic (will use whomever's hardware gets it done) but will optimize their silicon and hardware stack for running models locally. This is VERY EARLY days of use-facing AI (besides the Nvidia bubble, which is late-days)
I definitely agree that Apple will optimize their SOC, but IMO their best solution is to just copy Nvidia's homework. Dedicated inferencing hardware is power-hungry and rarely any better than the beefed-up GPU or even a RISC CPU core at a decent clock speed. Integrating AI at the GPU-level lets you get dual-purpose functionality out of the same silicon; it's what Nvidia has built towards since they started shipping CUDA.
> besides the Nvidia bubble, which is late-days
The Nvidia bubble might just be beginning, if we keep relying on phrases like "training agnostic" to pay our dividends.
I do a lot of open source LLM research/dev work on a Mac Studio. While it doesn't quite compete in terms of speed with a GPU for standard transformers models, I can run pretty huge models locally. When I'm working with llama.ccp, the speed and model size I can run is very impressive.
I can also run Stable Diffusion XL in reasonable time frames on an iPad Pro. The current gen Macbook Pro can perform almost as well as the Mac Studio with an M2 Ultra, only the M3 Max has about 1/2 the bus speed (though still wild that you can run good sized local LLMs on a laptop).
If local generative AI becomes a major part of computing in the future, Apple has a huge advantage over the other players out there. This was obvious the second I started working on my Mac Studio. I have spent plenty of time using a traditional GPU setup for LLM work, and yes it is faster, but the complexity of getting things running is way beyond the average user's ability. Not having to fight with cuda ever is amazing, and so far everything else has 'just worked' as is typical of Apple.
If Apple has a team of talented people working to get gen AI performance tuned specifically to their hardward, I suspect we'll see some very competitive offerings in this space.
I feel like there's going to be a lot of movement towards the CPU with AI compute, and Apple's processors show the possibilities.
GPUs happened to have a lot of throughput lying around so they got put to work, but already the importance of having lots of memory to hold huge models even just for inference is clear. I also think the future AI will have a lot more going in 'conventional' compute rather than just large arrays of simple tensor ops or the like.
CPUs will increasingly gain specialist hardware to accelerate AI workloads, beyond what we have now and less monolithic too, in that it'll probably have a variety of kinds of accelerators.
That will combine well with big main memory and storage that is ever closer to the CPU to enable very fast virtual memory. I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see CPUs with HBW storage as well as HBW memory.
> CPUs will increasingly gain specialist hardware to accelerate AI workloads
Maybe, but then you're describing a coprocessor instead of the CPU. The CPU portion of the M1 SOC should be simpler than Apple's Intel processors, considering they don't support the wide bevvy of AVX/SSE instructions in-hardware anymore. The goal of the ARM transition is to keep the CPU side as simple as possible to optimize for power.
Personally I think we're going to see more GPU-style accelerators in the future. People want high-throughput SIMD units, ideally with a good programming framework a-la CUDA to tie it together. It makes very little sense to design dedicated inferencing hardware when a perfectly usable and powerful GPU exists on most phones. It's practically redundant to try anything else.
Yeah, the consensus here seems to be that this is a good move because the car was a bad idea... but it doesn't follow that AI is a therefore a better idea? Apple's poor reputation in ML related areas not withstanding (I've heard its a lot of bad infra and silo'd development), I don't see how they will make money from this.
Siri is fine for sending a text or setting a timer, but I don't think most people are going to pay money for an "AI assistant" to plan vacations or make restaurant reservations, if for no other reason than most people aren't busy enough for it to be worth it?
> My guess is they'll try to turn VisionPro into some kind of generative gaming system.
I'd speculate they can't do this without 5-10x the compute, which means a wildly bigger battery. I can't think of how you'd mash VR gaming and generative AI together into a headset form factor in a way that's practical for gaming. We can _only just_ run image models in almost real time, and that still requires some heavy lifting and compromises on quality. Doing generative AI on-device for a gaming experience is a hugely tall ask. (And if you're doing it in the cloud, why not do it for the simpler, more popular hardware instead, like iPads?)
The problem with Siri (and with Alexa) is that Apple was not able to provide enough value for people to make it mainstream. Alexa at least worked for home appliances but using Siri for Macbook or iPhone? Why? Not to mention Apple was not able to monetize it.
When driving I use Siri to control Spotify and to call people. At home I use google home every day to know the weather, to set alarms and to play music. I'd use Siri for those functions but it responds way slower than google home.
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 use Siri all the time for really trivial things like settings alarms/timers. Any time I try to do something slightly more complicated, like maintaining a shopping list, it gets terrible pretty quickly.
> Apple has gone from leading the industry to increasingly desperate and huge "me too" developments that they've failed at.
Apples biggest advantage is having piles of cash to spend on R&D.
Developing new products that it doesn’t have much previous experience with is how it’s gotten this big to begin with. That’s what the iPod was, that’s what the iPhone was, that’s what Apple TV was, that’s what the Apple Watch was, that’s how it became such a good chip designer, etc…
The difference between now and 2001, is that it’s got so much cash today that it doesn’t need all, or even most, of its new R&D to succeed, so it can invest in more less-potentially-viable R&D, and it’s not such a big deal if it never gets to market. Which seems like the opposite of desperation to me…
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!
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.
Have you read the headlines about how difficult and expensive it is to procure NVIDIA GPUs?
Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware. If software ends up being the "easy part" and hardware remains difficult, Apple is in a great spot between the volume of hardware they're already moving and their cash reserves.
> Apple has an enormous hardware advantage over Google, Microsoft, and even OpenAI in the space if the constraint is hardware.
The constraint isn't hardware. Google, Microsoft and OpenAI are buying datacenter-scale Nvidia hardware that Apple quite literally does not ship the equivalent of. There are no Macs that support DGX-sized workloads, and attempting to make one seems like a suicide mission a-la Xserve. Nobody is buying what Apple's selling, in the server market.
Apple and Nvidia both compete over new TSMC nodes, and with Nvidia reaching a trillion (!!!) dollar valuation you'd be foolish to assume they're not outbidding Apple as we speak. All things being equal, Nvidia is probably Apple's greatest threat in pure compute-per-watt: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks
The biggest limitation and expense for most players looking to get in on the generative AI land-grab is hardware, which Apple already has completely solved. If anything, they’re already ahead of everyone else in the game. The “me too” thing is nothing new. They’re just following the classic Apple playbook and biding their time to wait for the market to solidify before unleashing the best user experience in it.
If they can make a voice assistant that runs on-device I'd pay good money for that. Now that a lot of LLMs are able to run (slowly) on raspberry pi's, they could get a great following by just not stealing data and not having their assistant get very noticeably worse over time.
Google assistant has completely dropped the ball from a user perspective, though I'm sure they're capturing great data and have reduced server costs 90%.
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.
> The predictive nature of LLMs are perfect for voice assistant use cases
But people in general don't seem to be interested in voice assistants in general. They were a huge hype when you basically had to manually uncheck boxes to not accidentially order an Amazon Echo, etc, but as quick as the hype was there it was gone. To my knowledge Amazon has yet to make any kind of substantial revenue with Alexa stuff.
With LLMs I would expect this to be even more of an issue given how costly the inferencing alone is when we're talking about an LLM. And yes, the utility will likely increase substantially with the adoption of LLMs as opposed to previous language processing techniques, but I don't think this will outweigh the disinterest in the overall technology.
People aren't that interested in voice assistants atm, though i know plenty people who look up stuff, start music etc with it.
When voice synthesis, long context etc. i'm pretty sure a lot of people would love to have a private "Her" like friend/assistant that could both be therapy, a PA and a friend, and i don't think we're that far from that. Dystopian and lonely as it is.
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.
They already run compute for siri for voice to text. So they could in theory still provide an LLM backed siri service for free for their customers/users.
Sure the AI input/output itself doesn't have a ton of value. Tell that to Microsoft and Google, who seem to be obsessed with chat interfaces while lacking any creativity as to where else the technology can be deployed.
Apple's key strength is Integration. If their AI play is different and better, this is why it will be so. When Samsung puts AI in their phones, its a sparkles-and-magic button in an action bar that pops up a list of actions that might as well be chat prompts. Microsoft releases 365 Copilot and its a chat sidebar to the normal Office apps. There's real opportunity to integrate AI more deeply into the OS and the actions users take when using the OS.
I don't know what form that takes; that's Apple's job to figure out. I think WWDC this year is when we'll be presented their vision (ha) on how it fits together. I think: If it looks a lot like the Galaxy AI event, then your take is right and I immediately become bearish on AI and honestly bearish on Apple's future among the ultra-high-value companies of the US. But, I'm leaning toward feeling that they're going to surprise us, and I'd put money on the outcome that WWDC represents an "iPhone Moment" for AI, leaving a lot of organizations scrambling to understand how their product fits into Apple's world and not the other way around. But, we'll see.
What an inane strawman argument. Houses are obviously not worthless because there's finite land to build on and building houses takes a non trivial amount of labor and capital. The problem the user you responded to is pointing out is that a lot of people assume productivity was the problem with so-called creative fields and these tools are going to somehow fix that problem. What's actually going to happen is a ton of people are going to produce a ton of trite AI content that is essentially identical because everyone is using the same models, thus inflating the supply. In addition, nobody actually gives a shit about AI generated garbage, so demand isn't suddenly going to rise. In many ways, the attention economy is already saturated, and the way you succeed there is not through productivity but by differentiating yourself in ways that make your content more desirable.
Put simply, have you heard of or do you follow any AI based creators? I can name 10 or 20 artists, content creators, movie directors, or writers that I respect pretty much instantly. Can't really do the same thing for people using AI.
This is such a weird take, at $dayjob we're selling a product right now that's based on generative AI to end users who largely have no idea or care that it's an LLM behind the scenes. The previous version of this product used NLP via spacy and it was pretty bad because even with lots of tuning wrangling the kind of unstructured text we consume just didn't work in general.
Didn't think our boy karl marx would be relevant here lol but yeah that's a very commodity-fetishistic way to look at the value of AI/assumes that the value of the generative models is that they generate output that has some sort of market value as a commodity by itself. Makes way more sense to think of it as a service than a means of production. I'm not gonna pay for an ai generated image, but would I pay for access to better internet search, or document understanding, or for help understanding/writing code in new codebases? Yeah I would. Clearly there's enough people that haven't cancelled their chatgpt subscription that the value is greater than zero. Including negative externalities net value might even end up negative, which would make it hard to argue it has little influence elsewhere if it has a negative influence on e.g. artist pay or electoral democracy.
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.
Not that it failed per se, but there were lots of reports that they ended up at a very bulky and compromised headset that was not much different than what Meta was selling when they really wanted AR glasses. Reports also said the executives were unhappy with the final design and that there was political debate if they should launch or fold.
Maybe in a few versions they will have something that could sell a billion units, but they have a lot of work to do to get there.
While some may have doubted the iPhone, Apple sold 1.9 million iPhones in the year it launched, and cell phones had already been established as an enormous and growing market.
VR seems very different from that. Most people simply don’t want what companies are trying to sell them, and I think multiple major technical breakthroughs would be necessary to change that.
While there were absolutely people who thought the iPhone would fail, the idea that most people were skeptical about the iPhone is simply ahistorical. The iPhone had a huge amount of hype from the moment it was announced, and it was pretty clear from the outset that this was the direction cell phones were headed.
The Vision Pro just doesn't have that. Apple was able to clearly articulate what the iPhone allowed you to do that you couldn't do before. But the use cases presented for the Vision Pro just are a lot more niche, and a lot less compelling. Some people will certainly find uses for it, but right now the Vision Pro feels like a solution in search of a problem.
Yeah but didn't the first iPhone sell pretty well? I tried a demo of AVP in NYC the week after release. The staff casually mentioned that they had units in stock if I'd like one.
I think apple is having a difficult time selling these things. I had a harder time getting a hold of an iPad pro over a month after launch.
I mean the hype around the iPhone was huge. There was obvious need for a phone that "runs OS X" and was part of the already massive iPod ecosystem. It sold itself.
I still don't get the case for a screen you can wear. My phone screen is big enough for most use cases (like posting this comment). If I need to get work done, my laptop is realistically not much larger than the keyboard I'd need to use anyway. The laptop is also cheaper, and I can show what I'm working on to other people without jumping through hoops.
I understand it, or at least what it could be. Picture something in eyeglasses or even invisible contacts or neural implant. It adds an AR layer on everything. There are no devices, no screens, no buttons. You look and think and the world responds. The Vision Pro is a clunky preview, but decently feature complete.
Utopian or dystopian, this is exactly the future that Apple, Meta and NeuraLink are chasing.
Vision Pro was never designed to replace the iPhone from day one.
People seem to have this revisionist history where every Apple product is an instant hit. But the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch etc all took years to reach that product-market-fit stage.
All Apple has done is establish a baseline for what they want the category to be.
Correct. All of those products were pretty crappy when they were first released and then got very good. In the case of the iPhone, I think it was like the third revision when it got good. The iPad comes to mind as one of their only somewhat recent products that was really good right from the start. That one still benefited from being more or less a giant iPhone and it was years before it really came into its own. For at least the past 25 years, their initial forays into a new category have been marked by potential that isn't realized for several more years. I think the Vision Pro will be fine.
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.
Honestly, a car made more sense than a VR headset if the vision behind the VR headset is "an all-day wearable iPhone". Though I doubt it is, nor was it for the forseeable future. Despite it's outward appearance, I expect Apple's management to consist mostly of engineering type realists, otherwise it becomes hard to explain how they keep being the #1 in Lifestyle products.
I think the VR goggles were always a stab at what's supposed to become Meta's core business.
Regardless, I would have really like to see a car from Apple. Tesla is still too small to get the attention of EU regulators when it comes to their stupid warranty and serviceability. Apple is large enough and already known to not play nice when it comes to repair - I'm sure we would've gotten some amazing legislature about electric vehicle repairability out of it!
Tesla is already the Apple of cars. Designed in California. Capacitive touchscreen instead of buttons. Vertical integration. Minimalist hardware design. Focus on software. Over the air updates. Custom SoC.
When Apple did all this in phones it was unique. There was no Tesla of phones. But there is a Tesla of cars and it's tough to imagine what unique thing Apple could bring to the market.
Definitely similar in a lot of ways (going against the current, similar design language), but there are a couple of key differences to the point I wouldn't say Tesla is the Apple of cars -
Apple typically productizes mature technology and ensures that its products are designed well. Tesla is an early adopter and productizes immature technology which it overhypes and overpromises on (e.g. self-driving).
Apple's manufacturing quality control and attention to detail is also generally pretty impressive. Tesla products looks impressive on the outside but feel cheap on the inside, and there are a lot of issues with the quality of manufacturing. Apple uses nice materials and Tesla uses cheap materials.
Apple making a car always struck me as weird, though.
I would argue BMW or Mercedes are much closer to being the Apple of cars - they aren't early adopters of new technology, and their products are immaculately designed (though using a much different design language than Apple does) and are and feel expensive, unlike Tesla's cars, which look nice but feel like toys.
"shifts team" ... 'cuz the skillset overlap is so high, seems natural. Cars, AI; as far as Apple is concerned, is all marketing bullshit. A "direction shift" like this is turning the spout this way or that.
And there'd be a hell of a lot more demand if we priced the negative externality of the CO2 emitted and damage ICE vehicles do to the environment but sadly we don't.
This is the problem with Tim Cook. He was able to execute on the ideas that Steve Jobs had about the future of computing, but has no real vision of his own. For the past decade he's made all the right decisions about how to best expand personal technology and introduced a couple new products like the Apple Watch and AirPods. But those are just extensions of the same basic idea.
But in terms of the future? He's just been chasing trends. The VR headset is a copy of a fad that peaked a few years ago. The car project is the same - way outside Apple's core competency and doomed from the start. It probably started simply because Cook drives a Tesla and wanted an Apple version. Just like the push to make the iPad a replacement for the Mac - it's all he normally uses, so that's what he thought was important.
Apple completely dropped the lead they had with Siri. They should have had a massive generative AI project for the past 5 years.
It's not a secret that Cook isn't a visionary, he's the type of guy who implements the vision of others. I think over the next decade we're going to start seeing Apple start to pay the price for that deficiency.
[1] Examples of what I mean:
- Cars use faux materials all the time for cost and weight purposes, or even just looks (i.e. fake chrome bits, spoilers and vents that don't do anything etc.). Apple these days does not, if it looks like metal, it almost always is, same for glass, and vents are as hidden as possible.
- Creature comforts: Cars are a place people spend a lot of time in, and are usually as comfortable as possible for it.
Apple examples where ergonomics took a back seat for looks: All their mice, Airpods Max (Heavy, can't fold or turn off without a case), Vision (Heavy), Apple TV (ZERO buttons, need to unplug to reset from a crash). I'm not saying it's impossible for them to make a comfortable car, but I am saying they've prioritized looks over comfort several times.
- Apple design in general has lost a lot of it's soul. They used to be more fun and whimsy, just look at iMac designs of the past. The Cyber truck, love it or hate it, is not boring. Everything apple sells is a glass and metal slab, or as close as possible to it.
By the way, I like a lot of Apple's hardware design decisions, like premium materials etc. I just don't think it's in their DNA to launch a car that isn't a touch-screen-hell appliance with rounded corners.