A small, dedicated C program is what I use for outputting formatted text that is easy on the eye from Bloomberg's htmljson monstrosity, but the above shell script ("1.sh") should also work.
It's result of a technical fight between the archive website and some hosting services, discussed a few times in other HN threads. Here's the Wayback Machine version which may work.
One fun aspect of Apple's moon shots is tracing back tech dependencies, which they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1). In the case of Apple Car that will include computational image capture¹, sensor fusion², lidar³, and now the R1 SPU (Sensor Processing Unit) used in Apple Vision. What else?
The Vision Pro in its entirety seems like a cog in a much larger strategy.
It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial computing” that will show up in much higher-volume products later on… as opposed to being a high-volume product itself.
Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
The Vision Pro’s existing sales have already justified the project. They have sold 560+ million dollars worth of them at presumably insane profit margins.
I think Apple’s strategy is to just execute whatever the next tech thing is better than existing participants. MP3 players weren’t a forever thing, but they were a very profitable thing for Apple. Watch, tablet, 3D glasses etc timed after someone else proved the market and just in time for Apple to slurp up the most profitable slice of the pie.
They don’t want to be the first self driving car company, they want to be the most profitable self driving car company.
Apple's profit margin on the Vision Pro, from a purely bill of material perspective, is estimated to be around 45%. But of course they have spent billions of R&D towards that project and it is far from out of the woods yet. It will be in the red for a few iterations over years.
Meta has sold more than twenty million Quest headsets of various types, and by most measures that project is still basically a money pit.
Meta quite likely also subsidize their headset. They follow the console market plan of getting money back on software sales, but a big issue has been incredibly low user retention.
With low retention, every sold device is likely costing them.
That’s 20 million headsets with ~zero to negative profit margin on each sale.
Meta’s investment in VR has been a dumpster fire, but the headset R&D isn’t where the overwhelming majority of that money is going. They’ve done everything from making VR movies to promoting 3rd party games most recently spending 400 million for beat saber’s publisher.
Meta is investing in VR movies? How much and where? I can count on my fingers the good VR videos from Meta, and I mean that from a tech point of view. The median VR porn has better video quality than 90% of videos on the Meta video app. Also Youtube VR is limited to just 4k and looks like garbage. VR video only starts to look good from 6-8k and 60fps.
More recently they also bought Supernatural (fitness app)
Meta are playing the long game with this, they are building out the eco system and the devices. They are doing a great job despite it being a money pit, the Quest 3 is an awesome device. It just needs a bit better software and better marketing around those killer apps, like fitness etc.
I don’t believe for one second that they are doing a great job. They have lost so much money. The only reason they haven’t completely abandoned the idea is because Zuckerberg has a controlling stake in the stock.
I'm not saying Vision Pro won't eventually justify itself, but $560m revenue is likely nowhere near the cost for this programme so far.
This project has been rumoured to have hundreds of engineers for 5+ years, that's that revenue already (let alone profit), then the manufacturing setup, new chip development, etc.
Even if this product makes $2bn revenue, which could be unlikely just based on the rumoured manufacturing limitations and number they expect to manufacture this year, it probably wouldn't be justified once you figure out the profit margins. This is clearly all about the next product, or the one after. It's about the iPhone 4 launch, for this product, not the first, 3G, or 3GS practice runs.
Apple have a history of healthy margins, but huge production costs on their high end stuff, so while this is $3500, I wouldn't be surprised if it's still only 50% margin. That's great, but it's not the 70% one might expect from such a high price, and it will be because of things like maybe the body costs $200 rather than $50 because of some silly uncompromising design choices that don't make sense for high volume consumer hardware.
A lot of the individual tech pieces to make it work have been going into other products for years. Like head tracking in AirPods, face id, Memoji, probably lidar, certainly other things that aren't coming to me right now.
A lot of things that seemed like gimmicks that turned out, it seems to me, were really for Vision Pro.
I highly doubt that the head tracking on AirPods is the same implementation as VP. VP uses iris ID, not Face ID. Memoji is a non factor. Lidar’s usage is probably also very different.
There’s minor overlap but I feel like the R&D cost of the VP didn’t have much overlap with other products. Except the M2 SoC.
Yea but the inherent costs are not in the implementation. The complexity of integrating something like head tracking is only 10% to do with the “type” of head tracking.
So even if VP head tracking works differently, the groundwork has been laid for that category of feature.
Why wouldn't the head tracking be the same? They use the same H2 chip as AirPods. FaceID probably implemented ideas used by iris ID. Learnings from Memoji almost definitely underly the personas. Lidar in the wild I am sure provided valuable data and got developers used to working with AR.
From what has been reported - a lot of the AR things, including RealityKit and ARKit came from the TDG which are also who made VP.
The project could be 7-10 years old but they didn’t start on day one with hundreds of people. Let’s say a core of ~50 people for 5 years as proof of concept then ~350 people for another 5 years at 300k per person on average, that’s a 600 million dollar investment.
Sure they could have a larger team, but they also don’t pay testers anything close to 150k year.
$300k/annum is the carrying cost of low to mid engineers at big tech. For the kind of talent you need to pull this off, I’d at least double it (and maybe closer to $1M/year for the early folks)
Employees are expensive. That $200k salary comes with 100k in RSUs and then 25+% overhead.
Then factor in bonuses for leadership when they finally get the thing to ship…
And 350 people sounds like way too few, considering the novel R&D. Maybe 2000 would be my guess.
What’s the ratio of testers:developers and how much do testers make? Not everyone on a this kind of a project is making even low end software developer salaries, and not every RSU vests which is a big part of why they are so popular.
I’ve heard people quote hundreds of people working on the Vision Pro which is already a lot of people for Apple. The company only recently broke 150k employees globally and a large fraction of that are working retail at their stores. Now split the remainder across iPhone, Mac, iPad, App Store, Apple TV, Air Pods, Watch, marketing, this car project, back end infrastructure etc and ~2,000 people on Vision Pro for 5+ years just doesn’t line up.
I agree that for the Vision Pro headcount 2000 is unlikely, but you also have to include all the other functions – chip design, marketing, all the people that interface with the manufacturing partners, the manufacturing partners themselves, the people who design the production lines, the people who design and program the machines on the production line, the people embedded in TSMC overseeing chip fab, the people TSMC will have embedded in Apple overseeing chip design... it goes on.
For an idea of the scope, a number of years ago it was reported that Apple had 40 business class seats from SFO to Shenzhen pre-booked every single day. That's how much it takes to interface with manufacturing. Now this isn't the iPhone, the scale is smaller, but this stuff is hard and takes a lot of people, it's practically why Tim Cook got the CEO job.
I completely agree manufacturing takes significant oversight, but only a tiny fraction of that manpower goes back 2+ years on a small scale production project like this.
Apple has a pipeline and they move experts between projects. The team making commercials is another late yet critical addition.
IME, having worked at big tech on moonshots, outsiders wildly underestimate how many people it takes to build a new platform. There is just so much work needed. I could be wrong on the AVP, Apple might make it work, but my prior is what it is.
Now discuss the millions spent on the physical R&D, corp acquisitions (Apple was for a while averaging 1-2 acquisitions/day), whatever licensing fees they need to pay out for initial access, this is easily a multibillion dollar bet.
Meta burned through ~$50B to get where they are with Oculus. Apple has likely spend at least a reasonable fraction of that. My guess is somewhere in the league of single digit billions.
Developing R1 itself would have cost ~$500M. Not to mention the cost of tooling the factories for mass production. Apple has fronted money to TSMC in the past to accelerate their manufacturing roadmap.
That said - a car is a completely different beast. They are going to upend a lot of things with it, including the dealership model. Probably timing it based on projections of when the demand is set to rise, given many countries are “banning” sale of new ICE from 2035. Though my money is on that deadline getting extended a few times.
I seriously doubt Oculus VR would have spent 500M as an independent company on the R1. Especially when looking at the other head set manufacturers.
Mega wasted 50B on VR as a category but that includes money subsidizing headsets, making VR movies, buying an VR company that had less than 100M invested for 2B etc. It’s a story of management incompetence not some requirement for headsets R&D.
But the point is: Tesla had to build a service network. Apple would have to find a solution for that too. You cannot bring your car to an Apple store nor mail it in, if something is broken.
I am looking forward to seeing Apple execute on Generative AI. While I think shoving it into every product you can think of (Google, Samsung) might have unforeseen consequences, I don’t think the other extreme is the right play either. This field is moving fast and they may not have time to do it the Apple way.
I have both of those devices on my desk. The originals of both. The similarities of both: rectangular, displays, batteries (dead), audio jack, charging ports and could play music.
Aside from the large list of physical differences (like, one has cameras while one has a big flat physical turntable as its input device), the biggest category of differences is as large as the number of unique apps there are in the app store. Because the biggest difference is: one does anything, the other does one thing.
Still, you're right. One doesn't leap over oceans of differences. There were many products and ideas between the original iPod and the iPad, each one potentially sharing with or influencing the other.
Pretty sure they meant a big iPod touch, which was basically an iPhone without the phone part, not a gen 1 iPod.
The 2nd gen iPad was the real magic, and made me start paying more attention to Apple. There were rumours of a "Retina display", higher res than an HDTV in a tablet size. I was doubtful. I figured if display manufacturers could do that, we wouldn't be stuck with all these 1080p monitors and 768p laptops... Well, it turns out I was wrong. Display manufacturers just can't be bothered to make compelling displays on their own for some reason.
That crisp display, with enough horsepower to run things smoothly, there was nothing else comparable at the time.
> What specifically do you think the iPad inherited from the Newton, that didn't come to it through the iPhone/iPod Touch lineage
iPhone / iPod Touch / iPad all come from the Newton lineage.
But the person I responded to said “iPod”. The iPod is far removed from iPhone / iPhone Touch / and iPad in terms of interaction modality, operating system, application platform, etc.
The iPod doesn’t run iOS, is a media player not general purpose computing device, like the others and their ancestor, the Newton.
The person you responded to did say "iPod" but they surely meant iPod Touch. It's an easy mistake to make, you even made a similar mistake above writing "iPhone" when you meant "iPod" so very easy to do:
> And the supercharger network is no longer an advantage as almost all EVs will now be using them.
Having more demand for the network means the network can grow and expand at a much faster rate and make it cheaper. That's good for Tesla drivers in the long term. And Tesla itself. Tesla making more $$ also filters back to the consumers through R&D and new products.
If EV is truly going to be everywhere then charging needs to be generic and everywhere like today's gas stations. Currently it's still very much a luxury type thing when you consider a lower-middle class person living in a skyscraper in a city (which is a ton of people these days). In urban areas you don't have the luxury of multiple separate gas station services, given the limited real estate. Having to drive longer distances to use one near your apartment for ex. The more the better.
The network was always going to become a commodity anyway. Why not establish yourself as the leader ahead of time?
> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
Apple is a master at having the users pay for R&D. They didn't go and raise millions to billions of dollars in venture capital... they started with phones using cheap Samsung SoCs and from there on, they evolved rapidly, with their M-series SoCs now being on par with Intel performance-wise.
The hipsters pay outrageous amounts of money for Apple hardware - me being amongst them - and Apple doesn't go and waste all their income on stock buybacks or luxurious dividends, but invests it into developing technology to legitimately drive the state of the art forward.
I think this is exactly right. Notice how they actively avoid AR/VR words, preferring spatial computing. I think this is because, to them, AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.
> AR/VR are going to be much more compelling than spatial computing, and they don't want to sully those efforts by mixing it with this stepping stone we have now.
I disagree. I think they don’t want to be compared to a $500 VR headset. VR hasn’t taken off enough to move the needle on Apple financials. It’s not “good enough”. As nice as the Vision Pro is can it justify its extra $3000 cost in comparison if it’s also just VR/AR? Sure it’s more powerful, but it doesn’t even have controllers.
On the other hand AR has largely failed so far too. The HoloLens didn’t revolutionize the world. And the level of AR a Quest 3 offers is much lower resolution than Apple had. And, again, $3000 difference there (HoloLens was way more).
I think they want to be seen as a new category and not just another AR/VR thing. Sure the Mac was technically a personal computer, it was so different from a PC AT as to be almost a totally different thing. iPod vs Creative Nomad. iPhone vs early Windows CE phones.
That’s what they want. They want to be judged on their own. Not “I bought a Quest 4 and it was OK, why should I pay $X more? It wasn’t useful to me.”
Will it work? Time will tell. If it does the Vision line will be looked at as a totally different product category from the Quests/etc of today. If it doesn’t they’re in trouble.
AR and VR is a wasteland where money gets burned on ideas that have not advanced much since 1990s and the first Virtuality devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtuality_(product) in terms of being more useful than an Apple Watch, an iPhone, or a laptop for pretty much anything. A computer does not get better when you wear it.
Realistically, for a VR headset to be successful it would need to be as light as a baseball cap and have a ~12h power source that would not cause overheating of the wearer's head.
AppleVision is going nowhere. Apple is a mass market manufacturer of status products with a limited lifespan and support. When they work and are supported they generally offer great experience for the money. Apple Car and AppleVision are not such products, but evolutionary dead ends in Apple's history, just like Newton or Apple Network Server. Apple is investing money into an old personal transportation platform when the future of transportation will be based on something else and that "something else" will emerge out of new ideas for urban planning. Some of the tech developed for those products may make its way into those new modes of transport, but it will take a while and may lesser impact than we think.
Nobody needs any new ideas for urban planning. Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried, so what's needed is ideas for how to make the planners go away.
I think having an infinite power source via plugging it in will work well enough for power in this case.
Do you think urban planning made Amsterdam worse in the last 40 years? That it made Paris worse? Or Barcelona? All these cities have been greatly improved because they planned it (after some terrible decisions too, especially all the decisions related to making more cars enter the cities).
All great cities have had several planning phases, over centuries
The good parts of Amsterdam and Paris come from undoing previous bad ideas, and Paris is still too expensive because of height limits, so I don't think it's an impressive showing yet.
Good Asian cities' planning efforts are mostly making illegal to let NIMBYs have input on anything.
> Urban planning mostly just makes everything worse when it's tried
Is that generally true or only in the US? I’m also wondering what you suggest we should plan urban centers with if it isn’t the methods of urban planning itself.
No, it's even worse in other Anglo countries, and China, Brazil, etc. (not sure of the details of the last one, just remember something about planned cities not working)
The US just has an unusually large money and land budget to spend on car dependency, but other countries have made their housing even less affordable.
Copenaghen or Amsterdam aren't perfect from the Urban planning PoV but after having spent a few months in an LA suburb vs a few years in those cities... Yeah, Thanks but no thanks, I think I'd rather have the imperfectly urban planned towns for the next few years. Matter of taste, I guess.
At this point I feel we're arguing a no true scotsman fallacy.
Care to point a good example of "unplanned" urban environment with an excellent quality of life for _all_ of its occupants? Outside of, dunno, some exceptionally small villages in the Swiss alps or northern parts of Scandinavia (which are basically unchanged since the middle ages), I can't think of any.
Tokyo is the usual example. (Of course, it has a planned road network too.)
American suburbs are just about the most planned things in the world though. Try building an apartment there - you can't do it. They would never exist if it wasn't for artificial zoning laws. Gotta read Strong Towns.
I think none of those "innovative future of transportation" ideas will come to life in any meaningful scale. Transportation for the most part is a solved problem.
Car dependency is the main issue and no "super innovative personal transportation device" solves this.
Meta likes to call quest 3 "mixed reality" since AR is generally defined as adding images to the existing light going into your eyes.
I just feel like the technical challenges of AR are much larger than people give it credit for - even just dealing with "how to project an image" before even trying to miniaturize it is really hard!
I can see the reasoning yeah, for now it seem to be treated similarly though. Maybe a v2 could help like it did with the iPhone, after all the first model also had a lot of trouble to find its place.
I do agree with them on that, that's for sure. The VR market is minuscule and even the "market leaders" get chump change compared to smartphones and laptops, the market penetration is very low and worse than that, is looking like a flat curve now.
I don't know what will work to commodities VR but the current platforms just ain't going to cut it.
In my mind the big problems are a killer app and nausea.
Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.
And enough people have nausea issues that it can’t be ignored. Higher frame rates will help. But a lot of software either ignores the issue or does half measures. The instant something screws up and gives you a huge lurch in your stomach the fun stops.
“Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
> Games are fun, but no one has come up with much compelling past that.
Sure they have, it’s the only medium capable of offering anything close to the presence of real life social interactions.
The worst social experiences in VR are worlds ahead of anything you can experience in any other medium short of meeting someone in the physical world, which would be my preference but for many people, is not always possible.
“meet your friends in reality instead problem solved, it’s better anyway”.
My friends live all over the world now, but thanks to VR, we’ve still been able to catch up and hang out in the same space and converse, watch movies, play games and even dance and exercise together plus many more activities in a manner that is simply incapable of ever being delivered through a monitor and keyboard.
I’m a gamer (though I hate to use that word) but it’s not where I see the value to this long term and it’s never really been where I see it, though it’s a value add to me of course.
> “Just wait until you get your VR legs” is not good enough.
I hate hearing this.
I've tried with VR. I built my own HMD back when a bunch of people were building them, including the creator of the Oculus Rift. I've tried every commercial product I could get my hands on since, and without fail, something will flip a switch in my brain and that it, I'm sick.
Not just nauseated, but destroyed. Like, instant hangover with a side of migraine. It's unbearable.
My hope is that with high enough resolution/coherence/realism for passthrough video/environment, the VR sickness won't happen. I think I'm being more realistic though when I predict that that same "high fidelity" is just as likely to make the sickness occur, as any mismatch with my senses and what my eyes and ears are seeing will seem more obvious to whatever demon is waiting for its moment to strike.
Apple does have the benefit of the rest of their ecosystem and walled garden though, they can easily integrate with their own pre-existing apps/service/technology whereas competitors have to pick and choose 3rd parties and spend time building it themselves - meaning that they usually don't.
How memory fades. People used smartphones for years, in large numbers, prior to the iPhone. Nokia, Blackberry were the market leaders. Also Palm and MS and probably others I've forgotten. Sony...
I wasn't talking about anything except Windows CE phones (I had a Palm-based Treo phone at one point, but it was not really a very good phone or palm pilot.) WinCE phones were barely usable for their primary task, and were almost completely unusable for anything else because of the limitations inherent in WinCE and Microsoft's insistence on trying to replicate the Windows UI on something that was fundamentally unsuited for it.
Palm devices embraced the limitations of their platform; WinCE just struggled to run well on anything.
I will also dispute your "in large numbers" assertion, although I do not have access to detailed statistics. In 2008, Gartner asserted ~1.3 billion devices sold, with most growth in emerging markets. A couple of publicly available charts on Statista suggest that slightly less than 10% (~120m) of those were smartphones (Apple sold less than 1% of all phones that year at ~11m units, a ~9x growth over its just-over 1m units in 2007).
The only "smartphone" models sold meaningfully in largish numbers before the iPhone would have been BlackBerry. Everything else was an also-ran. And even BlackBerry was an also-ran compared to people just buying phones.
WinCE phones? No, they mostly weren't. When they weren't crashing, they were only really accessible with a stylus and often not well built. Microsoft didn't get mobile UI and stability correct until Windows Mobile, and by then it was too late for Microsoft to be a major factor.
I assumed by "CE phone" GP meant WM5 - how many non-WM && WWAN equipped devices were there? WM5 way okay for its days, and with the buttons and controls that don't change they were quite useful.
It should come as no surprise that there were many, which is one of the reasons where Windows Mobile failed. All the other manufacturers had been burned badly by Microsoft's inability to deliver anything reliable on mobile (and eventually saw themselves directly in competition because of the Nokia purchase) and Android starting being a cheaper, more focused option.
Fundamentally, Windows CE was flawed beyond repair, and it should have been obvious from the very first iPaq and sibling devices. I used my Palm devices every day. I rarely turned on my iPaq (available third party software was also a problem; there was lots for Palm and comparatively nothing for WinCE).
If they had 100% capture of the current consumer VR/AR market it would still have a tiny impact on their overall numbers.
They use a new term because they feel the only way to succeed is to create a new product category.
And that is part of why it is confusing - it doesn't feel like they could create a large enough market to matter for any device in the current VR/AR form factor, or even the idealized version of the current form.
This VR headset isn’t but I think spatial computing will be. IMO this Vision Pro wasn’t meant to be a big seller but a way of taking a research project into an iterative production process. The first iPhone was shit too, same with Apple Watch, and this is far more complex than either. Now it’s time to crank the price/performance/manufacturing.
The better analogy would be the Lisa. It’s reasonably powerful but more expensive than they want it to be. The next version will probably lose some features but be less expensive. The Macintosh to the AVP’s Lisa.
> Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
For the ‘clunky’ I think they’re just betting on Moore’s law (in some interpretation) keeping up and batteries getting more powerful in the next few years, so that they can shrink the device and its production costs.
IMO, that is a safe bet for batteries, a bit less so for the electronics and even less so for the mechanical parts.
And what’s considered ugly can change fairly fast, if the device turns out to be useful/entertaining (which it IMO will be) enough to warrant its sales price (that, I’m not certain of.
But mainly, if you know the use case, you can ship iphone-equivalent device with the sensors needed, not an expensive miniaturized laptop. Vision Pro is an user research platform.
yeah. people really have a hang up on VR and AR, but it’s almost entirely simply because the electronics and power aren’t there yet. once it is, it will almost already be game over, because… i mean literally everyone eventually will have one. it will be the most significant compute platform in history.
you can see this immediately btw if you book some time on the expensive industry AR and VR devices. but even those aren’t any smaller than the Apple device, for reasons of physics.
Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. Meta's most recent released Smart Glasses are solid and work solid especially for taking pictures and videos (just using them to film my ski runs this weekend; use them few times a week as my sunglasses and to snap pics). The smart features on this latest addition aren't terribly reliable though and need user experience work (i.e. audio just starts playing an inopportune times.. annoying).
> Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later.
My point is that AVP is step 1 of working on and releasing Apple Glasses. Rather than start with whatever minimal features they could fit into wraparound shades, they started with the feature set they wanted, built the minimum hardware that could do that, and from here out will keep iterating and improving until they eventually fit it into a pair of glasses.
In other words, it only looks like and functions like a VR headset by accident; the form is a side effect of the current hardware, and the VR functionality is just a nice bonus on top of what they actually wanted to focus on.
Apple does not look at hardware and need to release sooner rather than later. Apple is a software company. When they look at a product category, they think of the software they want running on that.
With a computer you wear on your face, they’ve just released their minimal viable product. You’ll get glasses when they can fit visionOS in them.
In the meantime you can buy glasses from other companies that only take creepy pictures.
If enough people discover and buy meta glasses for taking pics n videos which I'm betting 51 percent out of 49 will...Apple will release their similar glasses too that are also only for taking pics & videos. Everyone I show my meta glasses too ..they show some level excitement yet a few think oh no I'm going to be recorded and not know. Well you can be recorded now and not know too.
Yah, so Apple is working on dependencies for a moonshot... and choosing sets of those dependencies to put into other products. (Perhaps combinations, perhaps permutations, perhaps something in-between how much of an ordering there is on those pieces).
Edit: I remembered it wrong. It was LG Prada that came before iPhone - that's the reason why iPhone did not feel completely novel at the time. iPod Touch was released few months later and was very similar to iPhone minus the cellular connection - a logical cheaper followup to the iPhone.
while the LG Prada phone was announced (though not for US) about a month before iPhone [1], it was not available until after the iPhone announce so it not like it was a known item at that point. However, it was available (not in US) [2] a few months before iPhone was available so maybe there were people that used LG Prada then iPhone so a touchscreen phone was not completely novel.
however, the LG Prada was >$800 at launch so it seems that the impression was fairly limited to people who would spend $800 then $600 a few months later in 2007.
additionally, while the LG Prada had a touchscreen it wasnt really a smart phone. there was no full keyboard, texting and contact entry was with T9 [3].
> they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1).
I still get a kick out of the ARM transition happening laregely in public with the T2-chip Intel Macs. Vast majorities of a T2 system ran off the ARM-based T2 for its ISA.
Do you have any further reading to provide about what all the T2 was doing in those Macs? I too have long suspected that the T2 was Apple playing with transition right in front of us, but would love a more comprehensive look at what all that chip was doing.
I know it was providing the Secure Enclave, some hardware encode/decode media blocks, and I think FileVault for the SSD. But would be curious to know if it was even more than that.
secure storage/secure boot while acting as the SSD controller, crypto functions via the Secure Enclave with TouchID processing.
Video codec for encoding/decoding H.264/H.265.
Also handled the hardware for the microphone/speakers, camera, light sensors so that these would be isolated from the main OS. It handled Hey Siri voice command recognition.
It also had independent power/sleep levels from the rest of the system, and handled power/thermal management from what I understand.
Probably because it didn't operate as the NIC, they didn't move system/application background tasks like watching for push notifications or checking email.
Yup. It did. To me the transition happened in front of our eyes because the T2 chip was Apple stopping development of new hardware features on Intel. All that came to T2 could have been done on Intel but Apple was already committed to the switch so they started the work early and made it so they didn’t have to do it twice.
There's a lot more to a computer than whether it has a certain kind of CPU somewhere in it. In this case they're not running the same software or connected to the same things.
Wasn't T2 the first "Apple silicon" to make its way into a Mac? AFAIK, the SMC and other stuff are just third-party chips with Apple firmware, but T2 is full custom silicon.
There were custom things like display controllers before, and third party chips often had features added for Apple. (Much of Intel's new features and power work were for Macs.)
I still don't understand what's the game that Apple is trying to play here. Manufacturing a car is completely a different business to small digital devices and the existing players are not willing to play nicely with Apple so they need to bootstrap everything from scratch, similar to Tesla. In this context, 2028 is still an extremely aggressive goal even for Apple and I won't be surprised if it's delayed to 2035 or something. Tesla had the advantage of being the first mover in the EV market and Waymo has the most advanced autonomous driving technologies. I don't see any competitive edges Apple has against them.
> I still don't understand what's the game that Apple is trying to play here.
It's a fair question, which was also raised when the iPod was introduced. It helps to see Apple as an "affordable luxury smart things" company. Dumb, ICE-based cars were a poor fit, but smart, mostly solid-state vehicles may not be.
Automotive is just another product category large enough to matter to Apple. A possibility not mentioned in the article is that Apple may initially partner, as they did with Motorola for the ROKR (but hopefully more successfully). Sony, the company Apple wanted to be when it grew up, is doing this with Honda for their first car, the Afeela.
> Tesla had the advantage of being the first mover in the EV market…
Apple has gone up against several first-movers that are now gone or are shadows of their former selves. It's neat that Tesla will be remembered as people's first EV, but it's not enough to ensure their market position 20 years from now. Tesla has no special sauce that I'm aware of.
2-3 years ago, I was thinking something similar along the lines of "yeah, why doesn't Apple just stick with computers/phones/peripherals/software." But if anything's become clear in the last few years in the EV market are issues with: reliability, software/firmware, usability, aesthetics, build-quality, and high startup capital requirements. Apple is a perennial expert UX/design/durability/usability. Sure there's been a few boondoggles over slight decreases in QA and quality (butterfly keyboards)--but at the end of the day, most of us still love at least some of their products because they still, usually "just work". Apple is also quite good (whether or not you like it) at building walled gardens. Imagine if Apple released a rock-solid car and an absolutely kick-ass charging network that rivals Tesla's? There's be demand. The biggest, most-obvious reason why Apple could succeed at building a car is that they have massive amounts of cash. The #1 reason these fly-by-night EV startups fail is because they can't handle 5-10 years of negative margins coupled with massive capital costs. Apple could burn billions before their EV division becomes profitable and not even blink.
I wonder if Apple has been secretly acquiring land or negotiating leases for a charging network. That would be a significant chunk of infrastructure to add to their services segment. Apple One -> Now includes charging your vehicle at no additional cost.
Seems absurd frankly. How would they even approach this task? Something like this is either organic, gradual, and before you are famous or it is stealth and as wide as possible.
I don’t see them pulling something like this off without everyone noticing.
"No one knew what the iPod was for either" is a sort of Godwin-for-Apple-speculation. Once you cross the Rubicon where that's invoked, with no other argument provided, it's been signalled it's rational to connect any dot.
But yeah, it's novel that Tim Cook's Apple would lean into something Wall Street would abhor - a low-margin capital-intensive business - for something that sounds out of date (L2 in 2028, n.b. Mercedes is at L3 on highways, even assumes liability. Elon would tell you Tesla is L3, YMMV)
Apple already is a major investor and builder of renewable energy farms around the world. They won’t even have to buy the energy, they will already have it.
When it comes to core UX, the current-gen iPhones and iPads are less usable than Androids. For one thing, this whole idea of swiping from beyond the edge of the screen, in many places without even a visible indicator that it's an available gesture, to do the most basic stuff like opening Home, is a severe regression compared to simple buttons; and it's even worse because some of the swipe gestures do different things depending on how far you swipe. To be fair, Android also introduced this misfeature, but at least you get a checkbox to restore the old behavior.
At first, Musk's stated goal was to make EV's viable. I feel like that Tesla is well on the way to that, in ways nobody thought possible.
Assuming he hasn't changed his mind, there may come a day he just calls it quits.
But to your point, I would agree - Tesla has no particular special sauce. I am waiting until Waymo FSD finds its way into consumer cars you can drive all over the country before I buy one of them.
> Assuming he hasn't changed his mind, there may come a day he just calls it quits
I have not idea what leads you to that conclusion.
At their last investor day every single department head gave a very detailed presentation about how they're going to 10x their manufacturing from 2M vehicles in 2023 to 20 million in 2030.
Those novel things only matter if there's a large enough, visible, positive difference to the customer. I'm not convinced they have anything like that.
I feel like Apple as a company is great at coming up with those novel things that tend to blow right past the competition. (I don't like the locked-down, walled-garden result of many of those products, but I can't deny they have that special sauce.)
But a car? Computer -> laptop -> music player -> smartphone -> tablet -> smart watch... -> ... car? Not sure I buy it.
It matters if it makes it cheaper for the manufacturer. Teslas are best selling cars in many places (e.g. Model Y is the best selling car in EU) at the same time while Tesla maintains rather high margins compared to the industry standard.
If the competition forces them to, they have buffer to lower their prices.
> Teslas are best selling cars in many places (e.g. Model Y is the best selling car in EU)
You made me look this up and this is slightly misleading. I couldn't find the full numbers for 2023, but I did find H1 2023.
Yes, Model Y is the best selling car in the EU, but for H1 2023 Tesla is barely the 16th best selling car brand in the EU. The other brands just sell a lot more models, on average.
> at the same time while Tesla maintains rather high margins compared to the industry standard.
I looked this up yesterday, Tesla has similar margins to BMW and Mercedes, because they sell upscale models, just like those. Tesla margins will drop once Tesla starts making cheaper models. For reference, cheaper models in Europe = cars costing 20k€. Not 40k€+ like the cars Tesla is selling right now.
I didn’t get it but I recently did a couple of things that changed my mind. Drove an EV and switched to an iPhone. EVs are not cars as we know them, they are scaled up phones whose only real traditional car bits (tyres, brakes, Air conditioner) the major manufacturers already outsource. Once the engine and gearbox are gone you are only left with one point of differentiation and that is styling/user experience.
Apple kills it at those things. All the stuff you don’t see will be outsourced. All the stuff you do see could be amazing. I am no Apple fanboy but get in a Tesla and think how good it could be if fancy stylists and designers made it.
I am a car guy but really, now you can’t differentiate on power trains the EV market is ripe for an Apple style product.
> think how good it could be if fancy stylists and designers made it
I'm thinking about how bad it would be, actually. That's the kind of thing that brings you the infamous steering yoke because it "looks cool". Or touch controls everywhere instead of physical knobs, because the latter are "ugly".
When it comes to cars, I want function over form, especially when it comes to UX.
For fast-charging, the Cybertruck battery is an incremental improvement, not the leap everyone wanted. For longevity and cost? The rest of the market can't come close. Tesla's secret sauce is being willing to do things nobody else will do, change the paradigm, all that stuff MBAs want to do but don't know how to do.
However, more people are making EVs, so Tesla is using its biggest advantage (supercharger network) to essentially force every other EV buyer to witness what competence looks like. Great move.
Cybertruck uses the 2.4 4680 without dry coating. We've already seen the CT has amazing thermals, great charging curve, and we haven't even seen the 800v charging yet. We also have a floor on the cost with the range extender, which is the cheapest 50kwh battery I've seen first-party.
Tesla is becoming a commodity and you don't see an advantage?
Manufacturing of both cars and batteries. That's vertical integration. While I think their current overselling of Autopilot is going to be a folly for them, their assistive driving suite alone would be a multi billion dollar business. They have taken on a ton of risk, and they certainly have their problems, but their successes are substantial and are nothing to wave away.
> Manufacturing of both cars and batteries. That's vertical integration.
Tesla is building their own battery packs, but they're still buying the cells from Panasonic, just like everyone else (Apple included) has the option to do.
And their first gigafactory in Nevada as far as I know has been producing cells for years. I suspect they stopped buying cells from Panasonic years ago.
Actually, the Gigafactories are operated by Panasonic on behalf of Tesla. Technically the cell production in the Gigafactory is done by Panasonic and the packs then assembled by Tesla.
I don't see that special sauce as ensuring market dominance. The established players can (and do) source their batteries from third parties, and that seems to work well enough.
If that vertical integration translated to a marked, obvious benefit to customers, then I'd agree. But I don't think it does. Certainly your average EV buyer is not going to say "I bought my Tesla because Tesla makes their own batteries". Why would a customer care about that? I certainly wouldn't.
Tesla's special sauce is that they can make a profitable, desirable EV at scale. The established players can't ramp their EV programs -- they'd go bankrupt! I wouldn't call that "working well enough."
The dinosaurs failed to innovate for decades, while Tesla sat down and did hard engineering.
Look at BMWs and Mercedes margins. They're quite comparable with Tesla margins.
Let's see Tesla margins once they grow to try to match that insane market valuation that only makes sense if they sell 10+ million cars per year, most of which will have to be cars costing 20k€ per year, not 40k+€ per year.
It's easy to be profitable at the high end, but that also comes with a negligible total addressable market. BMW and Mercedes still have all their R&D work ahead of them to advance their high-cost EV technology to catch up with Tesla.
BMW/Mercedes also didn't do the engineering legwork (like the other dinos), they just use a slightly different strategy to conceal the deficiency. They chose "make expensive and unpopular EVs" instead of "quietly lose money on EVs." Same shit different shovel!
At this point, I doubt they'll even try to catch up on technology. They'll retreat behind "we don't make cheap cars so why lift the cost curve with R&D," meaning they'll never contribute more than a rounding error in the EV transition.
It's doubling down on buggy-whips in 1905. It won't be pretty.
Both BMW and Mercedes have EV platforms, have you done your homework?
I find especially US folks (sorry) very un-informed about non-US car companies regarding EV technology.
Also, Mercedes sold ~250k EVs last year and BMW sold about ~380k. Yes, Tesla sold 1.8 million or something, but you're acting like Tesla is some hyperscaler. And this is in a context where both BMW and Mercedes sell more cars overall, than Tesla, so they have to take care of the going concern, too.
> Both BMW and Mercedes have EV platforms, have you done your homework?
Of course I know they "have" platforms, but look at the price of the actual cars. They're at least a generation behind Tesla on platform cost.
Legacy automakers' dirty little secret is that their cheap EVs aren't profitable, and their profitable EVs aren't cheap. They failed to invest in lowering EV build costs.
I find non-Tesla/non-China automakers (including Europe) very in denial about how far behind they are.
> Both BMW and Mercedes have EV platforms, have you done your homework?
Doing some quick googling I could not find any source for margins of BMW / Mercedes on their EVs. I remember EVs fron GM / WV being mostly unprofitable, but maybe those are old news.
Can you please share some links for those who want to be more informed?
It translates to price, speed of innovation, and overall quality. Tesla beats everyone at $-per-mile of range, there are no refresh cycles, and the cars, ignoring fit and finish, are phenomenal. Adds up to a serious advantage.
Apple will never build cars. Each dollar of car revenue will hurt their margins. It doesn't matter how lux the car is or the target market, it isn't going to happen.
Tesla isn't going to be able to hold their margins, either.
It's going to be more like Nvidia - Nvidia captures all of the margin in the servers - with some going to Intel or AMD - and SuperMicro, Lenovo, HPE, etc. eke out their existence on the low value chassis.
Also of note: while Tesla sells half of EVs, that’s still a small share. It’s not hard to imagine EVs as a whole still being at single digit market share in 2028.
It’s one thing to compete with iOS and Android, where the combined market share is nearly 100%. It’s another to compete with players who don’t add up to 10%, the market is still wide open.
Tesla’s special sauce, currently, is their charging network. I’ve driven both Tesla’s and non-Tesla EV’s. The public charging experience for Tesla is considerably better. I guess when everyone adopts NACS in the next year that may change though.
> It's a fair question, which was also raised when the iPod was introduced.
I don't know. Benefit of hindsight, but you can see the line between computers and iPod. The line from selling iphones and rent seeking on casinos for children to CAR seems less clear to me.
It’s much simpler to me than all that. To maintain the growth percentages that Apple has seen, there are only a few markets that Apple can enter to make enough money to keep growing at the same rate. Otherwise growth stops and then the stock price tanks. So Apple needs to get into American healthcare, cars, or housing.
The fact they chose cars is not that it’s a natural fit. It’s that it’s the only fit.
Our "dumb" Audi A6 ICE vehicle has just as good or better self driving and parking as most EVs on the market, so not sure why we are coupling these together.
The point is that Apple is all about coming across as innovative and trailblazey while also being premium. Smart features and build quality is the premium half of the equation, being an EV is still innovative/trailblazey. Your car isn't gonna feel innovative in 2028 if it is an ICE vehicle.
> Your car isn't gonna feel innovative in 2028 if it is an ICE vehicle
Couldn't disagree more. Again, our Audi A6 is much more advanced feature-wise than any Tesla on the market. That can continue to be true as the software, torque vectoring, AWD, air suspension, MPGs, assisted driving, etc all improves.
You're talking about incremental improvements, when I say innovative I mean Apple wants more Blackberry -> iPhone moments, not "our car has better suspension".
You might really like your Audi and think its advanced features are much better than what you'll find in a Tesla, but the market couldn't disagree more with you about which company is more "innovative".
Oh, so like going from physical buttons on a console to a massive iPad? Some may call that innovation, and that many now consider a regression in terms of usability. Thankfully the market doesn’t purchase cars purely for the sake of “innovation” or whatever your biased interpretation of that is.
And yeah, the fact that my car feels like I am driving on a cloud in a quiet cabin versus a rickety Tesla is innovative and equally important to a lot of people.
You realize we're actually talking about an Apple Car, right? Not Teslas. You're making points about why you think Teslas are shit, but I merely used them for illustrative purposes. Again, regardless of how much you like your car, it is not seen as "innovative", in large part because it is an ICE vehicle. Quality control, individual components, and decisions about the best way to interface with a car are secondary to that. In fact, you're only helping make the point. The fact that Teslas have a number of clear issues (including a founder many people like to hate) and yet still win the hearts and minds of people as an innovator in the car space speaks volumes.
Building an electric vehicle does not mean you need to be like Tesla in other ways. Apple doesn't want to be a Tesla clone, they want to do their own thing. I'm sure the bigwigs at Apple would balk at panel gaps or whatever more than you do. But Apple releasing an ICE vehicle in 2028 would not be in line with their brand and market positioning at all.
As an aside, if you'd like to see a vehicle that is both electric and superior to your Audi in terms of comfort, check out the new Rolls Royce Spectre. RR also feels that the best way for them to innovate is by electrifying their vehicles, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a car maker further from Tesla (in terms of ethos) than RR.
You’re right that it’s unfair to exceptions, of which there aren’t many in terms of cars on the road. My point was just that the combination of spatial computing + EVs is where an Apple entry starts to make sense.
The "special sauce" for Tesla is in the manufacturing, or as Elon Musk likes to say, "the machine that built the machine." Musk has built a corporate culture that drives innovation and change at breakneck speeds. Seek out a few Joe Justice videos to dive deeper into this.
Tesla has upended the way cars are being built with mega casting and structural battery packs. Their next-gen car will be another step change with the "unboxed" method.
The odds of anyone catching Tesla is about nil. Apple's chance may be less than that. Are they going to pay BYD to make cars for them and lose that margin?
Modern cars are largely undifferentiated mechanically, whether ICE or EV. Every auto manufacture assembles a car from primarily third-party parts plus a dwindling number of semi-custom assemblies. These are skinned with a look and feel appropriate for the brand. It has never been easier to build an automobile manufacturing company from scratch. You don't have to build much yourself. It is primarily a problem of managing the complex global supply chains. And of course the branding and marketing to penetrate an already saturated market.
With the physical parts of the car commoditized to oblivion, the primary opportunity for product differentiation is in the sensors, software, and UX. All the automotive OEMs know this. For better or worse, the traditional automotive companies are terrible at this part of the business and they do it reluctantly. It isn't in their DNA, and their traditional production processes are unsuited to it.
When the two big execution problems of building a modern automotive company are "software, sensor, and UX design" and "efficiently managing complex global supply chains", it is easy to see why Apple might be uniquely positioned to be successful at it.
How do you come to the conclusion that traditional OEMs are terrible at the sensors, software, and UX?
For example, Daimler/Mercedes is developing for years toward self driving cars. They had working prototypes in the 1970s with "electronics" based on analog designs that was working as good as a modern Tesla FSD, with the exception that it required lots of space. Mercedes/Daimler is the reason why we have cheap ultrasonic sensors in modern cars. They developed that in the 1990s together with then Temic. They had a working self-driving prototype during that time. All that lead to cheap sensors we use today daily for adaptive cruise control in every modern car by any OEM.
Mitsubishi had for sometime the best in class safety system with sensors able to detect pedestrians, like kids, and bicyclists.
MobilEye is now developing self-driving capabilities for years, and IRC first used by BMW for safety features in their models. Only later Tesla used the system in ways which were never consumer ready. That'S why they finally split.
The things is OEMs are conservative introducing features to consumer. Because nobody wants to risk its brand to devalue. Its not only that, if there are too many accidents that would mean that the insurance will have an extra premium, which would lead that consumers don't buy such cars.
So I was driven in car in the early 2000s with features that are rolled out just recently, like the level 3 by Mercedes on highways.
The things is, most just don't see how much things are going on under the hood. They just see the MMI/entertainment system. Yes, that was for long not as high value proposition.
Agree. "software is eating the world" someone once said a decade ago, and yet most car companies still didn't get the memo. MBux, anyone?!?
Personally, if Apple creates a standard car simply with a great software experience (I'd expect at least a few small novelties), and not too expensive, then I am totally in.
I agree with the sibling; I think Apple's attention to UX is going to inform them that physical controls are good on a car, even if physical controls on the front of a phone (a la earlier iPhone models) are unnecessary.
I do assume it'll be a locked-down, walled-garden experience, only serviceable at Apple Stores (which will open garages at some locations), assuming they can get away with that legally. They'll reject any non-Apple-genuine part, of course.
But to your point about voice control, I do expect Apple will try to make that really good. Touchscreens suck for keeping your attention on the road when you want to change the heat temperature or change songs or stations. Physical controls are better. But good, painless, non-frustrating voice control is by far the best option for avoiding distractions and keeping your eyes on the road.
Given Apple's emphasis on UX and UI: 100% across the board. Ask any Tesla Model 3 Owner what they like the least about their cars, and you'll hear a lot of them complain about the touchscreen-only (sorta) interface. There's some levers and thumb wheels, sure, but I abhor my touchscreen-only interface. Love the car. Hate the UI.
Apple knows how to build interfaces. Including interfaces outside of software. I suspect it'll be the primary thing they focus on in the product launch video, how they didn't screw up the UI and there will be knurled titanium wiper speed ring switchy things and tactile feedback in the damn mushroom leather wrapped heated steering wheel and Jony Ive whispering directions, seemingly inside of your head.
This misses the point of the Tesla UI, which is to not be needed. Everything Tesla does is calibrated to minimize interaction with the perfectly functional UI.
I don't want Apple forcing their excellent design sense down my throat, I'd much rather have decent design I don't have to use.
As a big Apple user, I think all three are very possible.
Just one tiny example: see the manual dial or “crown” on Watch, AirPods Max, and now Vision Pro. You could easily imagine those products without an unnecessary manual “dial” when there is both voice (Siri) and software controls. But, you still have a “dedicated knob”.
Not sure which iteration of it you have, but I've actually found the software on my 2022 E-Class to be surprisingly decent. I generally prefer plugging in my phone and using Android Auto, but if I don't need Google Maps to get where I'm going, I usually don't bother with it and the car's own system is fine.
Obviously they want 30% of every place the car takes you because you're "their customer" and "their car delivered you". Don't pay the 30%? No problem, the car won't drive customers there.
> I still don't understand what's the game that Apple is trying to play here. Manufacturing a car is completely a different business to small digital devices
I agree 100%, and I don't think it makes any sense for Apple to manufacture cars in any way similar to the way legacy automakers do it now. That is old-school. Slow, expensive, capital and resource intensive.
I don't think Apple have any interest in having enormous factories churning out massive vehicles that have tens of thousands of parts, long-tail warranty and repairs, etc. etc.
If Tesla have taught the industry, it's that the way legacy automakers build vehicles is archaic, and there are much faster/cheaper/better ways.
As much as Apple want their vehicle to be self-driving, the fact they're willing to down-rate it to a Level 2+ makes me think that isn't actually the focus.
What if Apple start building vehicles on an scale and in a manner than has never been conceived before?
Tesla currently have the best in the industry having a Model Y come off the line every 40 seconds [1], and they've said they want to halve that with their new "smaller vehicle" coming soon (TM).
Hypothetically, what if Apple's play here is not to "re-invent the car", but more-so "reinvent the way cars are manufactured". ?
Apple has enough cash on hand to purchase a major car company outright. I don't think "existing players don't let us in their sandbox" is likely to be a major hurdle.
That said, even Tesla spent ~4 years manufacturing and selling a very-low-volume hype car before they attempted to move towards the mass market (and that mass-market product has taken a decade thus far to approach Apple's reputed standard for quality).
Generally what happens in things like these is that the existing company would continue function as it is, just there will be a new shiny department which has maximum funding and ability to make decisions.
But I can't help thinking back to 2007 when so many were saying how hopeless breaking in to the very competitive and competent cell phone industry would be.
> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
I've always thought this statement rephrased makes more sense:
"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent computer," he said. "Mobile phone guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in."
It's the new Apple Pippin. If Apple wants to win at personal transportation game it needs to skip a generation ahead and offer something vastly different than the old car platform loaded with the latest tech packaged in the sleek Apple look.
The current ICE-age (pun intended) Auto OEM dinosaurs are struggling to transition themselves from metal benders, to software innovators.
Gone are the days where the complexity was in building complex Internal combustion engines (ICE), with associated complex mechanical drive-train.
EV technology has reduced the bill of materials to mostly batteries, motors and tons of software. The batteries and the motors (essentially the "skateboard" in EV parlance) can be sourced externally. The key differentiator is the software defined innovation. Everything from the connected mobility application, to AV/ADAS, the in-cabin UX, etc. And Apple already has most of the pre-cursors (chatbot, maps, CarPlay, OTA, iCloud for CDP, telemetry systems, etc).
Only thing not quite in place is the AV and ADAS systems. Which is where Apple is focusing their R&D.
To be fair, there's still a lot of metal-bending (or carbon fiber forming, which the old dinosaurs learned quickly enough) going on when you make an EV. After all, you're still trying to move two tons of sprung mass over a bumpy surface as smoothly as possible, without any of the thousands of individual parts rattling or letting in water.
The Germans pretty much dropped the ball on software and UX from the very beginning. But they're still decent enough at bending metal around batteries and electric motors, and that seems to be enough for huge profits.
Apple already have a global scale mesh network that's used for e.g. AirTags. iPhones are just absolutely everywhere, they have the true internet of things.
I imagine that could be very interesting for self driving technology.
This is already standard in upscale new cars. My 3 year old Subaru SUV has this built in to the Subaru Mobile app. GM OnStar has been doing this for a decade plus.
Apple is big in sub-contracting manufacturing for all there products. And there are thise shops for cars as well, e.g. Magna. And those are really good at that. Same goes forbdesign and development, if you want.
Still surprised Apple is really doing it so, the automotive market is cut throat, mostly low margin. But we will see.
I mean, given Tesla's market cap I think similar expected long-term profitability is Apple's game here. And yes, bootstrapping everything from scratch is exactly what Apple has to do.
The competitive advantage Apple would have is simply in the car's design -- reimagining cars from scratch based on not just batteries but especially interface technology. And nobody has a proven track record of profitable consumer design at the level of Apple's.
Just brainstorming, everything from heads-up displays for driving directions and safety alerts, to eye tracking to determine whether the driver has seen an upcoming sudden obstacle detected by LIDAR, to who knows what manufacturing and materials innovations they can come up with. A lot of individual elements that other manufacturers can provide as well, but Apple manages to make them seamless and natural and "just work" for the average person.
I would assume that they have known Elon Musk is a fraud longer than the general public, and want to position themselves in the market before Tesla inevitably collapses.
if apple starts doing the massive capex investments to try and build an auto manufacturing plant, investors should sue to stop the from taking such an enormous risk.
I think the game is simply that they don't want to admit it's a stupid idea and so they're keeping it on life support.
Perhaps those investors should sell their shares instead.
And Apple doesn't have to admit anything. They have never promised a car, they don't even have to acknowledge such a project ever existed if they cancel it.
> And Apple doesn't have to admit anything. They have never promised a car, they don't even have to acknowledge such a project ever existed if they cancel it.
Apple doesn't care at all. Why should they? It's normal to have internal research projects that don't go anywhere. We also don't know almost anything about the project other that it probably exists.
Back in 2018, when Tesla was still worth $55B and Apple had more than $100B in the bank, they could've acquired Tesla in an all cash deal, but for some reason didn't. I think they would've made a great match.
Because Tesla was, is, and will continue to be overvalued as a car company. Why pay the “tech premium” for a manufacturing firm when you already have all of those core competencies in house?
Pffft. They have done over 10 billion net in the past couple years. High ROE. They have a big, durable competitive advantage with their buying process v other companies (just go through the buying process across a number of car types). They have a big competitive advantage in staff capabilities, also in the ability to actually produce software.
Elon is no dummy. He targeted fat tired old industries to attack. It was brilliant. He now faces possibly the weakest competition in large business.
Suggesting it's worth less than $55 billion is silly.
But they don’t have all the core competencies in house. I don’t think manufacturing a small, mostly solid state rectangles with maybe one major stress bearing hinge is the same as manufacturing a highly dynamic multi-ton steel machine that is meant to transport people 200,000 miles over a decade or two any more than an aluminum smelting firm could suddenly dominate glass manufacturing if they decided to.
I don’t think it’s really Apple’s MO to outsource product design to any significant extent, though they do use a lot of contract manufacturing, my understanding is that they dictate how a lot of that’s done. Their brand is all about quality and seamless integration between everything, you don’t get that without being involved in every aspect.
They won't outsource design, but they can outsource the engineering needed to make that design safe. Its not like the "boutique car from a consumer electronics" market is saturated, they can take more risks in regards to info leaking.
I agree with you, but Tesla did get things in gear fast enough to ship cars, early. If Apple's car ships in 2028 (and that's optimistic), then they'll be 20 years late to Tesla's party. The early mover advantage is worth something, not what investors value it at but still a hefty sum.
Apple could spin up a joint venture with, say, Rivian or even Ford for 1/10th of that tomorrow.
I’ll be honest, I think the whole Apple car thing is a pipe dream. Apple doesn’t have some sort of magic that is two decades beyond anybody else driving in circles underneath their weird spaceship campus. If they have their own full self driving, it doesn’t matter who assembles the car. They can sell the tech to everybody.
But isn't the Apple way to combine hardware and software better than anyone else?
I've only ever bought an Apple tableet for my wife, so I've got no bias here. But I'd be keen to see what they can produce. If only to differentiate the market up a bit ... it's as boring as hell at the moment and why I haven't pulled the trigger on one.
Tesla is now moving into making their cars cheaper, with exceptional results. That's leveraging your first mover advantage: compete where others can't, because your manufacturing process is mature.
You don’t have to look any further than the Cybertruck to see evidence that Tesla builds cars it wants to build, not what the market wants. This worked to their advantage when no one else was building an EV but now it’s their biggest liability. They could have captured a highly valuable truck or even light pickup market if they just produced something practical. Instead, they launched something like what you see as a concept at the Detroit Autoshow. It’s an art project, and a vain one at that.
They created a sex symbol which manages to include surprising practicality and insane technology. I've been excited about many concept cars, and now I get to buy one, and I know I'm not alone. It's a halo product, but a good one.
I don't think it's an execution problem: it's a product design problem.
When/if they figure out what they want to build, I expect they're leverage their existing expertise in partnering with third parties to churn out product.
I'm not sure what Apple would bring to cars. Waymo is almost uncatchably far ahead in self-driving. Tesla has already brought minimalism to cars, and will probably have an affordable car with mass appeal by 2028 if BYD doesn't get there first. Apple might be better off making a luxury fifth wheel.
The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?
(Meanwhile, Apple will keep boasting about their green credentials...)
What about consumables?... You'll still be able to change the tyres, brake bads, and wiper blades. But Apple will take 30% from every sale/service of these items, and the vehicle won't start if you install non-genuine-Apple replacements. (And then there's the chargers... don't expect to be able to put electricity into that battery without Apple getting their god-given 30% cut)
Starting at $99,999 for the base model (50 miles range). A maxxed-out model will do 750 miles, but they're really going to make you pay for those battery up-sells, and the well-glued-in battery pack is non-upgradeable after purchase.
Aren't they cheaper than the Ford F150 'Lightning' (electric version, so comparable)? Or is that also 'hyper-luxury'? (Genuine question, I suppose I'm not really familiar enough to know what the top end would be, maybe that's it, I know Lamborgini makes a tractor, but I'm not aware of a 'supertruck'.)
A Rivian R1T with dual motor and the large battery pack (352 mile range) is $79,000. An F-150 Lightning with the extended range battery (>300 mile range) is between $69k and $77k.
Both have cheaper trims available, but the cheapest Lightning is significantly less expensive than the cheapest R1T.
Both are really nice trucks too, especially at the higher trim. I don't see a big difference in luxury between an F-150 Platinum and the R1T.
Ah ok, I had them the wrong way around then (I didn't mean much cheaper), but pretty comparable - if you were in the market you might probably be looking at both.
But it's all subjective I suppose, maybe they meant that either would be 'hyper-luxury', I'm not that familiar, I just thought F150s were quite commonplace. (Not here in the UK, no such trucks are, but from what I've seen in North America.)
Yeah, I definitely think people cross shop them. I've seen former R1T owners that would consider a Lightning.
The F-150 in general is a little complicated on this scale. They are absolutely commonplace (the #1 selling vehicle in the US!) and the base model for the gas version is "only" ~$34k. But the price range is immense, and it isn't particularly uncommon to see >$60k King Ranch versions either. Higher price trims are available too, but tbh, I don't see them as often. Maybe occasionally a Raptor (~76k).
As it says, while there are horror stories, there are also non-horror stories.
I've seen a similar fender-bender (i own a rivian, so do some neighbors) get quoted at 3-4k.
Honestly, 40k seems more like "we don't want to do this job" than "it really costs this much".
Given the PDR took 3 days to do it, I can understand the perspective of a body shop that doesn't want to do the job - they can probably get done 150k worth of jobs in the same time period.
So if you're going to have minor bumps result in a repair bill more expensive than many cars, it's not that much of a stretch to say that'd make it virtually unrepairable.
Interesting! But may have actually not have been sealed.
The Wikipedia page says:
“ The bonnet was widely rumoured to be sealed – Car and Driver wrote: "...feature of the A2 that may foretell the future: the sealed hood". Actually, the bonnet is easily removed, being held in place by two twist-lock catches. The bonnet, weighing 8 kg, then comes away from the car altogether, unlike the usual hinged flip-up arrangement on most other cars. Due to the service hatch, the bonnet does not need to be removed frequently for access to the engine.”
The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?
No big deal. Just buy the AppleCar AppleCare plan.
In my limited experience the TCO for Apple computer products seems lower than equivalent PC products. A MacBook I can reasonably expect to stay in the same condition until like 7-10 years later. With a regular windows laptop the screen would be flickering, the keyboard would be worn down, and it would overheat intermittently.
I can open my 2012 MacBook Air right now and expect it to work just fine.
Apple's phones have about 7 years of first-party support / guaranteed useful life, compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2. Yeah I'd never buy a car that will only be good for 7 years, but let's see what they ship.
I'm pretty sure there is no such "guarantee". You can definitely Apple has a track record of supporting 7 years and I have absolutely no problem with that. Samsung and Google actually say they are committed to 7 years of support for the latest phones in their official document.
Also the rest of the industry is not 2. 3 years is very common these days for phones, 5 getting more common. And for computers... Many business computers are supported for a long time, and Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility and support (Windows 10 is supported till 2025, 10 years from its release).
Yes, I speculate and draw my conclusions based on my most recent experience (2017-2019) with Android. I'm glad it's improving, but I'm not in a hurry to "experience" Android again.
The batteries don't have 7 years of useful life, though. And replacing them is made intentionally difficult to encourage people to just upgrade instead.
A lot of people don't live near an Apple store, and few people are prepared to be without their phone while mailing it off for a battery swap.
They have a program for independent repair companies. It doesn't pass Louis Rossmann's bar since it doesn't let him do board-level repair, but none of the "fix your screen/replace your battery" shops I've ever seen do that anyway, so it would be fine for them.
Well, I'm yet to buy a car in my life (viva la public transport), so there's a realistic chance I don't know what I'm talking about, but I can imagine the 4-5 years cycle largely depends on the resale value.
Apple products can have a hit&miss resale value; I think the 2015-2019 line of MacBooks were bad value at any time and any price point, and will be avoided well into the future. Hence my speculation: let's see what they ship this time.
Well I guess that's one reason why I seem to be incompatible with car ownership. When COVID hit, I continued to pay for my public transport ticket even while I couldn't even use it, because I wanted to throw in my share towards keeping the system alive and as good as it is.
> compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2.
You're just making up facts to protect your beloved brand/cult. C'mon. All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
You're talking about different things. Apple officially supports / provides software updates for its iPhones for 7 years. Other phone manufacturers' durations of support vary, but they're usually much less. Until fairly recently, Google provided 3 years of software updates for Pixels, for example. [1]
Samsung accounts for the vast majority of Android phones in actual use. Their current policy is also 7 years, as is Google's. You're right that historically this was different, but things change.
Here's objective facts and my experiences that I used to draw my conclusions.
My final Android phones were: [1] a Samsung A7 (2017), which included a non-replaceable battery, shipped with Android 6 (2015), officially supported Android 8 (2017; theoretical first-party security patches which it never received were offered until 2021), no longer receives updates even from LineageOS, and never ran postmarketOS; and [2] a Nokia 3 (2017), which had pretty much the same story (support ended on Android 9).
In 2019, someone gave me an old, smashed [3] iPhone 7 (2016), and the phone literally worked better than any Android phone I've owned before, including either of the two above. Since it was already physically falling apart, I took the liberty of getting [4] an iPhone SE (2020), which is still with me; the 7 continued to serve in the family for a couple more years.
> All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
I have a 2002 TiBook, which, believe me or not, continues to outlive my T61 and X200. My MBP (2017) had a spicy pillow though (which Apple repaired for free, outside of warranty).
> [...] to protect your beloved brand/cult.
I'm not a cultist, I'm a pragmatist. I used to believe in things - I had a [5] Jolla (2013) for the longest time, because I believed in Free Software and Open Source and all that stuff, until I realized suffering for your values is not necessarily the healthiest thing to do, and that freedom is not strictly a function of a software license, but of things the hardware+software enables you to do with it.
You refer to your smart phone as a non-mac computer? Because nobody is talking about Mac's besides you. Or PC's. Or "computers" outside of smart phones in general.
I certainly wouldn't call that minimalistic. Do you mean the exterior surface? The controls, UI, etc. are complex and difficult. People can even open the door the first time they ride in one. The big screen and all its software are not minimalistic.
> People can even open the door the first time they ride in one
Found an iPhone in the snow on Sunday. Had to google how to unlock it / get contact information. "swipe up" it said on the screen. Nothing happened. It was a lie. You need to "swipe from the bottom of the screen". Not intuitive at all.
Tesla's hardware certainly is minimalistic though, and hence the Apple analogy. The software inside an iPhone is ferociously complicated, but the slab of glass, no buttons form factor is much simpler than the Nokias etc it replaced.
The difference is that Tesla's hardware is simpler in a way that's harder to use. Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones. Moving to touch screens in cars is more about cost savings than making them easy to use.
If a touchscreen was the ideal way to interact with a car, why aren't acceleration and braking done through the touch screen? Why isn't steering on the touch screen?
> Moving from indirect control to touch screens was great and intuitive for phones
This isn't even necessarily true for phones. Back when I got the early iPhone and iPad for my parents, one thing that they loved about it is the physical Home button - because, no matter where you were in the UI, even if you ended up "lost" (e.g. by accidentally fullscreening some app), you could always escape to a familiar place by pressing that obvious button.
Fast forward a few years, and it all gets replaced by completely unintuitive swipes. They were not happy, to put it mildly.
You accelerate, brake, indicate etc all the time, so you need tactile controls for those functions, and Teslas do. But how do you find a Spotify playlist, adjust how you're notified if you exceed the speed limit and the margin you want, or check tire pressure readings with tactile controls?
You can argue that this gets too unwieldy once the UI gets more complicated. But if the UI is too complicated to be navigable with arrow keys, I would say that it's too complicated for a dashboard of a fast moving vehicle.
FWIW touch itself is not really a problem. Sometimes it is indeed more convenient. But when you can only e.g. adjust volume using touch, that becomes much more difficult to do while driving. Same thing goes for navigation and other such things. A good dashboard UX will let you do this using both touch and dedicated physical buttons.
It's minimalistic, as far as is possible in a vehicle. The best part is no part, the even better part is one you never have to think about. I don't have to turn my car on or off, don't have to change the oil, don't have to think about headlights or wipers, don't have to fiddle with climate control. The car is designed around being driven and nothing else.
There's been a long term trend in Apple hardware of simplification (removal of buttons, ports, flourishes, etc.). The iPhone was a big jump in that direction from the Blackberry, but I can't imagine an Apple Car being that different from a Tesla/Rivian/BYD one.
If minimalism means intuitive, I no longer find the android/ios ui minimalistic either. They've gone to a system of gestures that aren't particularly intuitive.
Ahhh, the true reasoning for the wheels experiment. Apple has always had a thing about round. Maybe Apple Wheels (TM) will have finally perfected round that all other manufactures have been unable to solve.
> Never had an issue with after-sales support. My 2nd Tesla in 5 years.
Sorry but you probably are not the target market for the Apple Car.
Many premium-market customers (early Model S/X, current Plaid shoppers) have moved to other brands such as Rivian, Lucid, and Porsche due to Tesla’s “cheapness” and abysmal customer service.
But sure, if you’re coming from a Toyota RAV4 or BMW 3 series, Tesla is great. But don’t expect to be the target demographic for a $100K+ Apple car.
The Internet is full of disaster stories about everything. In the actual Consumer Reports ranking Tesla is far from the bottom. It's almost exactly in the middle, between Infiniti and Cadillac.
For a car that is, as Tesla fans like to point out, "far simpler than an ICE, with a lot less that can possibly go wrong", being in the "middle of the pack" with ICEs is actually pretty damning.
Nitpicking everything Musk-related is one of the biggest drivers of content on multiple social media platforms. Using the general trends of those sites that you've gleened from headlines to make generalizations is probably a bad idea.
There is huge, huge demand for a negative spin on everything and like we've seen a ton of times on the internet, if you say something exaggerated enough times it starts becoming the accepted truth.
And the world is full of Teslas. You really think if even 20% of the hyperbole was true that they'd be shipping the volume they are? All those Tesla buyers are just deluded marks who'd be happier in a VW or whatever?
Maybe... the situation is complicated and like all manufacturers they have some good points and some bad points and the market is in the process of deciding on what particular traits it values?
My one experience with after-sales support has been fantastic.
1. Set an appointment on the Tesla app
2. The day before the appointment my rep from the service center calls me to see if I have any questions about the process.
3. Take the car in, they immediately give me a loaner Tesla of the exact same make and model. When I get in the loaner car, it already has all my preferences imported (Signed in to Apple Music/Podcasts, seat settings, Joe Mode, Phone is the key, etc..)
4. A few days later, I get a notification from the app telling me my car is ready to pick up.
5. I drive the loaner to the service center. The app tells me to park it anywhere.
6. The app shows me where my car is parked.
7. I get in my car and drive away, without having to talk to anyone.
8. Bonus: My car has been detailed
9. Cost: $0.00
This is obviously anecdotal and I'm sure people have had bad experiences. But I was really impressed!
You're right, the screen could just be too expensive to replace rather than break easily. The only data I need for my assessment is the price and lack of freedom. I once did an experiment with my friend who's a die-hard fan. We both turned on bluetooth on all our devices, his iphone and macbook and my android and Windows. I saw both of his, he saw none of mine. Disgusting, why would anyone pay for that?
It’s easy to say that now but at the time there were obvious huge obstacles to Apple doing a great cell phone.
And not just technical; the business relationships between cellular network owners, handset manufacturers, and software companies was totally different. Apple essentially had to restructure the industry to make the iPhone what it is today.
I suspect a car would need to have a similar impact in order for Apple to succeed. They would need to launch a new kind of product that just happens to have the shape of a car.
> Someone in 2006 asked what Apple would bring to the cellphone market, too.
And that would be a fair question. The iPhone never did anything others weren't already doing, nor has Apple ever done that in recent history. They sell products not because they're better, but because they've convinced people Apple is cool.
> They sell products not because they're better, but because they've convinced people Apple is cool.
That's not why I buy Apple products. I buy them because their build quality is impeccable, their software for the most part "just works" (ok they've gotten worse in this regard lately), and all their stuff works together. Having date move magically between my devices without doing anything is really compelling.
You seem to have confused not paying attention with nothing happening. The carrier relationship was completely different for iPhone users, starting with how you didn't need carrier approval to put something in the App Store.
I think you underestimate how bad the competition has usually been. Apple is bad but the competition is usually terrible. Tech stuff has always had a pretty low bar, especially for actually working without a huge amount of sysadmin.
Tesla has been setting fire to their brand, mostly by their CEO acting out. Apple has the affordable-luxury design chops to leap to the head of the class, as they did with the watch. Phone and Siri integration, plus I'm sure their product teams would come up with a bunch of great stuff. Maybe it's Apple Car built by BYD.
Elon's antics are wrecking Twitter, but Tesla is chugging along nicely all the same. Most of the world doesn't follow or care about Silicon Valley CEO drama in the same way that we here on HN do.
Right now people are following along because Tesla is the market leader and they see the cars on the street, but they rely heavily on media and word of mouth for marketing. I think they're very vulnerable to an Apple marketing blitz, but it sounds like it's not happening, so it's all hypothetical.
A few years ago I saw frequent signs from my social set that Tesla was considered a great innovator and a really cool company. The news has not been good the last year, and I haven't heard any sentiments like that in a while.
FWIW I cancelled Tesla order because of Musk. Wouldn't be caught dead driving one after the unhinge that keeps unfolding (and that is also very easy to pick up in the mainstream news).
Anecdata: I know multiple people who are intending to buy an EV for their next car, and all of them have removed Tesla from their list of possible purchases because of the CEO's behavior over the last couple of years.
And sure, maybe I live in a "woke bubble", but that's a bunch of revenue that would almost certainly have ended up with Tesla that's now going elsewhere.
And I know multiple rural people (who disagree with you on everything) who either have bought or are planning to buy Tesla vehicles because they're now affordable and really really good.
Also, people who already own Teslas aren't going anywhere. Immense brand loyalty for good reason.
I don't dispute that Teslas are a good car. I can definitely see why people would like to buy one, and indeed the people I know who intended to buy one did so because it was a good car. There are some issues, sure, but on balance I'm sure there are many happy customers.
I don't see them becoming more affordable though: it looks to me like both Model 3 and Model Y prices are high, and in fact they're only staying still because Tesla is removing features from the low-end configurations.
If it was about ethics then the signal wouldn’t come from prominence in the media (do you scrutinize ceos of your everyday products, tesla is an org far beyond Elon, etc).
You tell me what the EV landscape would look like today had Tesla not succeeded, and whether that delta is really of equal worth to someone's purportedly painful experiences using a microblogger.
That's a terrible argument. Putting aside that no one can possibly know that, you seem to be under the impression that Tesla Motors invented something revolutionary. All they did was put lithium batteries in an electric car and slapped an iPad in it. Pretty cool, but there's nothing they've done that any other car company couldn't have done from day one. Everything else they've done has been a gimmick, but their promise is that these vehicles can drive themselves and make everyone money by working as taxis, and if that never happens (which looks inevitable now), then all they are is a car company, and plenty of other car companies make EVs now.
Apple's MO is to make a premium version of a product and sell a huge quantity of them, and ideally it's a new product category.
Right now there IS a category of vehicle that we don't have in the USA, the cheap small electric cars that have taken over in China.
I could see semi-plausible arguments for mass adoption of those in the USA, as secondary cars for short errands and beginner drivers, and if they were cheap.
But Apple's move is to sell the nicest, most expensive version of a product. It's sort of what their position in the market demands. I don't see any way to put those requirements together in a vehicle, especially considering how we can't import cars from China.
> especially considering how we can't import cars from China.
Are you referring to the US tax credit rules around battery origins or vehicle import tariffs? Because there certainly isn’t an actual ban on Chinese-made cars in the US. You can go down to your local Buick or Volvo dealer and buy a Chinese-made car today.
Apple will come up with a car to signal wealth. Like a $20K camry disguised in $200K white colored unrepairable car which will demand money if you want to drive it outside your city.
I thought and wondered this before I drove a Tesla, and then it all made sense. Teslas feel like what we would would have gotten with an "Apple car" had Tesla never launched -- next-gen hardware, software at its core, great UX, etc.
What apple brings is, I think, the same thing they brought to cell phones when we all thought a Palm Treo was the pinnacle of mobile tech. The same basic ideas as Tesla, but better design, better hardware, better software, etc.
I have no idea if they can actually pull it off, but if they can, they have a good shot at relegating Teslas to Palm Treo status.
My primary purchasing criteria for my next car is how easy it is to recover my iPhone when I drop it between the seat and the center console. Surely Apple will solve this problem in an elegant way.
Having taken 2 dozen Waymo rides, it’s all it’s cracked up to be. Confident driving, feels safe, clean. I just hope Google doesn’t decide to just turn around and kill it one day.
Of course they will. It's been billions spent on development to just offer you a slightly cheaper taxi ride, with no clear path to any kind of viable commercial service beyond "ok-ish" taxi provider in few American cities. Someone will get bored of it eventually and it will get shut down.
The path is building an entire centrally-directed transit network out of custom vehicles. Waymo currently doesn't look anything like that because they're still doing R&D on the critical technology, but if we have good self-driving even in just nice weather, it's very easy to imagine a radical transformation of transit. Of course you can make money on that.
>> it's very easy to imagine a radical transformation of transit
Really? How? Because I don't see it at all, and I don't think it's "very easy" either.
All they have created is a very slightly cheaper taxi service. How does that transform anything? You could be taking a taxi instead of driving everywhere right now - why aren't you?(not literally you I mean people in general)
Is that going to change if the ride is couple dollars cheaper? Of course not.
No Way[mo] that it gets shut down. Possibly split off and IPO'ed, but no one is going to throw away technology that is very close to cracking a multi-hundred billion dollar market.
100% this. I don't think Americans in general are aware of what the current state of Chinese cars (EV and gas) is like right now since they're not in our market. It's worth checking out some YouTube videos, this guys channel is pretty good for Chinese EVs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQPwlHixWo
Yea I do want to know what the costing on this is. It's a bit hard to figure for BYD because:
(a) there's unknown government subsidies going on, and
(b) they mine and refine their own lithium and make their own batteries (also make Tesla's batteries too, I think). So their battery cost is... unusually low
It doesn't say "available for purchase." It says "will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities."
Waymo is already there, in at least 2 cities but not all weather conditions. Expanding to 10 cities and all weather conditions in the next 6 years sounds more than plausible.
I had sided with Atwood (skeptic) but now it seems like Carmack "has already won".
Is "all weather conditions" a global benchmark, or is it "all weather conditions occurring in the cities of operation?"
At least in SF, I haven't seen a day where Waymo refused availability for the weather. Rode it all over town in the rainstorms this weekend, and found it a little jarring to see the windshield covered in rainwater cause the computer doesn't GAF.
If it doesn't need to handle snow to win this bet, it seems it could handle Seattle-tier rain already.
They're allowed to have limits like "local driverless taxis don't operate outside SF city limits or below 35 degrees with precip in the forecast" etc. at level 4, but to meet level 5 (per the bet) it has to be able to "drive everywhere and in all conditions," [0] which adds a lot of really difficult edge cases.
Situations that come immediately to mind:
- Driving in the hurricane lane on the shoulder during an evacuation
- Reversible lanes and streets
- Sizing up an icy hill and figuring out whether it's safe to keep going
- Ferries
- Knowing a baseball entering the road from behind a parked car will probably be followed by a child
- Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.
I think each of these is already handled, or at least most. They say 99.4% of uptime in record inclement weather, which seems like it should satisfy "all".
https://waymo.com/blog/2023/08/the-waymo-drivers-rapid-learn... I don't think they really mean "all" (like it shouldn't need to handle a lava flood). Just "all a human might do". This feels superhuman already.
I actually see the main thing right now that would mean this bet is "not currently won by Carmack" is that they are not officially offering freeway access in its commercial product:
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...
But this seems minor, and I can't imagine it taking more than 2 years to allow freeway driving in multiple metros.
I can't fathom what would need to happen to derail this particular bet from being satisfied in Jan 2026 let alone Jan 2030.
(Note: if it wasn't for Waymo, I think this timeline would be much less clear. Tesla/Cruise feel much less predictable.)
Level 5 means there is no instance when Waymo intervenes from home base to tell the car what to do to get around an obstacle, and no instance where an emergency responder drives the car to move it out of the way. If the car is told to take the passengers to Arrowhead stadium, and it is directed verbally by stadium staff to go to parking lot 3, it goes to parking lot 3. Waymo will probably roll out level 4 robotaxis to a major city soon, but it's very hard to see them getting to level 5.
Emergencies are noted exceptions to Level 5, so the "A first responder insists on driving the car" case is still level 5.
Waymo has level 4 taxis in two US cities and is running tests elsewhere too. The usual reaction from the "This can't be done because somehow driving a motor vehicle is a uniquely human ability" people in those cities seems to be head-in-the-sand refusal to believe. The good news is that if they choose to believe a Waymo doesn't exist and step in front of it, it'll probably brake politely to a halt like they're any other asshole.
Level 5 mostly requires more range. I don't think this bet is a sure thing, but it's certainly possible that Waymo's reason you can't go from say New York City to Birmingham Alabama in 2030 is something that sounds like a taxi company reason rather than an "Our AI can't do that" reason.
>Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.
I can confirm that in my experience, Waymo handles these kinds of situations fine. Better than many humans in SF seem to, ha! Compared to my past experiences with Cruise, where the car would become instantly paralyzed at the sight of flashing yellow lights, so it could phone home for human intervention.
Icy conditions seem like a big open question to me. As a human driver, there's a big difference between driving on a road slick with rain and a road slick with snow and ice..but maybe there is not much of a difference to a self driving car? Certainly, other humans on the road behave differently in snowy/icy conditions than in rainy conditions, and the self driving vehicle needs to share the road with them.
> If it doesn't need to handle snow to win this bet, it seems it could handle Seattle-tier rain already.
Seattle-tier rain probably isn't what you think. But if it operates in Seattle, it does need to handle snow --- at least enough to recognize it's snowing and find somewhere flat to chill out until the roads become drivable again.
Waymo is already there, in at least 2 cities but not all weather conditions.
A few weeks ago I saw a video of someone making his first Waymo ride, there was some construction site and the vehicle stopped and waited for some human to take over control. They are not there in any weather and given that the last 10 % of a problem have a tendency to consume 90 % of the effort, they might have a long road ahead even if it already mostly works.
I find it odd that a self-driving system only works in 2 cities. Is the model overfitted to only know some specific locations? How does that work?
Like, I can understand it struggling in snow or heavy rain. I can understand it struggling if the lines on the road are faded. But given a well-marked intersection in one city, and another well-marked intersection in another, why would it fail in one?
That's my position on it. Sure, it functions better, but you can drop a Tesla into an area it's never seen before and it will drive relatively competently. HD maps are a crutch, and ignoring that produces fragile solutions that just require massive overhead to function.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, they do have problems in the rain, snow, or when it is really sunny out. But we are pretty good at driving in overcast but dry weather.
Waymo is level 3 at best. It is active in 1 flat city right now (and partially in another), and needs frequent interruption from remote drivers to get it out of hairy situations. You really think it will be fully rolled out in the 10 most populous cities in America in the next 6 years? You really think it'll work without any human interaction (local or remote)? This thing won't last 5 minutes in NYC or Philadelphia .
> "Against" is a pretty clear winner at this point.
You seem very confident that "against" will win after only two years have elapsed since the bet was made, when there are still EIGHT YEARS of time remaining on the bet.
Waymo is already at level 4 at least on surface streets, and they claim 99.4% uptime in rain, high winds, and thunderstorms during last winter. [1] They're testing highway service in Phoenix now.
There might be a debate about the word "all" for the distinction between levels 4 and 5, but Waymo has six years to erase that doubt.
Disagree. Waymo is currently at level 3. From your link, emergency responders have the ability to put the car in a manual mode to get it out of the way if it is stuck. Waymo also has employees make decisions on behalf of the car remotely when it finds itself in a tricky situation.
Level 5 fully autonomous would mean the car is able to drive in icy and snowy conditions (adjusting how it drives based on traction), it would be able to respond to verbal commands from construction workers, and it would be able to detect when a hazard in the road prevents it from continuing, plan a new route, and detour.
There isn't much incentive for Waymo or its competitors to create level 5 autonomous cars when there is a plenty large market in places where there is good weather and good signal for an employee to tell the car what to do if necessary.
Perhaps it straddles the line between 3 and 4. I don't see much of a distinction between the passenger taking over, and a first responder taking over. Would Waymo put cars on the road that don't have pedals and a steering wheel if it were cheaper to do so? I don't think they would. I think they want a backup in case the car has to be driven by a human.
Here's how you can tell so that you don't get confused as easily in future. Level 3 cars can require the occupant to drive the vehicle, "When the feature requests: You must drive the car". Waymo even offers service to people who cannot drive whether that's legally (they aren't licensed) or physically (blind people can use Waymo but can't drive a car). They are simply not required to take over driving.
What does it mean exactly? Because this can mean everything really. I mean you could guide decision making process by "now press break, now reverse and...", is it still driving?
The bet requires the cars to be SAE level 5 autonomous. You wouldn't notice the difference as a passenger between level 4 used in appropriate conditions, and level 5 car. But the bet does require the car to be level 5 nonetheless.
It does not have to go to NYC at all. If Waymo can show profitability is some city it is good enough. If it gets love in one city is is good enough for the rest of the world to put a red carpet before them.
It's really interesting to see Carmack take such risky positions, such as betting FSD Level 5 by 2030 along with his all-in bet on VR. The VR thing didn't go nearly as well as he had hoped... and I suspect, like VR, the FSD thing will also not come to fruition due to it's grossly underestimated difficulty.
The issue with VR is that it almost entirely doesn't require his type of expertise for it to succeed. It's almost entirely a hardware problem, in terms of cost, wearability/usability, quality, along with the other issues like nausea etc. None of which Carmack's vast expertise lends itself towards. Writing an app for Netflix isn't exactly using his skills.
We see this often with engineering types, many of us included. Vastly underestimating difficulty of challenging problems and naively believe they're simple to solve.
Personally I think VR is outside the domain of expertise of 3D games and game engines. To think that VR is within that domain is exactly the error -- VR as an overall product requires different consumer behavior than buying a game for a PC you already have. It requires buying a new kind of device or buying into a whole new form of interaction. It requires remembering to use that device and think about what games you have for it. It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.
I am not a VR or 3D game expert, but even I can list other key differences. I bet you can too if you try. I think those are reasons to think VR is not really the same domain. I am curious what you think.
While I mostly agree that the hardware and UX challenges are mostly out of his domain,
> It requires engineers to ship high FPS and low lag to prevent nausea to a degree unheard of for PC gaming.
This is very much Carmack's speciality, and why his focus was on making mobile VR happen [0]. There are very few people who can outperform him at that, and most of them worked for Oculus :-)
Fair enough. I think the UX challenges are tougher than FPS, and secondarily the hardware challenges are also tougher than FPS, so I probably should have omitted the FPS mention in my comment to keep things focused. :D
He became expert in the domain enough to decide to walk away...
He's now working on a startup in the AGI field, which will also probably go nowhere for him.
He gets to work on things that excite him - what a place to be in life. We can all envy that - but he's not very good at gauging problems and consistently underestimates their difficulty/time-to-market.
I am a self driving skeptic but seems like a good bet for Carmack. I would expect Waymo to open up to consumers before 2030 in SF, even if more expensive and take way longer than a normal car. It could be little more than a tech demo and he would still win the bet.
The major companies that have tried to go faster than Waymo have been destroyed by safety incidents (Uber, Cruise). Waymo's caution may be well-warrented.
Because they're careful? Especially after the recent Cruise debacle - SF is relatively friendly to their efforts, and once they can point to a few years of problem-free operation in SF, other cities might allow them in, but trying to expand the service too early could prove a very costly mistake if a major issue is found and they get thrown out again...
Ignoring the safety path, this other issue just scale. Manufacturing the cars would be a big problem. Getting a ton of them on the road is another. I wonder if all those sensors that the car uses could ramp up to a national level in a year.
I've been in the Waymo beta for a couple months now. At peak times, it's more expensive and slower than an Uber simply because there aren't enough cars on the road.
I doubt that fees are quite covering expenses yet. I expect they'll roll out quite a bit quicker once expansion decreases their losses rather than increasing it.
This is an oddly imprecise position to me. It's unclear whether an 8" snowfall is a natural disaster. In places where this is a regular event, it is not treated as a natural disaster. Some human drivers drive in it just fine, though most prefer not to.
What about a 3" snowfall? That is a more common event, and a much larger number of human drivers stay on the roads despite the snow.
The ability to safely and successfully get where you want to go would not be diminished by the fact it was an autonomous vehicle. 8" of snow in LA would be a disaster because they don't have the road maintenance infrastructure to handle that. It's not that people in LA are dramatic compared to people in Michigan.
Yes. It is intended to be so. Because being pedantic is now how you define these levels.
The ultimate goal is to run a large fleet of robo taxies wherever possible and Level 5 tech can do that everywhere on globe. One can get pedantic and ask if this would work in Antartica or on Dead Horse Bay or whether driving in sand dunes of Saudi Arabia is possible. But the folks who are trying to pedantic wont be happy with any definition either here.
The text of the official standard explicitly mentions floods, defining Level 5 to be when the software "can operate the vehicle on-road anywhere within its region of the world and under all road conditions in which a conventional vehicle can be reasonably operated by a typically skilled human driver"
It adds: "However, there may be conditions not manageable by a driver in which the ADS would also be unable to complete a given trip (e.g., white-out snow storm, flooded roads, glare ice, etc.) until or unless the adverse conditions clear. At the onset of such unmanageable conditions the ADS would perform the DDT fallback to achieve a minimal risk condition (e.g., by pulling over to the side of the road and waiting for the conditions to change)."
It means that it needs to be able to get the vehicle into a safe situation regardless of conditions. That can mean needing human help once it is there in some cases.
This doesn't mean that it needs to magically cross destroyed bridges, as the popular culture definition often implies.
The problem is that freezing rain caused Portland to come to a standstill, but in Canada, that’s just an annoying day with elevated rates of accidents.
In Texas, a light breeze takes out the entire state, whereas in Canada, most of our workforce is expected to at try to continue working after a 20 inch snow dump the night before.
I hope you can see how there’s reason to being pedantic.
If level 5 is all conditions human drivers do regularly for day to day activities, 2030 is an idiotic bet and anyone not living in a bubble could see that.
A lot of that doesn't have anything to do with cars or drivers, but is rather about city infrastructure.
Does the city own a fleet of snowplows? Does it keep massive stores of road salt available? Do schools and offices even have heating systems at all?
On the other hand, driving carefully on snow and ice is a skill in itself that has to be learned. And in snowy places I do know people who simply don't drive in some conditions because they're well aware they don't have those skills, even growing up there -- while others enjoy the challenge. So that part is a fair question of which humans we're talking about when we talk about human-level driving skill.
Regardless of city infrastructure, I've seen schools in North Carolina close after a light snow (like a few millimiters). In Stockholm this winter I regularly feel my car drifting when entering roundabouts, and a lot of roads have transformed from 2-lane streets into 1.5-lane streets.
> So that part is a fair question of which humans we're talking about when we talk about human-level driving skill.
These California-based companies assume everywhere is California, and still want to release those cars internationally.
Did you typo "light freeze?" Texas does terribly with ice but it is regularly windy as hell here, among the windiest of all US states. Even when a tornado tore up three miles of North Dallas a few years ago, it didn't take out even the local traffic, let alone the whole state.
There's an additional aspect however: on days with e.g. freezing rain, human drivers might risk it, but companies like Waymo will probably decide to play it safe and not let their taxis run, because they know how much bad publicity an accident would be...
In that case, SAE Level 5 driving may have a place for “sub-division” by weather, the same way that CAT-III ILS offers a range of operation options based on visibility.
"No" seems easy to say right now, but technology is accelerating at a breakneck pace. If AGI can happen within a decade, I reckon 2030 self driving is not a crazy bet at all.
I seriously doubt Apple is working on an actual car. More likely, they're working on car tech and that's all - trying to make OTS tech so companies that actually manufacture cars don't have to. Imagine 30% of every car sold - 15% if they can sell subs to the consumer.
The problem with offering car tech is that manufacturers won't want it. They hate the thought of automotive technology being commoditized. If they all use the same underlying technology, then there's less opportunity to differentiate themselves.
They’re exactly why I switched away from GM this year. I get wanting your own UI but not at least allowing CarPlay and android auto is very telling in the current market and I like getting updates and seamless handoff and/or continuity between the phone and the car.
The last thing I want is my car, with how I use it, stuck on multi year old tech that the car company won’t update and because it’s proprietary you can’t update it either. “Oh sorry the Spotify app we pre installed can’t use any of the new features they released last year. No we don’t plan to update it.”
Car companies are notoriously terrible with software.
GM sure is succeeding in differentiating their product. By removing the one infotainment system feature I actually want, they have guaranteed I will never buy one of their cars.
So far everyone I’ve talked to agrees that this is a stupid move. Anecdotal evidence, I know. But I feel like it’s obvious that not offering features isn’t a winning strategy
We’ll see how this plays out, but historically car companies’ tech has been the absolute worst.
I would MUCH rather see software in a car from one of the major tech companies if they insist. Personally, I would be happy with a tablet mount, Bluetooth audio, and physical buttons for the rest.
I would trust a tech company with self driving far more if the software on those media abominations is any indicator.
Thats how the rest of the car is built though. You don’t get a honda, you get a laundry list of component vendors you’ve probably never heard of on a contract to make parts along with a honda badge, vendors who go on to make all the competitors cars out of these same supply lines too.
Maybe this is why GM ditched it. Maybe they talked to Apple and Apple wanted their subscription money and GM thought, Hmmm, we could do that, f* Apple.
GM's move isn't about differentiation, it's about more money (no, differentiation alone doesn't == more money). They think they can charge for subscriptions. (They are delusional.)
OK, but none of those companies are going to be differentiating themselves by making their own silicon. and probably not their own self driving software from the looks of things.
It is totally what they are doing. The guts are probably going to be an automotive hardened version of an iphone / ipad and will have a bunch of connections to get sensors wired to it. Their competition for this product is Bosch.
Apple cares about the end-to-end user experience too much to do this. Likely the car will have Apple's software sauce and design, be branded an Apple vehicle but be manufactured by BMW, VW group, or a Chinese manufacturer (Volvo/Polestar etc.)
Apple don't release new products until their angle on it is ready to corner the market. They are rarely first, often late, but almost always unique in quality and finish.
When they do launch the car, it's not just going to be a swanky thing to compete with BMW with a bunch of flashy touch UIs and half baked self driving.
It's going to be something that is a step change, something so far ahead of the competition they will be years ahead.
If they have deciding to delay till '28 that suggests it's both not ready, but maybe the market isn't either. If self driving is the head line feature, they will want it to actually be so far ahead of the competition it will appear like magic.
If there is truth to the article (I suspect the delay is real, un-convinced on the reasons suggested) then I don't think the will release one at all.
> Apple don't release new products until their angle on it is ready to corner the market. They are rarely first, often late, but almost always unique in quality and finish.
Yeah I think this holds true there as well. It's a small, niche market, but it's hard to argue what they are doing isn't leaps and bounds ahead of anything from Meta (Ignoring the price differences).
I'm frequently nearby the Apple Infinity Loop. A couple years ago I constantly saw the Apple Lexus cars with the radar (?) and other equipment driving around the neighborhood every day. These days I very rarely see them. Maybe once or twice in the past few months. Definitely feels like they've dialed back quite a bit.
Apple may be the way Chinese manufacturers get into the US market. Apple will make a lot of noise about their car being a US product, but it will really be made by BYD and Foxconn in Guangdong.
Self-driving cars is one of the biggest boondoggles of all time. How much money, time, effort, amd resources have been spent on this? And yet, there's barely anything to show and the end goal is still not even clear.
* Drastic reduction in the >1 million annual worldwide vehicular deaths. ~40K/year in the US. ~20K/year in Europe.
* Also, drastic reduction in damage and loss of productivity from traffic accidents.
* Better utilization of roadways, e.g. from more responsive start/stops, and smoother acceleration/deceleration on highways to prevent phantom traffic jams.
Self-driving cars will likely increase accidents before they reduce them, if ever. It is pointless to outfit our roads and highways 100% with self-driving cars carrying only a handful, if that, of people, which is the only way you get to that unrealistic ideal of utilization. Trains, subways, and buses are "self-driving" technologies that we already have and are far more efficient at solving these problems. It is incredibly inefficient to have low passenger vehicles already. Making them self-driving just increases the cost of that inefficiency.
and given the current growth trends promises to play a smaller one in the future. (I just returned from a trip to the southwest - ever seen Phoenix? Given the growth trends that mess is as likely to be the future as anything else is.) As someone living in a city who likes the idea of transit (and walking and biking), I think the sort of prescriptive attitude (transit is the solution to all questions!) you are displaying is part of the reason American's have such a poor (and declining) opinion of it.
Autonomy opens up possibilities - of taming the roads, of enabling more responsive transit that can reach deeper into medium density suburbs, etc, but none of that is going to happen without a wide spectrum of constructive criticism.
The nearest train, subway or bus to where I live is 100km away.
How should I get there? By foot? Sprout wings and fly? Drag myself there by my tongue?
Also, I have bad news for you. You know that human you see sitting at the front of buses, trains, and subways? They aren’t just there to collect your fare.
> Also, I have bad news for you. You know that human you see sitting at the front of buses, trains, and subways? They aren’t just there to collect your fare.
It's probably much easier to construct a self driving train/subway than it is to build a self driving car. Driving a vehicle on rails is so simple that people use the phrase "on rails" to indicate simplicity (e.g. Ruby on Rails). Buses of course don't get to reap the benefits of this simplicity though since they drive on roads rather than on rails.
I wouldn't necessarily say the utility is diminished — it's more like a tradeoff. If you want to repeatedly transport people in bulk, you need to follow a predetermined path. Even buses tend to follow fixed routes, despite not operating on rails. Commuters would be disoriented if the E train in NYC took a different path each day for example.
So if you're following the same path every day, you probably don't need a complicated steering system, rubber tires that constantly wear out, and a large expensive battery. It's simpler to just have the vehicle operate on rails, and supply power through the third rail. Otherwise you end up with a bizarre situation like the "Vegas Loop", where you have cars driving back and forth along a predetermined path, lugging heavy batteries around with them.
> How should I get there? By foot? Sprout wings and fly? Drag myself there by my tongue?
It's not difficult: we build more. That is instead of spending however many billions on a pipe dream.
> Also, I have bad news for you. You know that human you see sitting at the front of buses, trains, and subways? They aren’t just there to collect your fare.
That's immaterial to me and the dozens of passengers. If anything, it's preferable.
IMHO, Waymo's autonomous taxi service is amazing. I think it's a superior product to Uber/Lyft. Consumers won't be getting FSD on their personal cars anytime soon, but managed self-driving fleets seem well poised to compete with ride-hailing services.
my personal belief is that driverless car hype was the by-product of the "gig economy"/uber success story. and in that march for IPO, uber had to address its largest problem re: scalability-- human drivers. this issue of scaling drivers was seen as the achilles heel of its technology play.
as a result they went deep into investing into the idea of driverless car technology, more for show than in reality. yes, hundreds of millions (billions overall) where dumped into this sector but it was really motivated by the incentive to keep a valuation high.
this "driverless" story picked up steam because it resonated with a lot of tech companies, similarly looking to move the needle in their valuations. for big giant tech companies this was alluring as there aren't that many single plays or markets you can do to move the company share price. so here came in google, head first, and apple still tentatively.
and then crucially, for established dinosaurs like Ford or GM, the opportunity to create tech valuations for themselves similarly appeared. so they jumped in.
all in all, we are still feeling the after effects of this uber story play out, with dwindling returns and ever reducing pile of money behind it.
Wow the cynicism. Waymo is successfully providing self driving rides TODAY. Tesla is actively trying to leverage their lean manufacturing prowess to provide this service en masse via FSD.
The goal was never a tangible product but a marketable investment opportunity. You can tell this is how it is because the latter went exceedingly well and there is still no product because there was never supposed to be a product. If it was about the product it would be done by now.
I still refuse to believe that they're actually working on a car. I think they're making a humanoid robot. It makes some sense that the car project is a cover for it. 2028 sounds about right, although a bit late. I've been saying this for years but let's see what happens.
Could explain why this makes sense? Genuinely interested
Edit: I can infer the utility of humanoid robots. I mean what about the project leaks or other datapoints lead you to believe this has been humanoid robots all along?
They're quite similar projects from software / AI standpoint. Anyone who is hired for autonomous cars can be assigned on a robot team. An autonomous car is also kind of a robot. Aside from this, I just think that a humanoid robot is a product that Apple is destined to make. A car doesn't make sense to me.
FWIW, Porsche has trended more into the premium market lately than the luxury market, in a bid to pursue more growth at the expense of profit margin.
Gross and operating margins are pretty high in the luxury car industry, on par with iPhones. Personally, I don't think Apple would release a luxury car. I think it's more likely to partner with manufacturers of premium cars.
It might be useful to make a small number of cars within Apple, to align on their north star vision for design, to lobby manufacturers in that direction, and to build up internal knowledge of the market they'd be selling into.
But you're right, the margins on manufacturing and selling the whole vehicle would be a poor allocation of capital.
But if Apple makes a car, is it more in the premium or in the luxury market?
It seems to me that most of the bestselling Apple products are more premium than luxury, why would it be different with cars? And if not, why would they profit from margins that are usually associated with luxury cars?
Tesla famously had by far the highest margins pushing 30%, though they've dropped a lot recently with price cuts. They are still by far the highest in the industry
It doe not matter for Apple. If the competition is offering an equivalent car for $20K apple will simply charge $40K or $200k and there will be enough takers.
It's interesting they're willing to push back the release so much, not falling to the sunk cost fallacy. A lemon would be a reputation hit.
That's kind of why I'm pretty interested in the Vision Pro, another product in secret-ish development for a decade. They wouldn't have greenlit it if it didn't show potential right?
It's interesting to think about what must be going on behind the scenes on products like this, deciding if they're ready to see the light of day.
I think these 'push back the release' reports are mostly just sensational reporting. Apple is constantly adjusting plans for things that aren't ready to be made public yet.
Part of the reason they are so secretive is because anything that hasn't been announced yet is subject to change and they don't want to promise something until they are certain they can deliver it.
So unless they actually announced a release date, they haven't 'pushed anything back'. This is just an internal review being leaked in a sensationalist way.
Maybe continuing the project and pushing back the date rather than cancelling it is falling to the sunk cost fallacy.
Or, maybe they truly believe this is the right market for them to enter. (or, don't have any better ideas about how to spend the cash and find future growth).
I don't think the two products demand an equal level of commitment. Car manufacturing is notoriously hard and low margins, with very complex supply-chain and scale requirements that could make a bad bet tragically costly both financially and to their reputation, as you said.
Consider also that there are no Level 3 cars out today (IIRC Mercedes-Benz recently got permission for the first such car), so launching a Level 5 seems virtually impossible. On the other hand, VR devices do exist and, even if they don't quite perform to people's expectations, releasing a marginally superior product isn't too far-fetched.
It's interesting how, from my average man perspective, it's impossible to say whether a company operating at the scale of Apple is or is not victim to the sunk cost fallacy.
On one hand, a push to deliver can be leadership setting a sink-or-swim deadline to avoid sunk costs. On the other hand, maybe they've already gone too far down a dead end.
I think it has to be tricky because a tech company that does manufacturing at Apple's scale is kind of obligated to explore these possibilities. But how can you or I calculate what constraints should be in place so exploration can be effective while avoiding waste?
As another commenter pointed out [1], I'm not sure if 100% of the expenses of this project are sunk cost, because it's yielded tangential but real value in other product lines.
I totally agree, it'd be really interesting to learn more about how they do internal accounting for these kinds of moonshot projects.
I think the conversation misses the fact that Apple has become a world leader in logistics and manufacturing scaling.
They literally ramp up production in less than a year and producing 100's of millions of new widgets that they distribute internationally and they successfully make sure that they get depleted by September each year. (You never find old apple inventory).
These are competitive advantages that apply to the car industry as well.
They heavily rely on Chinese and other Asian partners for that. While that is great for the tech stack, the tariffs involved make it not likely that they will make their car in China, and will have to work with existing automotive supply chains far away from the centers they are currently leveraging. Their experience still counts, but the advantage isn't as overwhelming as if they were producing another iWidget.
Seems odd to me that Apple would invest in developing a car instead of just focusing on the in-vehicle interface device. Then again, Apple has a long history of wanting absolute control over form factor, so they might believe their better served building the whole car than just one device that's used in it.
Yep because them and their ilk created the issue now you need to buy their solution. Meanwhile your bog standard no frills 2010s era car would be like a hardened CIA ghost vehicle in comparison to anything offered from an american tech company, even a model pitched specifically for privacy.
GM announced several months ago that their newest infotainment system, developed in partnership with Google, will not support CarPlay. Other manufacturers could start to go in the same direction. If Apple is committed to the in-vehicle interface, their own car ensures that they have a vehicle to display it in.
That is also a very reasonable hypothesis. It would be interesting to know the economics in this case, if that turned out to be true. Spinning up an entire automotive engineering R&D division seems like a very expensive way to generate patents.
Instead of building the whole car, they could do what they are doing with AppleTV.
With AppleTV Apple lets others take care of the bulky (and probably low margin) hardware and focus on the content and intelligence. For me the TV is now just a dumb screen, everything comes from the AppleTV.
Apple should buy one of the local EV companies like Lucid or Rivian, it would save them years of R&D on the hardware, give them valuable automotive guidance on the software and how things work in the car world. Lucid's software R&D is run by many ex-Apple people.
Also, I don't think self-driving is a must-have feature and I speak as the driver of a Tesla with full-self-driving. It's just not that useful. Traffic-aware safety features are more valuable and easier to achieve.
Also have FSD, driving it since 2021 as part of the first big wave pushed to general users. I see V12 as make or break for FSD. It's not worth $12k or $200 a month today.
My problem with FSD today is the robotic nature of the driving. It's still too jerky. If V12 with end-to-end use of neural nets is the way forward, and early reports seem to show a step change, FSD on city streets can something that's better and safer than driving manually while feeling human like. Then FSD is really useful. The NHTSA enforced stop sign rules are a killer however.
I think that would be a mistake: for Apple, for passengers, and for governments.
Superficially, sure, it'd be nice to have nicely designed, well-integrated, privacy-respecting public transport. But Apple is a very individual-focused company, and likes to control the experience of their users. That seems like it would be very difficult for rail transport.
It'd be nice to see some Apple-like qualities in public transport though, for sure.
"The car will use what is known as a Level 2+ system, the people said. That’s a downgrade from previously planned Level 4 technology — and, before that, even more ambitious aims for a Level 5 system."
Wow, what?
Level 2 is "lane centering and adaptive cruise control." Those are standard features these days.
"After the initial car debuts, Apple hopes to release an upgraded system later that supports Level 4 autonomy and additional regions."
Unlike Tesla, they'd definitely ship with LIDAR sensors. Honestly, lowering the bar makes me think that they're actually serious about this, they want to make an Apple Car even if it can't hit their original goals.
I do not know why you are being downvoted. I agree that level 2 autonomy is not cutting edge - it is an option level for nearly every car manufacturer.
I recently met someone who worked at a pretty senior level on self-driving cars at one of the main companies pursuing it. After working there a couple of years he decided it's never going to happen to he switched to another company doing entirely different things.
