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.