> By the way, recent developments indicate that Apple is back to building an electric self-driving car instead of a self-driving platform.

This is the correct approach, yet a lot of people still haven’t internalized this subtle distinction.

For a self-driving platform to deliver on the promise of being more reliable than a human driver, it has to constantly monitor two environments: its internal environment and its external environment, but most discussions dwell on the external.

External environment failure in the worst case scenario can lead to loss of life. OTOH, internal environment failure can lead to internal inconsistency and in the worst case, a machine shutdown; but because cars share the road with other road users, a sudden failure in one car can lead to multiple car accidents and in a worst case scenario, several lives lost. In a way, the failure outcomes are identical.

An electric car is far less complex than an ICE car meaning there are fewer moving parts and subsystems whose state needs to be kept track of constantly. This is where electric drivetrains hold a lot of promise: a low complexity machine can be made more reliable at a lower cost than a high complexity machine.

So far I’ve listed Waymo and Verily.

What about,

Loon - https://loon.co/

Dandelion - https://dandelionenergy.com/

Wing - https://x.company/wing/

Chronicle - https://chronicle.security/

Malta - https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061

Apple is almost 100% definitively not working on a molten salt energy storage solution I can promise you. And the reason is because it’s just not in it’s corporate structure or culture. Far too constrained / trapped in it’s niche to expand outwards into such a vastly different market.

And you didn't even mention GV, CapitalG and other investment arms. Well forget the others, I am surprised that Google's investments into Oscar, Magic Leap, SpaceX, Impossible, Slack, Stripe,Lyft,Uber, Snap, AirBnb aren't talked about much. I think these can be counted as successful, guaranteed future cash troves. In 10 years, all these are going to be worth a lot. Google should hold onto these. It's like a mini Berkshire hathaway is brewing up.

Some links: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/a-peek-inside-alphabets-in... http://www.gv.com/portfolio/ https://capitalg.com/companies/

And none of these are profitable.

A “successful” product for a profit making company is one that makes money.....

Google hasn’t shown an ability to ptofitably sell anything but ads.

According to numbers that came out during the Oracle lawsuit, even Android has only made Google $31 Billion since its inception.

>Google hasn’t shown an ability to ptofitably sell anything but ads.

The $31B revenue would be huge for almost any company. The magnitude of Google's largest cash cow, a glowing golden cow towering over the farm house, makes their normal-sized livestock look small. Because everything is so insignificant compared to advertisements, Google has killed projects that could be the entire product of a sustainable smaller company.

$31 billion revenue of 8 years? To put that in context, that’s about the same amount of revenue from Apple’s non iPhone business in one quarter.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/11/reminder-apple-financial-...

And that’s $31 billion in revenue not profit.

The profit over 8 years is only $21 billion.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

How many companies make 2.6B/year in profit? Rather, how many startups sell for over 1B? Comparing it to another gigantic business is missing the point in the same way that comparing it against ads is. Google has had many giant successes that only appear small when juxtaposed against unimaginably enormous successes.

So besides Android, what other profitable product have they had? Rumors are that YouTube is still break even.

Consider that Google offers the operating system for free, the software for free, and only charges OEM for optionally including Google's software on their phones, and only recently began selling its own phones...$21 billion of profit is pretty damn big.

Again, Apple has a more diversified revenue stream than Alphabet and it is growing. Contrary to what you are trying to imply, Apple is actually more successful than Alphabet. The difference is they don't tell the world about their internal projects.

> Again, Apple has a more diversified revenue stream than Alphabet and it is growing.

Based on what?

iPhone sales generate 59% of Apple's revenue, while ads generate 86% of Alphabet's revenue.

Hardware sales generate 80% of apples revenue. You can't combine all ads (google vs. other domains) and not combine different hardware types.

Even if we did it that way, Apple still comes out ahead.

Also, that 86% is basically from Google Search ads and YouTube. YouTube's quarterly revenue is estimated to be just under $4 billion. That puts Google Search ads at around 72%, which is still higher than the iPhone's 59%.

The notion that Alphabet's "other" projects succeeded while Apple's languished is completely baseless.

It also includes ad network ads on non google properties (double click and such), which is arguably more diverse than iPhone an iPad.

Google's last quarterly report says 24bn in revenue from Google properties, and ~5bn from non-google properties. If we add in that YT is a separate property too, we get ~60% from Google, ~12% from youtube, ~15% from network, ~14% from hardware/android/cloud.

(I work at Google, but I am using public figures from the Q3 investor relations document and your analyst number for YT revenue).

> Malta’s solution is to store electricity as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed. The key insight behind Malta is that electricity can be stored as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed.

Does nobody proof read these things before they get published?

The grammar is perfectly correct though I think?

Perhaps this portion is what confuses you: stores electricity as heat in "the form of a combination of a" high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid. This would be an explicit wording which might help to clarify things, but is not used due to redundancy.

The 2 consecutive sentence both contain the identical LONG fragment "as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed"