Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc.

The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed to avoid more anti trust issues is often forgotten. Apples products are built on legacies. "Resting on the shoulders of giants" is probably true in this case.

Apple is now an AT&T, its now a Xerox, it is now the company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS). Apple, unlike google, knows how to make a consumer product, and one of these moonshots could make it even bigger...

I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.

Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on R&D but that’s how the game works.

The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.

That said, nowhere on earth had better driving directions on apps since people will notice the bugs on the drive into work and fix them. ;-)

Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.

Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?

Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?

For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.

Unless the thing is "afford housing"

It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.

The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram where you actually do bump into and communicate with new and stimulating people.

Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.

> Interests must align.

That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.

some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have

You must be fun at parties.

Incidentally, one of the scariest things about the volatility in the housing market and in my (lack of) career, is that I may at some point be forced to abandon the neighborhood and city in which I've adopted as my home and in which I've befriended many of these random delightful people of all ages, and they might have to too. They're my community, I see them at the gym, the coffee shop, walking down the street, or at the park. A 1 bedroom condo starts at around $650k CAD, and most of the people here who haven't already owned something for a while depend on renting basements.

If some one asks what I do they'll say "that's neat, must be nice to work from home!" and that's the end of the conversation, we can talk about hobbies or something else instead.

I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.

What part of it is confidential? Its existence? Obviously not. The fact that it uses SLAM? Not confidential, of course it does. That a person was transferred from that to the Vision Pro? Probably also on their linkedin page.

Nothing that OP described this person as saying sounds "stupid" or confidential. Sure, maybe they also said something that was confidential in addition to what was described. Maybe they also insulted your mother. We don't know.

I've known people at Facebook and Microsoft who were working on upcoming not-yet-released products and were free to talk about the products and their roles on them. These people, much like the person we're discussing, worked on upcoming projects which had already been publicly announced.

Of course publicly discussing a confidential project that no one knows about could get someone fired, but that's not the scenario we're talking about.

Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.

Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.

More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.

At my last bigco job, I was advised not to discuss company matters outside of the office.

For others out of loop:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_an...

Maybe the fact that they were moved away from the car project would have been a leak though, depending on what else they said.

Tangentially, it's funny to me that people link to YouTube for podcasts these days.

aka The Innovators Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

The solution the follow up book to this one ^ was to build isolated teams that are flush with the resources/capital of the parents but aren't at the whims, or constant meddling, of the parent company's management class / stockholders / old ideas.

For all the effort Google/Apple/Meta/Xerox/Bell/etc put into their internal moonshot divisions the whole concept mostly hasn't been very successful.

But at the same time they also haven't been great at buying young up and coming startups either, often ruining them the second they arrive by the same impulses which demands R&D moonshot teams be isolated from the host.

I beg to differ; when I was at AT&T in the late eighties we tried to enter the computer business, on the PC side with Olivetti, and on the UNIX side with the 3B2 minicomputers made with our own chips running System V UNIX. I even had a 3B2-200 in my house for a couple of years.

Entering a new business is hard: although the engineering was solid, we didn't have a saleforce trained in selling computers, and we didn't have a rich ecosystem (Oracle! Ingres! Informix!). AT&T didn't throw UNIX out the window, but found that capitalizing on UNIX was hard.

I'm curious what makes you say that about MS? Out of three, I'd actually put MS first and Apple last if for nothing else than Microsoft Research which is like a separate entity in its own strong right (judging from the outside). So many things useless to Microsoft business from them, yet so many many things..

I hope so. That would be a great result, even if the consumer product didn’t land. That said, I would argue that sometimes you do just have to call something and move on. You’re right that Apple is one of the few places that can do research for research sake, but this wasn’t a research project. By all accounts this had a real goal of making and manufacturing a car.

It appears this project was in the works for more than a decade, had numerous stops and starts, leadership and focus changes and if your goal isn’t just research for the sake of research (which I do actually think is demonstrably different from Bell Labs or Xerox Parc which are more akin to things like Microsoft Research and Google X and the like), you need to ship at some point.

I think giving ten years to something like this is definitely a gift and I hope we see fruits from some of the work that went into it other places. But at the same time, there are other moonshots you can try if one doesn’t work out and there is arguably a cost if you keep focused on one idea that isn’t going to pan out for too long. Ten years for a project like this seems like a fair amount of time to try and a fair time to pull the plug.

But the really big stuff all requires working like your future depends on it. They can't do that, so they usually just end up with laundry lists of fancy PoCs.

Even when they work, the rollouts can be glacial at best (eg, Waymo).

Edit: I'm a dumb dumb and the brakes example was bad. I don't edit my mistakes in forums so peoples replies make sense. I still think the rest of the point is valid.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire

I think Apple can provide an emphasis on modularity for the car manufacturers. What if you literally had a place to slip in an iPad as your display? What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets - if not for the drivers, then the passengers. What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements). Another car company could make the shell and the power train. Apple would handle the "experience" and integrate it into its other offerings. Cloud Cars.

> What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets

Or what if the people who wanted that just bought their headset of choice?

> What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements).

Question: when you get into someone else's car, is the first thing you notice the lighting, or is it how clean it is?

I'm sorry but you're getting it completely wrong. Brake by wire isn't legal anywhere in any market of the world and consequently there are zero cars implemented this way - every car currently on sale everywhere has to have a physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes.

Throttle by wire on the other hand - sure. Nearly all new cars only have an electronic throttle.

Steer by wire is making progress, with Lexus making the first road legal car that has a steering wheel that's fully disconnected from the steering rack, with only electronic control.

https://youtu.be/agMrewRJTow?si=DrjfGsrKp5_ZazB-

There isn't a mechanical connection of any kind - the car just relies on triple(!) Backup for every component, including three fully independent power sources.

But isn't there famously brake by wire in toyota EVs? And that physical connection is required as a fallback?

I don't think this is true for most vehicles. Skoda Octavia 2020 for example still has hydraulic brakes. I was going to suggest that no mass-production vehicles use a brake-by-wire system but I would have been wrong, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire

AT&T (owner of Westinghouse and Bell Labs) then proceeded to take their monopoly and patent factory, and started buying up competitors and new small companies. Eating their golden goose in this way is what caused the government to break them up.

Bell Labs was independent for a few years doing... Stuff. Spent their remaining prestige on falsification scandals because of the publish or perish culture this new profit motive created. They were bought by Nokia a few years ago (now called Nokia Bell Labs) and now only employ a couple theoretical physicists last I read. The lab that put into practice the foundations of modern tech (Unix and C are in almost every non-consumer-facing device) just does some Nokia product development nowadays. What a loss.

It wasn't an unspoken agreement. It was an explict one, the Kingsbury Commitment.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

If anything of !35 years of cyberpunk input - and output building shit that spies on you:

Apple is Ono-Sendai and your iPhone is your deck. - the real battle is going to be how much agency does a Human Being have over all PII - all their data?

Your jack-in is your screen. Your data is your ID. But, who are YOU?

Tim will only tell.

...I'll walk myself out now.

Cars were a good candidate, but it sounds like AAPL now thinks that GenAI is a better bet. ChatGPT is such a basic product, that it sounds reasonable that there will be bigger and better products in the future.

Also bad. From the article:

> many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division

So, the people that failed to build a car, when Tesla, Xiaomi, BYD and half a dozen EV startups succeeded, will now fail to build generative AI.

I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build.

Lucky for Apple, generative AI doesn’t need to work for 100% of the cases to be successful, unlike autonomous vehicles, so maybe Apple has a better chance to be successful this time.

> the goal was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle

Otherwise, why release a device like the Apple Vision Pro? It's also very far from the holy grail of AR/VR.

It's very heard to beat the state of the art. It's almost impossible to surpass it by some unbelievable margin. It seems very unlikely that fully autonomous driving was the goalpost for going to market.

Much more likely, the project failed for more mundane reasons -- they figured out their EV would be somewhere between a Tesla and a Mercedes on the luxury scale, but with better integration into the Apple ecosystem. When the market for EVs cooled down and many traditional car companies already launched EVs, it became clear that they're both too late and entering a highly competitive market with small margins.

I’m not sure why everyone thinks that Apple only wanted to create an EV to compete with Tesla or BYD. Given that the Apple execs thought that fully autonomous driving was achievable, it’s possible that Apple wanted to introduce a mobile entertainment pod-type product which may have been relatively lucrative as a premium luxury product at first and later could have become a good product for keeping mindshare when the general public used it for their daily two hour commutes.

But after COVID started the work from home movement, Apple pivoting to a product like Apple Vision Pro makes more sense when the importance of commuting lessened. Peering backwards in time the decisions that Apple made look logical. Now whether Apple can monetize generative AI by leveraging their iDevices market share will determine whether they can make it to a 4T market cap. Apple has a tough mountain to climb going forward since none of these products are sure hits like the iPhone was.

While it may yet happen, the "about to" part of course turned out wrong. There was no AV revolution in the late 2010s, and Apple reportedly pivoting away from self-driving a couple of years ago was probably the actual death knell for the project.

Apple making an AV in the middle of the self-driving revolution makes sense; Apple making just a nice EV in a very crowded market does not.

I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.

And that’s the thing. Apple does really well at attainable luxury consumer goods. I think it does less well the higher the price point and market segmentation. Hence why the $10,000 Apple Watch didn’t work (and that was for lots and lots of reasons, first and foremost I think a misunderstanding of why watch enthusiasts spend so much on watches).

But putting that aside, partnerships (dealers) make up the car market for everyone with the exception of Tesla, and although with enough time and money, Apple could absolutely build out their own network, unlike Apple Stores, where they had a solid 5 years to a decade to really grow (coincidentally timed to Apple’s rise as a consumer giant) into that infrastructure, they’d need to have that basically day one for a car. Which is my whole point about it being overhead/capital intensive. Even Tesla had a chance to grow over time as it was a new company and not expected to sell and service cars everywhere. Apple would have a difficult time, I think, releasing a car and saying it could only be bought and serviced in select cities. The stakes are higher the bigger you are.

It isn’t that I don’t think Apple could do these things. It’s that I don’t think Apple could do them at the scale and margins at which it has based its business on. Especially if the net result is growing $100b in market cap. Apple added $1T to its market cap in 2 years (2018 to 2020) and another briefly in 2023 (current is $2.82T). I think there are far less intensive ways to add $100b to the bottom line than to become a car company.

I didn't realize Apple literally wrote a book on the subject. Sounds interesting, what's the title?

They could maybe sell 4k cars a year and increase their market cap by $100B (~3.5%).

You could potentially have some shop hand build them and not have crazy cap-ex or infrastructure.

I don't think Apple was planning to take on Tesla in the mass market - that would've been a pretty strange move, I agree.

See what Rimac did, it is a good example that starting a luxury sports car company and be successful is possible nowadays, and talking from the ignorance it seems to me easier than the past. If that is what apple wants or needs is a different story.

What Rimac did was partner with big automotive OEMs for research joint ventures and sell a tiny number of cars and a relatively large amount of battery and drivetrain tech to other OEMs. Difficult to imagine anything less like Apple's business model than that.

They might position themselves as an aspirational brand outside the US, and by keeping retail prices close to the same as in the US, no matter the local purchasing power, I can see how they can be perceived as an upscale brand in some markets.

So now, instead of buying things twice because the one was shit, I just buy Apple. I don’t buy “the iPhone”. I buy “iPhone”. It could be 99% more expensive, it’s still less than buying things twice.

I have similar concerns about the Apple Vision Pro, given its small yields and current high ASP/muted demand, but at least there you can see the vision (pun unavoidable) of how it could eventually be an iPad-sized business or greater. A car only works if you do go after Tesla and Mercedes and BMW, etc.

I just don’t see any reason Apple would enter any business if not to take it on as a mass market player. Selling a $10,000 variant of a $500 watch is one thing (and that strategy failed, for what it’s worth), selling a low quantity machine that you still have to maintain and support that isn’t part of your core competency as a company is something else entirely.

And all mass-produced in incredible numbers.

A low volume $250k car would be pure luxury for the sake of it. That's not Apple's market.

Apple's market would be a $50k Tesla killer with far better styling and build quality and some attempt at a game-changing killer feature, all bundled with cross-marketing for other walled-garden products.

I'm not surprised that turned out to be impossible - for now.

It isn't the only way to break in, but it is common.

I'd love some retro apple "lifestyle" gear, throwback porsche racing jacket would be clutch right now with the yoots

I’ll admit that I’ve stopped at plenty of Apple stores while traveling, simply because they’re nearby. They’re usually in very nice locations for tourists (5th av, grand central station, etc) and I can totally see them dramatically improving brand appeal and catering to fanboys with localized tee shirts or Apple Watch bands or polishing cloths or any number of other gimmicks.

Oh and their retro stuff would sell out in an instant. Their 80s stuff was cool.

That was the case until SUV release. Ferrari announced plans to limit SUV sales, but that wont last in light of what Lamborghini is doing.

And Apple is showing off parts of Car Play that could be fully integrated by manufacturers in a much deeper way, assuming they want to give up control (which given GM’s decision to drop Car Play and Android Auto, seems like it’ll be a challenge).

There is certainly a world where Apple could be a modern QNX unencumbered by its parent company baggage and a better business model (ongoing subscription and not 50-cents a car or whatever it is QNX gets) and provide the software for all that stuff, but based on everything that has been reported, that wasn’t what Apple was doing here. They were trying to build a real car. And as challenging and interesting as that might be as an R&D exercise, I just don’t see why that would be a business you’d willingly want to enter when you are so successful in other areas and the margins are so poor.

It makes sense for companies like Netflix to shy away from the Apple "walled garden." They want to deliver a unique experience with exclusive content, not just be another content supplier to the Apple experience. They don't want to wind up like the record companies.

But car manufacturers? There's a whole lot of stuff going on w.r.t. your driving experience. Like driving. Hundreds of physical things. Etc. Unlike the media industry I can't think of a future where the car companies eventually find themselves subsumed by allowing CarPlay integration.

Then again, I can't tell what's the main fear... if car companies are scared of getting iTunes'd, or if they really just want that revenue from 5% of car buyers paying for the Premium GM Infotainment Experience Recurring Subscription or whatever.

The small margin GM gets on its cars is buffered by the revenue splits it gets with Sirius XM and the various call for assistance services. Sirius revenue is on the decline because everyone listens to Spotify on their phone. The GPS revenue stream died with Google Maps on phones. So they have to try to lock in those fees where they can. See also: BMW selling a subscription to unlock features like heated seats.

Now, I think this backfires for GM. I think way more people will not buy new cars if they lack Android Auto or Car Play than they think. I also think that it will be harder to maintain the apps and services than GM thinks. When Ford was doing its partnership with Microsoft 15 years ago (and then they took it in-house because Microsoft Connect or whatever it was called was buggy as hell), I think that made a lot of sense. But it was also expensive to do and so you saw the car companies offload a lot of those details to Apple and Google via a QNX or other middleware layer. Tesla built its own software as sort of a foundational part of the car experience, and I think it has worked well for them. I don’t have the same confidence in GM.

The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system. But I bet Apple and Google would insist on 30% of that revenue (at least).

    The thing is, if GM just made a $30 a month connected car 
    subscription package to unlock Car Play and 5G assistance 
    or whatever, I think they’d sell tons of it. People would 
    complain but I know that I would pay the money in a second 
    versus trying to pair my phone with a non-Car Play infotainment system

I really can't imagine significant numbers of people paying for it and I don't know that a 5G bundle makes any sense. I don't understand why anybody would want their car to have it's own 5G connection when they already have their 5G phone in their pocket.

Even my elderly borderline-technophobe parents are able to understand (with some effort) the concept of CarPlay since it's more or less the existing phone interface that they're used to.

Maybe the real killer issue is that on one hand, clearly many people value CarPlay enough to pay for it. But it has always been free, and will continue to be free from quite a few other auto makers, and that's a big obstacle to getting anybody to pay for it. That has historically been difficult for any sort of good or service...

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I seem to recall that it was killed once before?

https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/2/16/8045625/jo...

> It’s one thing to create a new [lower-margin business], it’s another to purposefully take it on as a business line when your existing business groups prints money and have 40%+ margins.

While I agree that this plan didn't fit with any of Apple's strengths, as a general principle good companies plan for margin erosion. In fact failure to do this is a classic failure described in The Innovator's Dilemma, where you're leaving room for a disruptor to grow. Or as Sun used to put it: "if someone's going to show up and eat our lunch, it should be us who does that"

But a car...SMH

Generally, the closer you are to "people will die if this code has a bug," the more regulated the industry.

People that don't work in a heavily regulated space vastly underestimate the constraints. It's hard enough to create a product that's beautiful and works well at a price point that the market will bear, but it's often near-impossible to do all this while also complying with all the regulations of all the markets in which you intend to sell your product.

It takes a tremendous amount of commitment, money, and time, and companies that aren't used to working within snail's pace regulatory environments quickly lose focus and the projects sputter out.

Waymo and Baidu can credibly claim they have the people and track record to do this thing. Apple isn't anywhere close.

They could hire people with the expertise, but Apple is allergic to growing engineering expertise outside of Cupertino.

Then again, that isn't necessarily working out perfectly well for Fisker.

Probably, but who knows with Apple. I suppose they could have created a cheap Citroen Ami type thing with some cool tech and just doubled the price because it's Apple. I would assume they got into it because they saw a product with good margins.

If you think about it cars are poorly designed for the average journey. They tend to be designed for that one time you actually need to drive 300km, or the one time a year you need to fit 5 people in the car, or the one time you need to load 3 suitcases in the boot. And in America they're also way too big for no good reason.

Apple more than anyone might have been able to experiment with the conventional car design perhaps.

But we don't really know what they were trying to do do we? I think you assuming that they were just trying to create another low margin electric car company to compete the likes of Tesla and Ford is probably wrong though.

Only if they were to sell vehicles. I think it's more likely they were planning on having a fleet of self driving cars.

I mean, for Apple, it absolutely makes sense.

Electric vehicles are relatively straightforward to make. Everyone and their mother are producing some sort of electric scooter/dirt bike these days with new companies popping up every month. Furthermore Tesla has proven that for a lot of people a car is simply an appliance.

Apple could easily outsource most of the functional development and design and certification, and then focus on their core competency which is aesthetics and marketing and integration into iOS ecosystem, which would be a winning combo economically.

Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?

If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.

Take a car with 4 motors, 1 per wheel (which is the best arrangement). The total list of moving parts.

- wheels - suspension linkage - driveshafts - brakes - pedals - windows - wipers - coolant pump - washer fluid pump - seats - frunk/trunk

Thats the list of moving parts. Dunno where you got 1000 moving parts from. Most each one of those has reliable manufacturers that have figured out how to build them correctly.

Reliable manufactures? Auto suppliers are notorious for being unreliable - the supply chains are exceedingly complex, there's constant pressure to drive down cost and quality control lapses are a constant issue.

Not to mention each vehicle has hundreds of different suppliers and an issue in any one of them will grind your manufacturing line to a standstill.

In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind.

In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't moved the market much. But the risk is that generative AI is a paradigm shift that will unlock some game changing capability that could catch Apple off guard.

Same story with Microsoft and Copilot on the desktop.

If your two primary competitions are doing similar things then you start paying attention.

And what characteristics does the phone look for? It could just be sitting on someone’s lap or held in a way that cannot see the outside or the steering wheel.

Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?

I’d wager this cancellation is purely due to there being no chance in hell Apple could get the Apple premium for it when vehicle sales are stagnating due to massive price increases.

IOW Apple could easily charge their customary 20-30% margin and create fierce brand loyalty by just looking at whatever it is BMW is doing and doing the opposite in nearly every situation.

My point was simply that I don’t think an Apple car would sell for a notably different price than other premium brands.

Right. The electric car business took a wrong turn when most of the players decided that electric cars were a premium product that could be sold with huge margins. Tesla started there, and it seemed to be working for them. This led to excesses such as the electric Hummer, a 9,000 pound vehicle with sports car acceleration and a price in 6 figures. It's a great engineering achievement but a silly product. It also led to electric versions of vehicles having a price premium around US$10,000 over the same model with internal combustion.

Then Tesla exhausted the fanboy market. Reality ensued. Price mattered. Tesla had to start offering discounts.

This is a big problem for some major car companies that bought into the high margin myth. Ford should have known better. Stellantis' CEO was running around saying that they were going to get margins like tech companies, partly by adding on aftermarket fees. That didn't work out.

Electric cars are doing just fine, and prices are coming down. That's a good thing. BYD gets this.

Having to compete on price scares Apple.