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Comment by Crash0v3rid3 | Hacker News Reader

Unless I misread this deal seems to only cover shuttling for their employees. I think Apple has realized how far behind they are in this area and I'm not sure what they can do at this point to keep up with Waymo and others.

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Do they need a self driving car? Facebook isn't building one. Amazon isn't building one.

I can see why a self driving car appeals to Apple since Apple's expertise is integrating software and hardware in a high quality way but I don't see this as something the need to do to not be left behind.

Neither of those companies has the cash reserves Apple has at its disposal. Nor the expertise in hardware software integration. There’s lots of things Apple can do with their cash, gaining a foothold in a data rich industry of the future is one of the more obvious ones.

An even more obvious one would be bringing their hardware up to the same spec as their competitors and fixing macOS...

> Amazon isn't building one

Amazon is working on it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/12/intel-cisco-and-amazon-intro...

I’m not sure what they can do to keep up with the Nomad or Treo.

Building a self-driving car is vastly more complex and comes with a lot more regulatory problems than building a competitor to the Nomad. Also, Apple has had trouble recruiting top AI talent, among other reasons due to their secrecy in a field where publishing is everything. Though, they have opened up a bit.

I am not saying it can't be done. But Apple has been quite bad at machine learning so far.

I don't think that they are bad, just that their focus is more on the product holistically than as a standout feature. i.e. machine learning is a means to an end, not the end in itself. Whereas Google, Amazon etc sells products and services like GCP, AWS Recognition etc. Naturally they would like to market themselves as being the experts, and have the credentialed professionals to do so.

> I’m not sure what they can do to keep up with the Nomad or Treo.

Wait for someone to walk in the door with a design that Philips rejected?

They can spend a pile of money on an acquisition, but that’s about it.

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