Sounds very revolutionary to me. :mad:

hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? :mad: or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm? :mad:

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

But the way Tim is framing this, they're looking at it as an AI problem. He doesn't go into the feel of driving or the wonderfully bad user interfaces of current cars, he describes it as "the mother of all AI projects." So while this is "something that's never been in [their] wheelhouse", they're approaching it from the AI side. And AI, given WWDC, is something they are very much trying to make their wheelhouse. And it sounds like they're doing it in a very Apple-like way: work on the hardest problem they can, then take what they've learned and apply it.

Even if they don't make a car, or even a driving platform they can sell, the AI things they'll learn will show up in Siri, iOS, and everywhere else.

So yeah, I want them to focus on Mac hardware. But I also want them to learn and grow. And I think they might, might, be starting to do both.

EDIT: Since I keep getting the same replies, I'm gonna edit it here too:

1. When you are in maintenance mode and you still manage to introduce more bugs than you are fixing then your are doing something wrong (usually that's a result of limiting the budget of a department and as a consequence hiring less experienced developers)

2. Every new feature the last few years has been ported from iOS and without much care. I still can't believe they have yet to make Siri and Spotlight one unified product (at least make Spotlight more powerful, I can't even set a timer with it).

And to add to this, being in maintenance mode doesn't have immediate effects. If Apple continues like this somewhere down the line macOS is gonna end up quite behind (and a big mess due to points 1. and 2.)

https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/01/macbook-pro-16gb-32gb-ram/

They are referring to the fact that Apple portables ship with soldered memory and max out at 16GB while PC manufacturers are shipping systems which support 32 and even 64GB in laptop/mobile workstation form factor.

So they are referring to the physical memory (RAM) limit of Apple devices, not any logical limitations of the OS.

That's a false dichotomy. Do you really believe they are the only options?

2. Every new feature the last few years has been ported from iOS and without much care. I still can't believe they have yet to make Siri and Spotlight one unified product (at least make Spotlight more powerful, I can't even set a timer with it).

I agree, but I think their approach is flawed. A car is more than an AI with wheels and a seat. Tons and tons of engineering expertise goes into making a roadworthy car, and even more goes into making a truly good car.

Apple quite simply does not have automotive engineering experience, and the jump from computers to iPhones pales in comparison to the jump from consumer electronics to automobiles.

Cook has never struck me as a man with a vision. I think this is just Keeping up with the Joneses.

I agree with you, and I think Cook and Apple do to! The article just says they're focusing on "an autonomous system." When asked if they were going to commit to a full automobile:

> "We’ll see where it takes us," Cook said. "We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do."

In other words, they're not making a car, just the AI for it.

Granted, Apple rarely makes 'components'; they make Products. It doesn't really jive with the Apple we know to make part of something without making the _whole_ thing. But I think these comments from Cook are telegraphing that they are--at least for right now--just making a component.

edit to clarify: Based on this and previous rumors, I think the "Apple Car" project (that totally existed, no joke!) has been refocused on the autonomous AI project. Cook and Mansfield realized that a car was big and complicated, and the market was inevitably moving toward self-driving cars. In realizing that without the self-driving component, they wouldn't have a car at all, they refocused the project to see if they could even build such a component. Once they have that, they'll go from there.

It seems to me domestic/concierge/robotic/secure IoT AI is a much bigger and uncontested market.

What specifically does building an automotive AI give Apple that a more general robotics and/or concierge AI project doesn't?

We regret to inform you, but you are a part of a market niche known as "power users". That niche is but a small part of our customer base, and like all other big companies in the industry, we no longer care about you.

Don't be sad about gradually losing useful tools - enjoy the new, shiny toys instead.

Sincerely,

Apple.

However, I do think turning off power users is a great way for the company to shoot itself in the foot when it comes to recruitment. They really depend on a certain degree of enthusiasm to get the kind of engineering talent they want to get, much more so than money or the work environment or perqs. If they no longer inspire that enthusiasm in as many people, it'll make it that much more difficult to bring good people together to do whatever they want to do next. Unfortunately the general trend seems to be a long, slow transition from being the BMW of the computer industry to being the Chipotle of the tech industry. I'm sure all the metrics favor being Chipotle (and gosh do they love metrics), but that doesn't do anything to help make Chipotle a desirable place to work at that draws all the best talent.

I'm still waiting to see this effect in action from when Apple supposedly threw away the Final Cut Pro 7 userbase over night. That was back in 2011, 6 years should have been plenty of time to see this play out. Or perhaps the movers and shakers in Hollywood don't have as much influence as they thought.

I get asked all the time about buying laptops. I used to recommend Apple, but it has become very difficult to do so for a myriad of reasons. Lately, I have found that most people can get by with a chrome book after looking at their requirements.

-- Pear

like how they were a computer company and then decided to go into cellphone business?

Apple's claim to automotive relevance seems to be the idea that they could somehow worm their way into the supply chain of ordinary car manufacturers. As in, Ford, Toyota, Tata, etc. would all have the same iDrive system. To me, this is not only hopelessly naive, but utterly contrary to Apple's consistent insistence on controlling every aspect of their ecosystem.

This pivot does not seem like a savvy business move to me. It seems like they see a big market and want to be part of it regardless of their actual...ugh...synergies.

Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars. They can focus on more than a few products. It's natural that they look into AI.

Apple was doing just fine in 2007. OS X was in great shape. They had recently transitioned from the faltering PowerPC CPUs to x86, which revitalized their hardware offerings and opened up a world of new possibilities for users to dual-boot or virtualize other OSes. Their market share was pretty solid, and their share of PC profits was quite high.

You say "stature in the industry" as if there's a single "the industry" that encompasses both PCs and phones. If Apple hadn't done the iPhone then maybe Microsoft or Nokia would have done better, but so what? That wouldn't affect Apple in the PC market. Wikipedia says the top five PC makers are Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple, and as far as I know Apple is the only one with a substantial smartphone business.

Of course Apple wouldn't be nearly as relevant overall in a world where they never produced the iPhone. I don't care about that. I see no reason why the Mac wouldn't be about as relevant in the personal computing space, which is what I care about.

In any case, I'm not just annoyed at the existence of the iPhone, but the nature of it. If the iPhone had been a Mac-like open platform instead of this walled garden bullshit, all of my complaints would go away. I have no problem with mobile per se, I have a problem with pervasive vendor-controlled code signing, not getting root on my own devices, etc.

Most of Apple's APIs and tools run on and build for both Mac and iPhone. Without the iPhone, Apple would have to pay for that from just what they made from the Mac, so improvements to macOS would come slower than they do now.

    > improvements to macOS would come slower than they do now.

I do agree that autonomous cars are a money pit not worth pursuing right now.

They're big enough to do a lot of different things. It's like asking Microsoft to focus on Windows and Surface instead of putting in effort into their Hololens. Again, why can't they do both?

Well they certainly aren't doing both at the moment. All of the Mac hardware updates have been so heavily "form over function" that they aren't very appealing to people that just need to get shit done. My 3 year old Macbook Pro is still very fast, and since I use most of the ports on a regular basis it's arguably more useful than the new Macbook Pro.

[1]: https://stratechery.com/2016/apples-organizational-crossroad...

Apple's the richest company in the world and it seems like they are actually focusing a bit on the MacPro and some of the other pro offerings power users need.

I'm also confident with the amount of money they have, they can certainly do both.