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Re:Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car by briandear on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @10:30AM (#15081784)
They definitely should have not wasted time with multitouch and just used a stylus and a physical keyboard for iPhone. Right? Any time someone says “no stylus” it’s time to refocus right? After all, that just isn’t how portable devices in 2002 already worked?

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.

Re:Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car by jacquesm on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @04:44PM (#15084899)
> 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.

Re:Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car by rothbardrand on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @07:10PM (#15086018)
> They are improved user interfaces over things that already existed.

This is the lie every Apple hater tells themselves to reconcile their hate with the fact that Apple keeps inventing things never before seen.

Re:Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car by dkonofalski on Thursday August 24, 2017 @05:02PM (#15094030)
They also tend to qualify it as "refinement" instead of "invention" because their definition of "innovation" can't include Apple for some dogmatic reason.
Re:Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car by anindha on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @03:50PM (#15084491)
Great analogy. Anything seems impossible before its done, and obvious 5-10 years after it's done.
Re:Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car by rothbardrand on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @07:12PM (#15086032)
Usually about a year after Apple's competitors have introduced a pale imitation, the haters will say it was always obvious.

I once had someone on here tell me that Apple invented nothing for the iPhone because the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey "invented multitouch".