As an example, consider the transition from MacOS 9 -> Mac OS X (public beta days). The tough challenge was what's below the hood, the new UNIX foundation, the NeXTStep APIs, being able to mitigate the conversion pain, etc. Yet in the midst of all these challenges, they added Aqua: an ambitious, over-the-top UI. Was it overkill? Yes. Did it get scaled back? Yes. Did it impact performance? Heck yeah it did. But it did one thing very well: it got people to dream of a (literally) shiny new Operating System. In the moments when Mail.app would get stuck or when one felt the absence of many Classic features, seeing the shiny OS helped sugar-coat the transition and from a UX perspective, it helped people stick with it until the bugs got ironed out.
Five random Titan engineers wouldn’t just start talking to the Times. Not if they wanted to stay working at Apple. So it makes you wonder if their “leaking” is designed to mislead.
However, in the OSX analogy above, Apple had a very good platform (NeXTSTEP) that had been commercially available and proven in real-world use for ~a decade before they started modifying it to become OSX. There is no similarly mature self-driving car platform for them to be working from, and we can be sure of that.
And it's not like robotics research hasn't been working on this problem for half a century now. It's a hell of a hard problem that one can't just product-design their way out of.
On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later, e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.
the iPod was not the first music player, the iPhone not the first smartphone. Re-engineering those was the only way to get them to market in a way that might drive mass adoption.
As for the spherical wheels, yes, however such a development is totally tangential (pun intended) to self driving cars.
I disagree. You seem to be discounting the learning aspect. Building an institutional knowledge base of the pile of systems that make up a car is a large task by itself. Different shops approach it differently. One may obsessively reverse engineer the competition, another might tinker with longtime designs.
I fully expect the managers in question saw the spherical wheels as something with maybe a 2% chance of becoming a reality, if that. The point at that stage is not to take a particular design to market, it is to explore the problem space, develop expertise, and work out what strategy to pursue.
From this article, it sounds like they figured out the strategy.
This is mostly likely not something that could be rolled out even in a concept car with present day technology unless there is some kind of trick that I'm not aware of. Halbach arrays are not without problems if you allow them to be unconstrained in all dimensions.
TaDa: the self driving Tron motorcycle!
It's a lot simpler with independent electric motors per wheel, but generally not that useful as self drivings cars can already parallel park just fine.
But those ideas are tangential (being generous) to self-driving, so better not steal cycles from it.
The iPod had click wheel. The Mac had the GUI. The Apple II was plug-and-play in a time when people built from scratch. The iPhone had multi-touch the Apple Watch had a bunch of stuff.
The challenge is not to solve an already solved problem.
Remember when the iPhone was introduced? It's obvious now it was quite revolutionary-- but at the time people complained that it wasn't anything significant and that lacking a keyboard meant it was doomed to failure.
If apple introduced a self driving Camry it would not really be compelling enough. For a new product category, Apple's only interested if they can create or redefine the category.
It's worked out pretty well so far.
How could you say that without knowing anything about such a car?
Is the brand enough to get you to buy something?
And yes, the brand-- which is to say, their 40 year history of delivering products at a level of quality and innovation unmatched by any company in the world-- is enough to be interested in anything they produce.
Apple doesn’t care about incremental improvements when talking about a new product category. They look to leapfrog. Have you considered the benefit of spherical wheels? I haven’t, but I am not part of that project.
Incrementalism would have been making a better Apple Newton or a prettier Palm Treo. Or a slightly better Tesla. Why bother entering the car market if you’re just going to marginally compete with everyone else?
It seems like you don’t get Apple or their history of product development.
I get it just fine. They are improved user interfaces over things that already existed. Changing the main method of transfer of energy from the motor to the road in a vehicle is a fundamental change that has significant implications for everything else in the vehicle to the point of making it very unlikely that that vehicle will ever be completed.
People would not buy a car with spherical wheels for the 'cool factor' they would not buy it because it is untested technology with significant implications for the safety of the occupants and others on the road.
> Apple doesn’t care about incremental improvements when talking about a new product category.
Well, what is a leapfrog to you looks suspiciously like an incremental improvement to me. There were some phones that had a fair amount of resemblance to the iPhone before it launched and the iPod had a large number of predecessors as well. And without iPod no iPhone.
Arguably the iPhone could have been a success without multitouch, it's perfectly possible not to have multitouch and at the same time not to have stylus and not to have a keyboard.
As for the benefit of spherical wheels, yes, I can see some benefits, but I can also see significant drawbacks that are not easily engineered away.
A car is a device on an entirely different plane than a phone, the only time your life depends on your phone is when you're trying to call 911 after an accident, with a car you (and the people on the road around you) depend on your car from the moment you get into it until you disembark. That requires a more conservative kind of development.
Such as Tesla is showing, and which they occasionally get wrong, usually when they release stuff that isn't quite as reliable as it should be for mass deployment.
This is the lie every Apple hater tells themselves to reconcile their hate with the fact that Apple keeps inventing things never before seen.
I once had someone on here tell me that Apple invented nothing for the iPhone because the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey "invented multitouch".
This is why I believe that comma.ai was so visionary, say whatever you want about George Hotz's personality. He truly _gets it_ that self-driving is the critical part, not the car.
I think commaai has a very bright future.
Comma one has been canceled and the new offering is more along the lines of a kit for DIY car hackers than for serious deployment and at a guess if you would be involved in an accident while deploying one of these kits your insurance would be void.
Goodyear released spherical wheels. It's not that stupid at all to reinvent the wheel, sometimes: https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-goodyear-unveils-the-futu...
Similar to how every software application project could theoretically result in a new database, a new operating system and if you really want to go all out a new CPU it is much more efficient to concentrate on your application if you actually want to see it go to market.
> Goodyear released spherical wheels.
No, they didn't, that's just some fancy CG stuff, not an actual product.
Also, it just so happens that Good Year is in the wheels-and-tires business so for them such research makes good sense, and of course it is a theory of a concept, not an actual proof of concept much less something that they are ready to roll out. It's more like serious science fiction even than actual science, it's how things maybe could work, not how they actually work.
That's only true if the team that reinvents the wheels and the team that does the self-driving tech is the same, and you're stealing members from the latter to the former.
Obviously those are not the same teams, nor they need to be.
And when you get out with your self-driving car, as 3-4 companies will do at more or less the same time or within a few years of each other, having other great new innovations on top of that will give you an edge.
Solving too much is a fantastic way to crash a project.
We don't know that. We just know that we're not familiar with them. If anything, globular wheels could make some kind of automated steering easier.
And of course, it's obviously not like Apple only tried that design: they tried globular wheels, fat wheels, thinner wheels, wooden wheels, and what have you to see what works better -- like they did when they designed the iPhone, etc.
https://www.cultofmac.com/181782/every-iphone-prototype-appl...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/6/14188624/apple-prototype-i...
Yes, and 'standard wheels' would have saved them time, money and other resources and would have increased the chances of bringing a self driving car to market.
Time from what? It's not some team considering other kinds of wheels was holding back their self-driving researchers...
You seem to have an overly linear and heavy-first concept of how such a development should go.
Time from focusing on the bit that mattered. Anyway, the article linked underscores my point far better than I'm able to do.
The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we have the profession.
Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The first is an exercise in consumer packaging, the second is a serious endeavor in engineering something tremendously difficult from the ground up.
What the vehicle looks like is not important at this stage, what is important is whether it can be done at all with sufficient reliability to let it out of the lab and into the mass market.
When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-focus.