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.
> 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Readit News
[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.
Yes, and such decisions exemplify the horrible taste of many car designs, designers, and possibly buyers.
The Cybertruck is also a glass and metal slab.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
My guess is an Apple Car would have nice buttons and switches rather than the atrocious touch-screen-only setup many cars have.
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.
Elon wanted to sell to Apple in the Model 3 early days. Who knows what would have happened if Apple were interested.
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.
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?
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.
An odd move all around.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple car would have absolutely been a pickup truck-like status symbol for highly urban people.
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.
But then again they’ve changed things so many times according to the rumors maybe both were true at various times.
Why you think Apple can't do the same if focused?
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.
And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.
I do agree that there's a huge amount of specialization for cars that doesn't overlap with gen AI in any meaningful way.
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.
None of these are practical luxury car brands. Certainly their competitors would be, say, BMW or Porsche?
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.
Very odd, why would you mention these? These brands neither have the brand recognition Apple would strive for nor the scale they are interested in.
Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.
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.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/general-motors-removing-appl...
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.
CarPlay? Cool.
Actual car?
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).
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.
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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.
it's no longer concept.
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...
But a bus? Yeah, that's just weird.
A bus network would provide recurring revenue for the actual thing a vehicle is for, instead of DLC headlight patterns.
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).
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.
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Apple doesn't have a privacy first ethos, it's more of an All your-data-are-belong-to-us.
They just don't like to share the asset of their users data, that's not privacy.
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.”
[0]: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-maps/
It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.
More impressive would be shortcut automation/smart shortcut tips IE; "Create a shortcut routine based off my device habits for week XYZ."
Is there any other examples you've heard talked about?
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Neither the name or logo of famous car brands got associated or tarnished by tens of thousands killed every year...
Even when some of them ocassionally made a specific "death trap" model or production run, that's simply not how people thinks of them.
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 (awkward wording, but you know what I mean).
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.
I don't think that awareness is built in to every consumer brand.
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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.
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.
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.
aka The Innovators Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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?
Tim will only tell.
...I'll walk myself out now.
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.
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 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.
Also bad. From the article:
> many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division
So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen EV 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.
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.
They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%).
You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure.
I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.
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.
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.
Having to compete on price scares Apple.
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.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but I seem to recall that it was killed once before?
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.
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/2/16/8045625/jo...
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.
Only if they were to sell vehicles. I think it's more likely they were planning on having a fleet of self driving cars.
> 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"
But a car...SMH
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.
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?
If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.
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Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?