News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm. Parent comment

Re:Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm by paxys on Thursday January 05, 2023 @02:25PM (#34265123)
They were already the market leader in computers and portable devices (iPod), plus "smartphone" was a very recent and underdeveloped sector to begin with (existing products were all focused on business use cases and no end consumer had one). Very different from cars.

Look at all their other efforts to enter areas with a dominant player. People were saying Spotify was doomed when Apple Music launched, yet it has barely has an impact (even though Apple had a massive amount of expertise and industry connections in music). Their social network (Ping) was an instant failure. Hopepod couldn't compete with Echo and Sonos. They tried multiple times to get into video gaming and went nowhere (Pippin, Arcade). iAd was dead in the water when it tried to compete with Google and Facebook. Same with Maps, MobileMe. Heck they are even having trouble with a wireless charging pad, and have basically conceded the market to Qi.

Dominance in one sector rarely extends to an unrelated one regardless of how many billions you throw at the problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm by nebula8804 on Thursday January 05, 2023 @05:51PM (#34268103)
>Heck they are even having trouble with a wireless charging pad, and have basically conceded the market to Qi.

Do you own any Magsafe devices? Their Magsafe implementation is like magic and its extremely practical. It (among many other things) has essentially locked me into iPhone ecosystem for good.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm by paxys on Thursday January 05, 2023 @07:08PM (#34268943)
Magsafe (the iPhone one) = Qi + magnets. There is nothing "magic" about it. You can even get non-Apple branded wireless chargers that have replicated the functionality. The new Qi2 standard will also have this built-in (with help from Apple in fact). It is hardly some revolutionary new product area or source of revenue for the company.

Meanwhile AirPower was in announced in 2017 and has still failed to materialize.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm by nebula8804 on Sunday January 15, 2023 @08:04AM (#34389099)
Is it implemented as standard in any series of Android phones? As far as I have seen, it is standard on the entire iPhone line 12 and up(minus the old iphone 8 design used in SE). Thats three generations and it has spawned a whole ecosystem of products that utilize the functionality(my favorite being the magnetic car mount/charger). Its magic because they managed to implement it extremely well + make this ecosystem possible due to their decision of rolling it out nearly complete product wide which helps expand the third party ecosystem. As a user, I measure how magical something is by how much better it makes my life and let me tell you, this implementation has been amazing. It is the third Apple thing I have called "magical" in the last 5 years. The other two being the Airpods Pro(again amazing implementation) + the M series chips(the speed and snappiness has made me impressed with a new computer for the first time in a long time).

I once had a similar solution with the Nexus 5(the last Android phone I bought new before I tried an iPhone and subsequently never looked back). This phone had some sort of magnetic charging system that combined with a third party car mount. Unfortunately the implementation sucked as many times it would fail to begin charging and once in a while some freak accident would happen where it would charge but the phone would get scary burning hot and then overheat. When this happened, the stupid phone starts to throttle and nothing is responsive anymore, not even the damn ability to power down the phone. Real great having to correct this issue when im supposed to be driving the damn car. The Nexus5 was the poster child for all that was wrong with Android.

>Meanwhile AirPower was in announced in 2017 and has still failed to materialize.

Why would this matter to me? I'm pleased with the solutions Apple has already provided. If they can't deliver something then I'm not going to call that particular thing magical but the magsafe in the phones is shipping and it is in fact magical.

[ Parent | on HN ]