Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car (bloomberg.com) 244
Bloomberg News: Apple is canceling a decade-long effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company. Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn't public.
The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people. The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car -- known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG -- will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. The Apple car team also has several hundred hardware engineers and car designers. It's possible that they will be able to apply for jobs on other Apple teams. There will be layoffs, but it's unclear how many.
The decision to ultimately wind down the project is a bombshell for the company, ending a multibillion-dollar effort that would have vaulted Apple into a whole new industry. The tech giant started working on a car around 2014, setting its sights on a fully autonomous electric vehicle with a limousine-like interior and voice-guided navigation. But the project struggled nearly from the start, with Apple changing the team's leadership and strategy several times. Lynch and Williams took over the undertaking a few years ago -- following the departure of Doug Field, now a senior executive at Ford Motor.
The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people. The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car -- known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG -- will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company. The Apple car team also has several hundred hardware engineers and car designers. It's possible that they will be able to apply for jobs on other Apple teams. There will be layoffs, but it's unclear how many.
The decision to ultimately wind down the project is a bombshell for the company, ending a multibillion-dollar effort that would have vaulted Apple into a whole new industry. The tech giant started working on a car around 2014, setting its sights on a fully autonomous electric vehicle with a limousine-like interior and voice-guided navigation. But the project struggled nearly from the start, with Apple changing the team's leadership and strategy several times. Lynch and Williams took over the undertaking a few years ago -- following the departure of Doug Field, now a senior executive at Ford Motor.
Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, Apple would have F'd it up. Tesla is successful because of the Model 3 .. Tesla isn't a luxury brand. Apple would have tried to make it luxury and it would have failed. Apple was always better off trying to make their own .. of course they messed that up. I think there aren't many high end automotive self-driving or EV engineers to go around.
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*Model 3 and Model Y (sub $50k price point)
Re:Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the real reason is that the self-driving car was supposed to be delivered 5 years ago and was not. Now we see that electric cars in general have plateaued in the market, that self-driving car is always "just around the corner", and consumers are getting tired of the inflation squeeze in the car market.
Apple getting into the car business now is a losing proposition and they know it.
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:2, Informative)
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Can it drive from LA to New York without a human driver?
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Almost.
Highway driving is where it has always been the strongest. Even with just Autopilot from 2015, it would handle most of it just fine. Now FSD handles the lane changes, exits, and all sorts of local driving.
It doesn't handle finding a parking space yet, so it will go to the charging stations, but not park at a charger automatically. And of course, you need a human to plug it in (but that's not driving).
So apart from that, it could likely do it without any driver interventions.
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
I have driven coast to coast a few times, to Nevada almost monthly, and to Arizona every other weekend during the summer.
That’s called lane following and it’s available on almost every car at or above the median price. The difference is the CEOs don’t lie about it’s capabilities and don’t call it disingenuous names. I live in Minnesota and it would be useless for almost half the year because it takes human intuition to even know where the lanes are when snow covers all markings and cars can go weeks never touching the roads because of 1-2” of hardpack and ice over them. I have lane following on one of my vehicles and just don’t even use it.
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I've driven from almost the east coast to Denver, CO without FSD. No problems whatsoever. The same thing to South Dakota and back.
I've also driven up and down large portions of the east coast.
Not sure why you have such a problem driving on roads.
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:3)
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually it's usually pretty good in road construction. Night driving is also fine. It saved me from hitting a deer on the NY Thruway two years ago (technically Autopilot, not FSD), and I never would have seen the deer until it was too late. I think the new version avoids road debris, but I haven't encountered any recently. It's also usually fine in weather conditions unless it's so bad that a human would also be having trouble. The biggest problem is near sunset when the cameras have trouble with dire
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Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:2)
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:2)
But humans are far stronger at highway driving too. You're far more likely to get into an accident on a side street. But the consequences of failure are much greater. I don't any sane person who would trust any current EV to handle the driving - even on the highway.
If you can't take a nap while at the wheel, then what are we even doing here? Sure, there are some safety benefits, but they are not that significant (beyond auto-braking). Certainly not worth the extra money.
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Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone need it to? Airplanes are a thing, and a whole lot of them fly between LA and New York on an hourly basis, taking far less time.
Why is that the target? How many people drive from LA to New York on a regular basis, in comparison to driving from their home to the grocery store or their office which makes up the vast majority of trips, and is a much harder goal to automate anyway?
Why is driving 2,791.1 miles of >99% freeway a useful benchmark, when far less freeway driving is done by literally every driver on a daily / weekly / monthly basis according to real data [bts.gov]:
- 45 percent of daily trips are taken for shopping and errands
- 27 percent of daily trips are social and recreational, such as visiting a friend
- 15 percent of daily trips are taken for commuting
Are you allowed to have a human passenger that can physically plug the vehicle in at charging stations once the car has parked itself next to the charger in order to make the journey, or does that need to be completely automatic as well, because of goalpost moving?
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't take it as a practical question but really unless the answer is "Yes, absolutely, no problem" then it isn't really "full-self-driving" which we would expect to operate as a level 4 or 5.
Even for the 45% shopping and errand trips, can I get in my Tesla, punch in an address and then it just takes me there with no interaction?
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Even for the 45% shopping and errand trips, can I get in my Tesla, punch in an address and then it just takes me there with no interaction?
No. But nobody has claimed that it can at this time, including Tesla. This is evidenced by the big pop-up message that comes up and informs you that you still need to pay attention and be ready to take over control of the vehicle at any particular moment when you try to enable autopilot / full self-drive, and the repeated warnings to keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel while the system is engaged.
Nobody ever claimed that the current state of Tesla's software is anything more than Level
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
And yes plenty of Tesla simps regularly claim that a current Tesla is L4 or higher and it's just government interference that stops them from making it official.
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Tesla simps should not be listened to when what they say stands in clear contrast to easily observable reality.
And Musk has a very long record of promising things that cannot be delivered on the timescale he promises them. If you believe anything he says about future developments that are bounded to any delivery time whatsoever, you're just asking to be lied to.
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Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:3)
"Why is driving 2,791.1 miles of >99% freeway a useful benchmark"
Because Elno claimed it would do that before now
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And he never claims ridiculous things on unachievable time scales that prove almost nothing, based on nothing at all. Not even once!
A self-driven trip from New York to LA (or in reverse) would achieve nothing other than having a reason for a press release and some accompanying YouTube videos. It's answering a question that nobody other than him asked, and he only asked it purely for marketing purposes.
A self-driven trip from your office to a charging station, where the car can autonomously get plugged in,
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:3)
I would prefer my self driving vehicle be able to get itself a charge while I'm at work. I have no access to charging at home, so this is the main thing keeping me from buying a Tesla or some weird Asian EV import.
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See, now that's a practical and useful feature which would help not only the vehicle owner who doesn't have their own off-street parking in which to install a charger, as well as help the charging network to distribute load outside of rush-hour. And, if intelligently designed, the self-driving car could know if there are available stalls and plan accordingly.
However, every single charging point deployed today still requires a meatbag to plug the car in.
I know at some point Tesla was doing some work on that
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No meatbag required.
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I’d like to take a cross country drive at some point. Sometimes it’s not about the destination.
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Then feel free to do so. I already have, twice, in a Tesla using both "advanced autopilot" when it was still called that, as well as their "full self drive." You still have to monitor it to make sure it doesn't do stupid shit, and the car is the first to tell you as much and keep reminding you if you get lazy about watching the road or keeping your hands on the wheel. And if you try to drive out of bounds for what it can do, it will disable the system until you pull over and put the vehicle in park.
When
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I'd love to see a self driving car make the 8 mile journey from my home to work.
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It can definitely, without a doubt, do that with no intervention *most* of the time. However I think FSD should have entered the market as ADAS only .. that is, to prevent people doing blatantly stupid things like running a red light or stop sign. The reason I think it would work better as ADAS is because when it does fail, it's because it didn't detect something (false negative, rather than false positive). Therefore I think the technology is best for ADAS .. in fact it would be really good at ADAS. If you
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Full Self Driving does what it is purported to do
Crash randomly and unexpectedly? You do realise it's official title is "Full Self Driving Beta".
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It isnt perfect, but if you showed it to someone in the 90s they would believe it was magic.
Only if they didn't see the demos from the 80s [youtu.be]. Well, they had less accidents than Teslas.
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and an electric car is a car, not a computer. and cars must be practical, and cars are rarely impulse purchases. Apple's fundamental "high fashion" approach to lifestyle appliances doesn't translate to a utilitarian device that is the second most expensive thing most people will ever purchase. Apple thought a car was little more than software, they learned otherwise.
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There are plenty of impractical and/or unreliable high-end cars out there, so I don't think this would be an issue.
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Like my Maserati - which, BTW, does 185.
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Like my Maserati - which, BTW, does 185.
Too bad you don't drive anymore
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:3)
That is a perfect comparison because Maserati shifted to making more mass market cars because there wasn't enough money in making only high end luxury vehicles. And those new cars are by all accounts not worth what they cost. They had to give up their specialness to get the production up and also get the prices down to where they will appeal to that larger audience.
Apple would essentially have to do the same thing, except they have no history of making automobiles. Their brand is worth a lot for selling ele
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:2)
EV sales are up like 50% year over year. What are you talking about?
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But electric cars haven't plateaued, despite the flood of articles stating otherwise. Year over year EV sales growth between Q2 2022 and Q3 2023 was a 52% increase.
https://mediaroom.kbb.com/2024... [kbb.com].
It's true automakers have backed off plans to totally cancel ICE vehicles or cancelled some specific EVs, but that doesn't mean that EV sales aren't growing. That being said, I agree that making EVs isn't going to be a very profitable business, and Apple was right to cancel the project. Tesla kicked off a price w
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Automotive manufacturing would have been a very odd fit for Apple in the first place. I never really guessed why they went that route in the first place; versus Google/Waymo, for example, who added their self-driving tech on top of an existing Jaguar hardware platform.
But there's still plenty of room for Apple in the automotive space though. Carplay is already head-and-shoulders above any "infotainment" system in any car I've ever driven. And even if some auto maker ever came out with something better; A
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Now we see that electric cars in general have plateaued in the market
Except they have not. The rate of growth has plateaued. The market's growth is still trending very sharply upwards with virtually every company having just delivered record sales and expecting to break that record again this year.
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:3)
Tesla's genius was starting out as a luxury brand to absorb the sticker shock of the new tech. Then porting the tech down market as it became cheaper. Fuking brilliant. Such a simple, yet amazing decision.
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While you are right, I personally like Elon Musk's admission that a company's value has nothing to do with the efforts of the CEO and that he is irrelevant and replaceable, much much more.
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Not really, Apple would have F'd it up. Tesla is successful because of the Model 3 .. Tesla isn't a luxury brand. Apple would have tried to make it luxury and it would have failed. Apple was always better off trying to make their own .. of course they messed that up. I think there aren't many high end automotive self-driving or EV engineers to go around.
Have you looked at Tesla's prices? They're definitely a luxury brand, it's just that their chief luxury is being an EV.
I think the real issue would have been that Apple is a computer company that branched into phones and watches. It's not clear to me that they'd be great at running a car company (just like Musk isn't great at running a social network), and this cancellation kinda shows it.
I mean it's worthwhile spending a few billion to see if you can do it, but buying Tesla would not have simply been expen
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:2)
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I'd imagine that the people spending more than $100,000 for a Cybertruck or a Tesla Model S Plaid would probably disagree with you about Tesla being a luxury car brand.
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I would check community notes to see how factual that statement was. But since Elmo has disabled that for his account...
Re:Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Interesting)
The EV market is here to stay -- more people switch to EV than switch back to gas .. in fact very very few switch back from EV to gas. Tesla is not going to fail for at least a decade if not longer. The only threat is from the Chinese but we won't allow Chinese cars here.
Re:Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:5, Insightful)
The EV market is here to stay -- more people switch to EV than switch back to gas .. in fact very very few switch back from EV to gas. Tesla is not going to fail for at least a decade if not longer. The only threat is from the Chinese but we won't allow Chinese cars here.
Electric motors are a vastly superior technology to the Rube Goldberg internal combustion engines. Most designs are basically just two bearings and that’s it, no brushes or other parts to wear out, vs hundreds of moving parts and worse, many sliding surfaces for internal combustion. While most every EV today has a fixed single reduction gearbox, that’s possibly going away with axial flux motors that develop far more torque at lower RPM yet still have a wide dynamic range of RPM reducing moving part count even more. The power density already exceeds internal combustion engines as well, and the lifetime or mean time between failures is far longer than any internal combustion engines of comparable size and power. Electric motors are clearly superior in all ways, the only limitation has been the batteries.
Expensive batteries are the only actual engineering challenge keeping EVs more expensive, yet battery prices have dropped 90% in the last 15 years on a $/kwh basis [energy.gov] while still improving in power and energy density by almost a factor of two. We are no where near maxing out the process as the market has finally been blown open for actual serious research and we are on track for continuing the massive cost reductions. This means that not only are electric cars more reliable, but will have more range than internal combustion cost cars today while being significantly cheaper, at least in terms of what’s possible. Companies that continue to pile on crappy tech packages to try and inflate the costs to consumers while reducing reliability will be severely undercut by inexpensive Chinese and to some extent eurpoean manufacturers in terms of actual adoption numbers. The market may be somewhat saturated in terms of people willing to put up two years average salary for a luxury EV, but when battery prices pass a critical point its internal combustion designs that become overpriced and that’s not even counting any environmental benefits. Also just adding the batteries are 100% recyclable and contain valuable metals that are not used up by charge discharge cycles and recycling is far cheaper than mining new materials.
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The only threat is from the Chinese but we won't allow Chinese cars here.
Of course you do. Chinese car manufacturers are working on plenty of electrification projects, they are just all government related where they have guaranteed sales rather than dealing with the shitshow that is the American auto industry and American foreign policy. Several manufacturers have all out said as such, BYD only recently said the only reason they aren't in the USA market is because they have no desire to enter it for consumer vehicles due to uncertainty and general distrust of EVs.
And that's not
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If Tesla can't do something (Score:3)
Re: Tim Cook should have taken Elon Musk's Call (Score:2)
EV sales grew like 50% last year, dipshit.
Not surprised (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, they finally realized that it's simply not feasible to build an EV that is 3mm thick and has zero electrical connectors.
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Apparently, they finally realized that it's simply not feasible to build an EV that is 3mm thick and has zero electrical connectors.
They just pivoted to the Vision Pro.
You never actually wanted to drive anywhere, you just want to see what's at your destination. Such courage.
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Well, back when Ive was still on staff, they also lost several years trying to design a car without doors or windows.
May not be a complete waste, though. (Score:5, Interesting)
Reason: a lot of the research Apple did could end up on somebody else's car. I wouldn't be surprised if a Japanese automaker or even Hyundai/Kia are looking to license the technology Apple worked on for their own future EV's.
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Yeah it's easy to forget Blackberry is still around and they own and sell QNX
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I doubt there's anything of value there. When a company enters another industry they largely spend the entire effort all the way up to and through the first and second generation of the product completely re-inventing the wheel. In most cases this doesn't stick. In some cases it does, but more often than not the only thing that is learned is lessons that others have learned decades prior.
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The easiest evidence is if they patented any of it.
If they did, those inventions are already in the public domain. They may as well get some return on that investment if someone wants to pay them to pick up the ball and run with it.
If there are no patents filed, then they're filing all of it in a big vault somewhere.
who wants to pay 30% more for each fill up + apple (Score:5, Funny)
who wants to pay 30% more for each fill up + apples repair pricing when something fails on the car.
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Don't forget the awesome experience of being told that you're sitting in it wrong when an obvious design flaw presents itself as obvious, and a design flaw.
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Not to mention trying to get your car to the Genius Bar in the shopping mall, and then listening to some smug hipster simultaneously teaching you how to use your car, telling you how great it is, and trying to upsell you on AppleCare.
Fad hopping (Score:2)
A great gig, if you can get it.
Et Tu Malus? (Score:2)
What the heck? (Score:5, Funny)
How hard can it be to build a car? If those morons in Detroit can do it, then certainly the smartest people in the country can do it?
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It takes determination to move a large compa
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It takes determination to move a large company into a brand new market... It really puts Amazon into perspective for example - book seller website to e-commerce is "easy", but e-commerce to Cloud infrastructure provider is a big step.
Not necessarily. IIRC, given Amazon's rapid growth, and an extreme dedication to squeezing every penny until it melted, they had no viable choice but to build out cloud infrastructure to support their own core business. Once that was done, selling it as a service to others was easy, and almost an afterthought.
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Re: What the heck? (Score:2)
That's what Elno thought and Teslas have shit paint, shit panel gaps, short out when driven through puddles (or the rear bumper cover rips off) and so on. You know, all the kinds of things that the other automakers managed to fix by the nineties.
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Re: What the heck? (Score:4, Funny)
My apologies. I thought the sarcasm was obvious.
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It was... (and I thought it was funny)
Re: What the heck? (Score:3)
Ah. My bad. Poe's law is powerful.
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They could have played Korean/Chinese/Japanese manufacturers, who would be less afraid of hurting their own US market, against each other in contract manufacturing. Of course long term Apple would be a deadly danger to them, but that has never stopped them from getting short term partners.
Use existing manufacturer frames and add Apple magic with the body and some chosen components, the factories are already designed to build lots of variants on the same frame. They can replace as much or as little as they w
pivot towards AI? pffft! (Score:2)
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Email that to Tom Cook ...and be the supplier of dolphin tanks.
Reasonable (Score:3)
Speculation: everything was pretty much done except a perfect autopilot, which turns out to require an AI neural net we don't yet have.
So they move everybody over to AI and in a few years they'll have the tech they need to restart transportation work.
No sense in starting to build factories when the killer feature (yikes) isn't ready.
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That makes a hell of a lot of sense. It wouldn't surprise me at all if you turn out to be right.
Additionally, they may be biding their time because the short-term viability of the market isn't proven. Electric cars are being ignored at dealerships, and charging infrastructure isn't where it needs to be. As you've pointed out, anything they've developed probably has a pretty long shelf life; so they can afford to wait and still have a good chance to eventually capitalize on the investment they've made.
Good!! (Score:2)
It was a dumb idea to begin with. Thank god someone finally came to their senses and put a stop to it.
I say this as a shareholder and an Apple user too. There's just no way this was EVER a good idea.
It's like Proctor & Gamble suddenly deciding to get into the farm business, since - you know, since they sell food, why not grow food?? Just fucking DUMB!!
So, good job Apple. Thank you!!
I feel sorry for the engineers (Score:2)
I feel sorry for the engineers who hired on to work on something cool, like a self-driving EV, but have now been transferred to work on lame shit, like generating fake comments and misleading content.
We already have an Apple Car (Score:4, Funny)
Good move. We already have Apple Car, and it's Tesla. I've called them "iPhones on wheels" for quite some time. It even comes complete with crazy asshole CEO, which Apple no longer has.
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Good move. We already have Apple Car, and it's Tesla. I've called them "iPhones on wheels" for quite some time. It even comes complete with crazy asshole CEO, which Apple no longer has.
You mean "courageous dipshit" doesn't trump "crazy asshole"? Say it ain't so!
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All of a sudden the proprietary charging cable makes sense.
Missed opportunity (Score:3)
They could have focused on the thing they actually know how to build - electronics and software - and made the most popular car infotainment deck in the world. Could have had every modern car running Apple software, and made a mint off licensing and subscriptions. Nope! They wanted to try building something they know nothing about instead. This is what happens when you take big risks: big losses. Meanwhile Google/Android will continue eating their lunch on embedded devices.
That's what happens when you raise interest rates (Score:2)
Anyway...all those weird ideas you were shocked to hear about?...expect less of them and more cancelations of crazy moonshot projects.
Scared of government? (Score:2)
It's a dangerously large market, cars could easily cause them to become the victim of their own success and run into a forced breakup. Especially given the need to "dump" 100's of billions dollar or so into a competitive fast charger network up front. Tesla did it a bit more organically, Apple would need to buy in up front. Even with giving non Apple cars access, it would not be a good look.
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There is still a lack of chargers and in the US if they want to be the premium brand they need the premium charger network. They can not obviously play second fiddle in any market they are in, it would hurt their brand. The distortion bubble can cover up small stuff but not this big.
No iCar (Score:2)
It never made sense. (Score:3)
Making cars is completely different animal than consumer electronics. They'd be directly competing with Tesla who has already had a 20 year head start.
I'm also sure that the Vision Pro numbers are not looking great behind the scenes, which has them rethinking their strategy. I think pushing into AI is a smart idea and what they should have been doing the entire time. Siri should have been ChatGPT.
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"But but but... this was the whole reason I got an Apple Card in the first place!"