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Comment by egd | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space.

They've made a trillion dollar business out of small, high-margin electronics that consumers replace every couple year. Most of their products serve to enhance this business model or have high complementarity from a technology standpoint. The self-driving car project feels like an incredibly expensive diversion from this core business with limited technological overlap to their existing product lines. I'm trying not to see this as "Post-Jobs Apple finally jumps the shark," but I'm just not getting what the vision here is.

This isn't snark, by the way - I'd really love to hear a good model for what they're doing.

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> I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space.

Many people didn't understand their move into MP3 players or mobile phones, either.

If you take a step back, Apple is an "affordable luxury" technology products company with a heavy emphasis on design and user experience.

In the luxury and "affordable luxury" tiers, cars are technology products with a heavy emphasis on design and user experience.

Apple knows that smartphones, as we know them today, are likely to be an anachronism by 2030. The market for transportation is large enough to be interesting as a potential source of revenue when the iPhone cash cow falters.

I was surprised by the last paragraph. What kind of device or system of devices do you think will fully replace the current concept of a smartphone?

AR and wearables?

> What kind of device or system of devices do you think will fully replace the current concept of a smartphone?

Today, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad provide different "lenses" on my digital self + my digital stuff. If I run an errand without my phone, I can still make phone calls, text my wife, play my music, etc.

Things like CarPlay, Apple TVs, and HomePods are other lenses. CarPlay happens to need an iPhone now, but something wearable will be enough to power CarPlay at some point. Eventually, cars will have enough native computing power and connectivity that they won't require a proxy device to work.

By 2030 I expect AR smart glasses to be fairly common, hopefully with less-conspicuous options for people who don't need vision correction. Maybe they'll be powerful enough on their own, or work more like CarPlay and require a wearable complement. Additionally, voice user interfaces will continue to evolve and work with all of these lenses.

TLDR: Instead of today's "hero device" model, I think we're moving toward an "many devices" model.

Implants, I bet. Maybe not by 2030. But even 11-12 years is a long time, when stuff is developing exponentially.

I wonder if the fact there will be no effective antibiotics by 2030 will influence people's decisions to put foreign bodies under their skin.

That is a good point. But again, a decade is a long time now.

We are always a decade away from complete destruction of civilization...

With a full global nuclear exchange, I would say more like 15 minutes.

With any luck, we are always at least a decade away from "a full global nuclear exchange" :)

True.

More like two minutes I hear?

https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%...

OK, sure. But then, it's been minutes away from Midnight on the Doomsday Clock since the late 40s, no? I do remember being in Moscow, when Reagan's joke about bombing the Soviet Union went public. Everyone pretty much knew it was a joke, given what a funny guy he was, but still it was freaky. And I was in Helsinki during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's not that far from Leningrad (as we knew it then). So now? The fear has worn off, pretty much, and the chances are good that I'll die of something far more mundane. But one never knows. And WTF, seeing a fireball up close and personal would be cool.

Once there’s a socially accepted high quality AR solution you basically don’t need screens anymore. Your wrist is your smartwatch, your palm is your smartphone, the air over your desk is your PC screen, every object in the world can be a smart device, and every face an infographic.

The challenges are (1) miniaturizing, (2) input devices and (3) social acceptance, but as far as I can see AR as the universal display technology is inevitable. Not sure though on the time frame and whether it will be glasses, lenses or implants.

I understood this not as that smartphones will be replaced, but that they will reach a plateu where few people will have a desire to upgrade or to pay the apple premium over cheaper devices. I'd say it's very clear that this is starting to happen already.

Honestly, I agree with @saagarjha further down thread - I think things like AR and personal assistants are much closer to their core model.

Grant the MP3 comparison, though - and that's why I'm trying to understand this. They've got smarter people than me pushing for this.

That said, I do agree the idea that they're fundamentally a company good at making high-tech, well manufactured items cheaper and at a larger scale than anyone else can and extrapolating that to luxury cars as a market is a reasonable and possibly sufficient view of this.

Another way to look at it is that the entire relationship to personal transportation is going to be reinvented over the coming decades. It's going to be very profitable. And who knows where it will take us. I understand why lots of companies are betting the farm on it.

Good point. What are people going to do when they’re sitting in their autonomous vehicles? Probably a great time to display an ad for the week’s best selling AR game.

What do commuters do now while using mass transportation? Read the news, read ads or social media, talk, work. You could say that Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Samsung are already big in the “autonomous” section, in that they already provide the information, entertainment and work environment for commuters who do not drive to work.

I think it’s only natural that those companies want to get in on the autonomous car industry, at least for the software side. I’m thinking that it might be more likely that companies who do hardware have a greater interest in it, but so far, from the 3 companies with a hardware side; Samsung mainly, but also Apple and Microsoft, only Apple seems to be putting research into autonomous cars. (I have too little knowledge about Huawei and other Chinese companies to know if they have the same possible reasons or approach)

Perhaps driving to work is mostly an American thing and Samsung and Microsoft see the world going more towards increasing remote work, increasing mass transportation.

It’ll be interesting to see the development. Maybe I will still be alive in 30 years to look back on this comment and see what happened.

I'd like to see how all this tech battles motion sickness. Like many people I think, reading while riding in cars/buses gives me motion sickness. This doesn't happen aboard trains.

With an AR windshield, you could put the content in the real world. Instagram posts could show up on fake billboards, or tweets could appear to be written on the road. Then you wouldn't get sick because what your inner ear feels matches visual input, but you could still consume your content.

I thought all that people do is listen to podcasts. I usually ride the bus (and listen to podcasts), but when I do drive and suffer through 45 minutes of bumper to bumper boredom interspersed with terror, I listen to podcasts. It's a bad day when driving if I forget to setup my podcasts in order.

There should be a startup opportunity for a smart scheduler, combined with voice integration. There are three types of things to listen to (corpuses?): music, a book or similar on tape, or podcasts. If I'm listening to a book, I probably want to continue listening. I want voice recognition to switch between them. 'play abbey road" already works in my car, but I can't continue the book i'm listening to. I can't ask for my usual daily podcasts - marketplace morning report for 5 minutes, then NY Times the daily, maybe a nasa podcast or something about politics, then yesterday's marketplace morning.

I don’t see why this is downvoted — when self driving cars are a reality the car windshield hud will become one of the highest value “displays” around. The computing infrastructure to support this display will also be highly controlled compared to previous generation consumer computing hardware — I think the only model for computing on this surface will be “walled garden”s — if Apple doesn’t want to be locked out of this interface they’ll have to build their own platform for it.

>"affordable luxury"

It always surprises me when Apple is described that way, this is an oxymoron.

It goes to show how great their PR is.

>"affordable luxury"

> It always surprises me when Apple is described that way

I realized this was true when I noticed low wage workers (McDonalds/Dunkin Donuts drive thru staff) on their iPhones and with their Apple Watches on their wrists, folks making right around minimum wage. You might not be able to afford a starter home, or a nice vehicle, or your student loans, but by god all of us could afford an iPhone on a 24 month payment plan (~$20-30/month).

Apple's marketing and brand is invaluable.

I doubt that's why. They were able to get one.for what felt like cheap by signing a contract. People who don't have money generally don't buy Macs. You can get 5 Dell notebooks for the price of a single $999 macbookair. Of course I'd by the air but I know plenty of working class people that wouldn't dream of spending 5x on a notebook PC which they will basically only use to browse the net, watch YouTube and shop on amazon

I am pretty sure neither "affordable" nor "luxury" is the part of their PR.

It is not an oxymoron. An item can be simultaneously seen as "affordable" and "luxurious". Since it's just a phone, anyone can save up enough money given enough time and/or external sources of money (e.g. parents), but that doesn't mean it's cheap (not luxurious) - "cheap luxury" would make an oxymoron, but this is merely "affordable".

le million' Piece Unique is a luxury phone (and a terrible idea). Mass market products are not luxury.

Mp3s and mobile phones made sense because apple had tech that nobody else had. The touchscreen and allowing tons of music to be stored were gamechangers. I dont think apple has anything up there sleeve here, just trying to compete in a segment they are already behind on.

The original iPod didn't have a touchscreen.

Do we have actual fully-autonomous* cars sold today?

No.

So by definition Apple can’t be behind of nothing.

*Tesla "autopilot" which require all time human supervision clearly doesn’t count as of now.

They can be behind on R&D. Not saying they are, but advantage starts years before it gets to market.

Only people under heavy Non Disclosure Agreement could assert that any of the competiting company is leading/behind in terms of R&D. An no such people would be foolish enough to comment about that publicly. Big money and strategic informations are at stack.

Conversely if any company brag about it’s leading mastery without delivering this should be considered as a PR stunt until proven otherwise.

The iPod had less disk space and lacked features other players had. It was a hit mostly because it was easy to use and looked good.

The scroll wheel. Every other player was a 'techie' device back then. I had a couple other MP3 players at the time; the entire experience from loading songs onto it to navigating around the UI with awkward buttons was annoying at best.

The iPod's simple UI, coupled with easy iTunes integration, made it head and shoulders above the rest... though the first few iterations were quite expensive compared to the competition.

It also came after iTunes, and would just basically sync your entire iTunes library (few people had more than 5GB music back then) including artist, song title, etc. in mere minutes (over FireWire). It had amazing ease of use, and a great UI.

The iPod had a smaller form factor than competing hard drive mp3 players.

Apple has enough money that it doesn't matter if this research is not successful. At least they want to try this, if the result is good enough they may eventually release a car. If not, they will just consider as a lost research cost.

If Apple doesn't expect to achieve a satisfactory return on investment they shouldn't enter a new business area, regardless of their liquid assets ('money reserves').

If expected ROI is too low they should return the money to investors (share buyback or dividends) and let investors choose a different investment with better prospects by themselves.

And, just like that ... The "Principal-Agent problem"[1] makes an entrance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

If Apple made decisions that way, I suspect they wouldn't have done as well as they did. While I'm sure they did plenty of research beforehand, their biggest successes don't strike me as products where 'a satisfactory return on investment' was certain or predictable enough to optimize for.

Apple doesn't have a history of developing products and then not releasing them.

How do you know that? Apple has historically been very secretive about their development

I think you are right, luxury cars would make Apple tons of profit.

Especially now that car makers manufacture very few of the parts that actually make something a car. There is a whole network of suppliers that make wheels, brakes, control arms, struts, transmissions, differentials, basically all the bits that make something travel down the road. Car makers only really kept engines and final assembly. Engines will give way to electric motors and will be extremly easy to commoditize since they already are. The car industry shed nearly all its manufacturing due to labour costs. They assumed the high cost of starting a car company and the complex safety regulations would prevent anyone else from joining the industry.

Apple is extremly skilled at collecting a tons of parts suppliers, giving them extreme specifications while simultaneously buying up their entire output, and creating an incredibly polished product.

The final reason apple is wanting to make a car is driving experience is now largely driven by software. The basic suspension geometry has to be decent and the mechanicals can't leave you stranded, but the basic day to day interaction with your car is now all software. Apple is great at software, they are a software company. None of the car manufacturers are great at software. They have all become good enough to get by. Is there anyone out there who thinks Apple won't blow the auto industry away at simple but powerful UI?

Car manufacturing hasn't been this easy to disrupt since the original brands moved out of sheds in the early 20th century. Tesla has joined the game but is struggling with manufacturing scale, something that has always protected the big car makers. Apple is unbelievably good at manufacturing scale, they have endless cash available, and they have a ton of software components to leverage already in use by hundreds of millions of people. Sounds like a winner to me.

On the other hand, Apple's design mistakes have proven extraordinarily disappointing and costly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8). That type of performance with a 40 times more expensive product could decimate their offshore savings in years.

The main reason why Apple would be interested in self-driving cars is eyeballs. If we believe that self-driving cars are inevitable, whatever the timeframe, consumers will have a lot more free time while they are commuting, and guess what they'll do during that free time?

That's right, they're going to want to watch movies, play games, and fiddle with apps, preferably on a big screen in their car. And guess who needs to be on those big screens in the car to stay relevant? That's right, carOS needs to be on that big screen in the car, or Apple should just cede the market to Google and accept inevitable irrelevance.

This is an extremely strategic play that will develop over the next 10-20 years as more and more transportation is completely automated and large screens become ubiquitous.

> If we believe that self-driving cars are inevitable

I am a programmer and I would never ever get in a self-driving car if I had a choice. I don't trust other programmers, I don't know if a backdoor has been put in by someone, and I don't want to get into a vehicle that can be hacked.

I believe self-driving cars will be a catastrophic failure.

Do you not get into regular cars where safety features are controlled by software? (That is, any car from the last 30 years?)

There's a big difference in user control between safety features and a self-driving car.

I mean, not really. You're already trusting software to decide how your car should steer (automatic lane keeping), brake (automatic emergency braking), and accelerate (adaptive cruise control).

You're assuming people actually use those features.

Is there anybody driving a car that does not use acceleration and braking? I could understand your argument for lane control, but otherwise your argument makes zero sense. Everyone's car is controlled by software, period.

The person you were replying to was talking about adaptive cruise control and automatic breaking. The majority of cars on the road do not have those features. Very different than plain acceleration and braking and much more likely to have glitches.

Braking systems are controlled by a dedicated embedded software system that's extremely well-understood and well-tested (probably even formally verified). All it does is check the ABS (and anti-skid) sensors and moderate the braking pressure to avoid locking the wheels. It also has a fail-safe system that gets rigorously tested, e.g. if a sensor fails. All possible values of all inputs are known, and the configurational space of those inputs is small enough that you can exhaustively test correctness.

It's plainly obvious that a braking system controller software is a very different beast from an autonomous car software, and I have no problem understanding why someone would trust th former and not the latter.

> Braking systems are controlled by a dedicated embedded software system that's extremely well-understood and well-tested (probably even formally verified).

Are you sure? That code is closed source, and the peek behind the curtain we saw with Toyota's investigation did not inspire confidence:

http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende...

That's a really interesting article for sure. But it does highlight that Toyota was being unusual in not following industry-wide (voluntary) coding standards for safety-critical embedded systems in cars, and they ended up losing big in court. So I do think (hope) that this example is worst-case, not normal.

Those are not in every car from the last 30 years.

I mean more like... brakes.

Which are also controlled by software. That’s literally what an ABS is.

ABS saved me once from a big accident. I have heard\read about this feature before, but man practically seeing it, operating in front of your eyes - was just like beaming a torch through the darkness

Yeah we are in agreement :)

I’m a programmer and I would have absolutely no problem getting in a self driving car even at the level of current Waymo in Phoenix right now. I wouldn’t trust a car on that level to drive me around a windy cliff road when it’s snowing yet, but as is if I were in Arizona I already trust those Waymo-level cars more than my buddy who might not be paying attention 100% of the time.

If you don't trust the abilities of other people, who do you think is currently driving cars? You are trusting everyone else on the road with your life every time you get in a car.

You ever look at other drivers when you are stuck in traffic? You will see people looking at their phones. You will see people eating. You will see people shaving. You will see people doing their makeup. You will see people reading books. You will see people with dogs on their laps. And that is just the people who might accidentally kill you due to carelessness. Vehicular suicide is more common than most people expect and there is no telling if you might be collateral damage in one of those collisions.

Self driving cars don't have to be perfect to be dramatically safer than human drivers.

Comment deleted. I would have been happy to discuss the point in a calm and respectful manner. But I don't appreciate being accused of intellectual dishonesty and being told that what I said was "ridiculous".

And "buff neck", really? What did that have to do with anything I said, except as a way to shut down the conversation?

You're being incredibly intellectually dishonest with yourself here. Suggesting that shaving makes you swivel your head and become more aware of traffic is akin to suggesting that shoulder checking during lane changes is going to give you a buff neck. It's ridiculous.

> Self driving cars don't have to be perfect to be dramatically safer than human drivers.

This statement is technically correct, but it severely downplays how close to perfect the autonomous cars have to be to be significantly better than human-driven cars.

If you look at European countries, current statistics are around 2 fatalities per billion km. The US is around twice that number. Either way it's actually a quite safe mode of transportation.

In fact, if you compare it to travelling by train, the average over European train travel over the past decade is around 0.2 deaths per billion passenger km. Trains are driven by professionals, still accidents happen.

In other words, the fatality rate for cars per billion passenger-kilometers is in the same order of magnitude as for trains driven by professional drivers. How much do you really expect autonomous cars to be able to improve on that?

Technically that's one order of magnitude difference between the the 2 fatalities per billion km and the 0.2 figure.

The units are different though, 2 is per billion vehicle-km and the 0.2 is per billion people-km. The average number of people in a car is greater than 1.

Going from 2 to 0.2 deaths per billion km (a 10x improvement in safety!) would be an enormous success for autonomous vehicles. Globally, that would save hundreds of thousands of lives every year. Often the lives of innocent passengers and pedestrians.

First of all, it's closer to 5x (you have to divide the car number by the average number of passengers in a vehicle).

Second of all, I agree a 5x improvement would be impressive. But that's the level of a professional driver on a closed, dedicated track. I don't think autonomous vehicles will reach that level anytime soon.

I was going to post earlier that IMO the level they should be aiming at is that of a brilliant racer, otherwise who needs them.

There was a vid on here recently of the Porsche 919 beating the lap record at the Ring, and one of the comments was "I don't have the balls to drive that fast in a video game" such is the skill level of humans at the wheel-a few to be sure, but still and all there it is.

Here's the vid btw. And it is ridiculous...

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmSUHhP3ug"

For what it's worth I find the Nurburgring record lap done last year with an Alfa Giulia even more ridiculous (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gEdJmIVqLY). The 919 is a unique super-car while the Giulia QF is almost a "normal" car, which one can see parked while shopping at Whole Foods.

Fine share!

An autonomous driving AI doesn't need to perform like a professional racing driver in order to improve safety.

The causes of most crashes are human fallibilities that AI doesn't suffer from:

An AI isn't tempted to drive drunk. It isn't distracted by incoming text messages. It doesn't get fatigued after driving for hours late at night. It doesn't suffer from road rage, and it isn't tempted to drive aggressively and take risks because it's running late for work. Just by avoiding these issues you've made driving a lot safer!

An AI also has reaction times that no human can match, has no blind spots and can track other vehicles in 360 degrees at once, and "see" through fog and rain using radar to detect obstacles.

Conversely, some of the things that are easy for humans are also the most difficult for AI to grasp: the social cues that we use to resolve pathing conflicts (eye contact, a wave, a blink of the headlights, etc), or our ability to intuitively predict the behaviour of other road users.

So while we may be some way yet from true, socially-accepted Level 5 autonomy, we're not far at all from semi-autonomous, driver-assistance technologies that significantly improve safety.

What you say about the AI vision is true in the best case. But frequently we encounter the worst case. How many times have you had a stone chip your windshield? On a Level 5 car, a stone hitting the Lidar means best case you're broken down on the highway, worst case you're having an accident because the car can't steer properly. A whiteout on a road with L5 autonomous cars would mean you have potentially hundreds of people completely stuck in a blizzard, emergency services would be overwhelmed.

And incidentally, many of the human problems are being solved without autonomous driving. Modern cars already have systems to detect that you're falling asleep and pull the car gently over. People are working on in-cabin online breathalyzers, which will detect alcohol in the air and make the driver blow into the straw to verify (s)he's not drunk (just a passenger). Better integration of phones with cars (CarPlay, Android Auto) and voice input will make texting-while-driving less convenient than just talking to the car with your eyes on the road.

Don't get me wrong, many of the new driver assistant safety features are great. Stuff like blind zone warning and auto emergency stop for pedestrians is awesome. But I think where we are now (autonomous highway driving in good conditions) will be the approximately the endpoint for autonomous cars in the foreseeable future. I think none of us will live to see L5 cars (without any steering wheel at all) on the road.

Where did you get 0.2 deaths per billion passenger km?

The EU typically cites a value of 0.14 for the EU-28. Numbers are (statistically) worse in the least developed EU members, and better in more developed ones. For example in both the UK and Germany it was 0.06 in the last two year periods I looked at.

So how much can we improve? Well apparently a LOT.

Cars are already mostly software controlled drive by wire systems. Self driving cars will also be easily safer than meat bucket controlled ones. You should try roding a bicycle regularly. It's scary how bad people are at driving. Most shouldn't be on the road. It's like they think what they learned to pass their test isn't relevant one you have your license.

How are cars drive by wire? Sure, newer cars have electric power steering, but I would guess that 99% of cars older than 10 years use hydraulic power steering and brakes.

Even then, it takes very little software to do electric power steering, so I'm not sure how you would consider this at all comparable to autonomous driving.

> Self driving cars will also be easily safer than meat bucket controlled ones.

This is a pretty generous assumption you're granting here.

We’re already granting the assumption that these self driving cars are generally popular. For that to be the case, they’ll have to be safer than humans or people won’t be okay with letting them on the roads in large numbers.

That's another mighty assumption. The new shiny doesn't have to be better or safer for it to be popular.

Human drivers are atrocious. It won't be hard to be better than them.

> It won't be hard to be better than them.

That's another very generous assumption wrapped in a truism.

I'd say it's one of the more difficult problems problems in the industry, given the billions of dollars poured into it.

It only needs to be solved once

I am assuming you have flown on a modern airliner? Anytime you land in instrument conditions, you are trusting programmers.

> I don't trust other programmers

Then how are you commuting currently? Almost every part of the vehicle is electronically controlled nowadays. All the components are connected - one way or another. So, it's easy to traverse around and make your way to CAN. Once, you are there, you can control the car.

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/blackhat-jeep-cherokee-hack-e...

Probably drives a 1967 Pontiac GTO.

The simplest solution is to stay away from cars that have networking ability.

Which basically means you are going to stay away from any car manufactured in the past 10 years.

Yep. My daily driver is 16.

Steering and brakes should work even if there's no electricity.

put your car in neutral and turn off your engine, see what happens. You can still steer and brake, but for a sharp turn or down an incline you would be surprised how hard it is without servo steering and the vacuum servo.

A backdoor on your current non-self-driving car can disable brakes and suddenly pull the steering wheel to the left as soon as you reach 65 mph.

It can pull the steering wheel, but I'm pretty sure the ratios are selected so that I can still overpower it. The steering wheel is still mechanically connected to the front wheels.

And it surely can't disable brakes. It can disable ABS or force it to cycle, turn off power assist, and apply electric parking brake, but brake pedal is still connected to the brakes through some old school hydraulics.

ABS is able to disengage your brakes even while the pedal is fully depressed, the old-school hydraulics are connected to ABS that can release the pressure so that the brakes disengage - that's what it does during normal operation. If it would intentionally release the brakes and keep them open instead of "pumping", there's nothing you can do.

The same applies for power assist - it's quite powerful; steering at high speed is possible but quite hard if it simply turns off; however, if it would be actively working against you (and do it suddenly without any warning), it's likely that you wouldn't be able to turn it back until you'd already smashed into the opposite lane.

Some other driver, right now, could decide to pull out their phone and text and you could be dead instantly. Worrying about backdoors and hacking is like worrying about dying in terrorist attack. It's not like it won't happen to someone but there are more mundane ways to die. Ironically, getting into a car is a very common way to die.

I was rear-ended once because of that: stopped smoothly at a just toggled red light, driver behind received a phone call and compulsively looked at his phone briefly, not paying attention to neither the light nor me being fully stopped for a split second, covered the distance which should have been safe were he paying due attention, and impacted without braking. Luckily he was going below the legal speed or else both cars would have to be written off.

You don't trust it now, but when everyone will happily ride autonomous vehicles and will have demonstrated they are safer, then you will change your mind. That's how we were convinced to go into metal tubes with wings hurtling through the air.

If you don't trust software, don't look at reality. So many things that can directly or indirectly kill you are run by (often shitty) software, you won't leave the house again. And those systems aren't looked at as closely as self-driving cars.

Of course you do. Do you ever fly? Do you drive in _current cars_, that are ran by software?

Do you fly...?

Do you use electricity...?

Do you use indoor plumbing...?

All of those things are controlled by ... computers!

You may feel differently when you get to 80 and feel you can no-longer driver reliably.

How large the screens should be is relative to how far away from the eye they are. Look up Apple's newest corporate acquisition announced this week. Maybe some of the screens won't be large.

They're not an ad company though - what are people going to do in their cars? Probably use their phones and tablets, and if Apple's got a lock on that, then who gives a damn about the car?

It's the same reason there's not an Apple Television, there's an AppleTV - the display doesn't matter, the source does.

But who is saying they will build their own car? AppleTV is a good example, remember how long an actual Apple Television was rumoured?

People wanted it to happen but it’d be a stupid product. How many people are going to buy a crazy expensive tv that is going to be obsolete in 3 years? Especially as you can just take out the part that becomes obsolete quickly and replace it separately.

That and most self driving technologies are not allowing Carplay or Android Auto to take over the center stack. So they are being pushed out of a space they had been trying to get into.

I'm not sure "incredibly expensive" is a thing that Apple needs to care about per se. They are the most profitable company in the world. They have so much cash on hand, coming in so quickly, that they are desperate to find ways to productively spend it. From that point of view, a possibly multi-decade-long "incredibly expensive" R&D process to try to tackle an impossible market (I'm thinking ultimately they would want to make the cars themselves, not just self-driving software) is not entirely ludicrous.

That said, I can't map this vision of Apple as a company with too much money to spend looking for new markets with the Apple that can't be bothered to update its desktop computers and who bailed on the wireless router market. If there's any company that has the resources and vision to create the components for an actually useful and productive Connected Home, I would have expected it to be Apple. And I would have thought home servers (in the form of a beefier Mac Mini, maybe) and no-nonsense self-meshing wifi routers (the products they already had) would have been the perfect platform to build on. But they really do seem to have hit some sort of practical limit on how many things they can do at once within their current corporate structure.

This technology is probably the most valuable thing a company can invest in at the moment. Imagine all of the car trips around the world being turned into profitable trips for a company, and imagine this being to the benefit of consumers. Owning a car is expensive; these companies can likely undercut car ownership cost and still make a profit. The savings would come from insurance & fuel efficiencies. Some people will claim they'll never give up on car ownership, but that's just based on the current context. On the timespan of decades, people will be less attached to the idea of car ownership.

Companies like Apple & Google are uniquely suited to this problem just by having lots of talented software engineers who know about artificial intelligence. The fact that it has nothing to do with their existing businesses doesn't matter too much; it might end up being a lot bigger than their existing businesses.

People don't own cars because they are cheaper. They own them for flexibility - which is why SUVs outsell compacts 10:1 despite worse gas mileage and higher prices. Competing solely on cost is a losing battle and has been since GM overtook ford in the '30s by offering style over pure function.

Cars are fashion, and convenience. Even if an uber was cheaper I wouldn't wait 5 minutes for one outside a store.

If you take an efficient autonomous ride share, you'd gain some conveniences:

No need to get a license, no need to do car registration, no need to insure your vehicle, no need to pay attention whilst driving, no need to find parking, no need to refuel/charge, no need to have the car maintained, no such thing as owning a car that has broken down, no need to change a busted tyre, and the list goes on.

You might need to wait a minute or two for the cheaper ride to arrive, though. Time will tell whether that's a bias based on our current context or a natural preference.

I get all those from the bus but people still don't take public transit. The wait is truly the killer - not cost.

You're right that people don't own cars because they are cheaper. But they will, in time, give up on car ownership because autonomous vehicles will be cheaper and better on other dimensions, too. Buses aren't a dedicated, direct ride to anywhere you want to go, so despite being cheaper, they don't stand in for car ownership.

Besides, with enough volume, an autonomous vehicle might pick you up faster from a store's exit faster than you can walk through a parking lot to your car.

I would definitely own my own personal autonomous vehicle. And I think the rest of America would as well. It's this vision of replacing ownership with autonomous taxi fleets that is not going to happen.

They are limited by roads and physics so they'll never have a wait time competitive with a car in the parking lot - and that is the killer.

I do see the allure on the economic side so I understand why this vision is being sold to VCs. But it's going to be just another feature the dealer tries to upsell you on.

When you exit a store, you can see other cars, right? Imagine if all of those were autonomous and able to pick you up.

Then they wouldn't be any cheaper than a car owned by me. The whole premise is they'd be cheaper from high utilization.

And if not cost what benefit does it have to take a taxi than my own self driving car? I can't leave my things in it. It won't have my radio stations set the way I want. And every trip I'm faced with the guilt of an explicit dollar value for the trip.

At Apple's scale the calculus becomes almost simple: which economic sectors are large enough to move the needle?

Answers: health care and pharma, finance and real estate, energy and petroleum, government and defense, and transportation.

Of these only transportation and perhaps health care make any sense for Apple, given their core competencies.

But Apple is either in or getting into healthcare, finance, real estate, and energy though.

Apple is a huge consumer of eco-friendly power and builds farms simply for producing the power it needs with no carbon emissions.

It is in the finance space indirectly by running the app stores, and directly with Apple pay. It's in the health industry by pushing people to collect health data on their phones and watches.

Apple is a big player in real estate markets. That's where it puts stores.

I totally agree with you that those are the big sectors Apple can use to move the needle. My only disagreement is that you think only one is tenable. I think all of them but government/defense are realistic. I don't see a future where Tim Cook lets Apple get into world-building.

But other than that, Apple is already there. Transportation is the straggler.

In addition to your list (and I tend to think the potential of Apple Pay is still really underrated), Apple owns Braeburn Capital. Whether Apple wants to or not, by running a fund with $250B+ of assets, it's a fairly sizable player in finance.

I had completely forgotten about that. Good point.

Do you happen to know how Braeburn compares to other big name funds?

Apple does a lot of low level design work in the electronics, sensors, and AI space. They even work in the automotive space already with Apple CarPlay. (https://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/) There are few companies that can afford to invest ~5 billion on a project that might be worth 10+x that or might be worth nothing.

So, it’s both less of a stretch then you might think and less of a gamble than most other companies in this space are making.

As we advance as a civilization, our tools have evolved along with us.

The invention of electronics combined with electricity meant that we could augment or replace tools that traditionally were mechanical in nature, and thus required some maintenance by the owner. (A good example being the mechanical wrist watch which transitioned from manual winding to battery power; timekeeping transitioning from mechanical to quartz crystals; and the clock face transitioning from moving hands to LCD).

The invention of general-purpose computing meant that we could slowly tack on "smartness" to new and existing tools that had become electronic.

Apple (originally named Apple Computer) rides on this second shift enabled by the invention of the general-purpose computer -- by using technology to allow us to do more with less.

From my observation of Apple, it appears they view the world exclusively through this lens -- where they completely re-imagine our daily tools to make them more useful, more life-enriching, by putting a general-purpose computer at its core.

In other words, Apple's unstated mission is to enrich lives using technologies we interact with on a daily basis by designing tools with a computer at the core rather than as an afterthought like other manufacturers. In addition, they try to differentiate themselves from everyone else by shipping devices that are not only beautiful to behold but also well-thought out in terms of ease of use. Sometimes they succeed wildly like with the iPhone. Sometimes they don't.

I have a theory that it has to do with keeping Jonny Ive happy.

It's well known that he loves cars. Perhaps he's bored and has taken on other projects to keep him at Apple (designing the new campus, Apple car).

Jobs, back when he was still breathing entertained notions of building a car, and I believe that when Tim Cook and Apple's executives make strategic decisions about the company's future, they're still asking themselves "What would Steve do?"

This has been my pet theory as well. If Apple loses Ives their stock will tank so throwing a couple billion at a car project to keep him engaged is still a good investment (and if they're lucky it might even yield some valuable patents)

does your Toyota automatically unlock when you simply walk up and look at it? can it remote-start just by you hollering at it? Does it open the trunk just by you saying “open the trunk”? Or wait, you actually still even have a car key? What are you still using a flip phone too?

hah. jokes aside, they develop a lot of low-level electronics and operating systems. and they have an AI with arguably the largest voice training. And they have Maps, with lots of real-world travel data. They know which roads are the best and the worst to use for a route. They know when traffic is congested. they know where you’ll need to be and where you’ll be leaving from. They know when your kids get off from school and how they look like. Speaking of sensors, their devices have the most advanced sensors. There are so many different kinds of sensors crammed into the iPhoneX. The best self-driving car sensors use IR, and apple’s already using IR on face-ID. I don’t see why they wouldn’t they be able to develop reliable sensor technologies for cars, given enough time. They don’t have to be the first movers. They’re probably just starting now and maturing the self driving tech and will be ready to respond to how the market develops.

Apple partnered with AT&T to get the iPhone out. They could partner with an auto manufacturer for a self driving car.

“The best self-driving car sensors use IR, and apple’s already using IR on face-ID.” Comparing structured light Kinect with time of flight lidar is apples to oranges.

I see what you did there ;). Anyways they can develop this technology given enough time. They do not have to be the first movers. A little R&D won’t starve their coffers.

Because Microsoft. There was a time when Microsoft was practically printing money, even ignoring corporate contracts. People were cycling through their PCs at an extremely regular rate which in turn resulted in massive revenues for Microsoft as each new machine was accompied by a variety of licensed software. But then something happened. It wasn't long ago that a computer was outdated in 6 months and obsolete in 2 years. Now? You can buy a PC and, unless you either do high end gaming or engage in a handful of esoteric high performance tasks, it'll last indefinitely. Buy this new phone that's slightly faster and slightly thinner than the last one you bought is not a sustainable keystone business model.

If they want to stay on top, they need to move on. But to what? Self driving cars seem like they stand a very good chance of being the next huge industry.

> I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space

There are only so many markets big enough for Apple to consider entering. Cars is one of them.

Banking is another. They're allowing people to pay by phone now through credit cards. One day soon it will be an easy transition to just keeping your money in Apple Bank.

You can already keep a cash balance with Apple using Apple Pay Cash https://support.apple.com/explore/apple-pay-cash

Doubly baffling when considered that the revolutionary trio of iPod, iPhone and iPad look, with eyes crossed and no glasses, remarkably like 3x sizes of a single product and at one point you could represent most of their profits with one small table of products. Apple isn't known for diversity.

If the defining feature of cars is engine or physical design, Apple doesn't have a chance; it isn't like traditional industrial companies don't have smart and talented engineers - the Apple of cars already happened with Toyota and their inspired manufacturing process. Apple does have a chance if software is the hardest part of designing the car of the future. In a world where Apple fields a good all-round car with great software, and the software notably improves the driving experience in a difficult-to-mimic fashion, then maybe Apple can find a margin.

It is an ambitious play. If they can't differentiate themselves with software it isn't going to be a winner for them. But if they can, it would fit very well with the Apple model of entering a market that was understood to be mature and demonstrating massive profits for well-designed software/hardware combinations. Driving cars in 2018 is like 20c/texts when using the phones of 2006 - if that chore went away, we wouldn't miss it.

Apple has 285 billion dollars cash. They have enough money to do pretty much anything from scratch.

You could think about it this way: the mechanical parts of cars are all the same-ish (and Apple is planning on them being commodities). So when self-driving cars show up, the only thing to differentiate them will be the software, and Apple is planning on controlling it.

If you hop in a self-driving car, then hop out at your destination, the only parts you have connection with is the seating and the software.

They don't have choice. They need new billion dollar businesses and as soon one new thing with potential they have to jump on it. And self driving cars is one that to "investors" promises a huge potential.

That's why Amazon Google and Apple did tablets, home automation, ...

I don't think they seriously think it's the next big thing, but they don't have alternatives to invest in that promise growth.

My read has always been that they are preparing to provide a luxury/high status product in a future market which will be dominated by whatever the “android” level brand is.

Cars are such a strong status symbol that Apple can’t resist. If these vehicles become the next huge computing platform, they have no choice.

It's such a large commercial space that ending up with even a few useful patents when the first full system comes out is worthwhile. Either sell the patents or use them as leverage.

With Apple's cash reserves, they can afford the risk. The chance of shooting the moon is worth it.

Perhaps I’m a bit simpleminded here, but the answer to me seems pretty obvious. A lot of people spend a lot of time driving places. You can’t use your iDevice while driving. But you could if you had a self driving car. Owning an autonomous vehicle would open up a bit more free time in one’s day to use consume content and use apps. Which seems like something that might benefit Apple. Whether they actually produce a car, or just license the software that powers the car, or contributes their research to the industry as a whole, self driving vehicles seem strongly in Apple’s favor.

I think the big "guys" sees it as the next possible thing. I mean quantum computers might be a reality but you can't currently bet on that happening in the next 5 years. Self-driving cars are currently not there yet. However, it seems that it could work given enough research and development.

Self-driving cars is a huge business. You could disrupt Uber, Taxis, Trucking and Public transportation in most of the developed world by a single solution. That's a trillion dollar business.

I'd imagine it's a matter of leveraging existing resources (or resources they could recoup by moving back to their core upon failure) for a chance at a massive, global business.

Or a new field means lots of potential patents to sit on.

But that's often the case. The thing is that 'smart cars' are not so different from where Apple is already comfortable, and where they want to move. Let's say they invest massive funds into ML, hardware, etc just to fail in the car market. They can recoup a lot of that by just taking the tech they've built and reinvesting it into their comfort zone.

How do you figure? Can you explain where the overlap is between Apple's current tech investments and autonomous vehicles?

A lot of autonomous vehicles is the computer vision, which is also a significant thing that they're trying to do with the iPhone - AR.

That’s a good point. It’s going to be a long time before someone finds the next “iPhone“ that really changes everything and becomes a new multi hundred billion dollar business.

Driverless cars are the only possibility I can think of right now.

What are the biggest purchases people make? Of those, is there a high-end product which does apple can apply their middle-high end design chop to see a signficant profit? How will Apple grow from a $1T to a $5T, and $50T company?

My speculation: cars, houses (or likely condos with Apple financing), then communities (like Disney/Celebration) and Cities. All designed by Apple, with everybody living the Apple way.

The easy and glib way for Apple to get to a 5 trillion valuation is for the market to give them a p/e ratio like they give Amazon.

If market analysts were sane, Apple would've hit the 5 trillion mark a while ago.

But it's a stupefying number that isn't worth talking about. Apple is bad at growth. Apple is very good at profit. To them, that's all that matters, and that's not going to change.

I think we'll never see Apple valued at 5T because Apple will increase buyback programs and go totally private within 10 years. Exactly because they don't want to have to deal with people who talk about a 50 trillion valuation like it's a thing that better happen or else.

> The easy and glib way for Apple to get to a 5 trillion valuation is for the market to give them a p/e ratio like they give Amazon. If market analysts were sane, Apple would've hit the 5 trillion mark a while ago.

At Amazon's P/E, Apple would be worth about $8T. But I don't think "sane analysis" and "Amazon P/E" are a good fit.

> Apple is bad at growth. Apple is very good at profit.

I've been wondering about this for a while, so I finally bothered to look up some numbers:

2004-2017, Amazon revenue grew from $6.92B to $177.87B, at 28% per year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenu...

During that time, Apple revenue grew from $8.2B to $222.23B, at... 29% a year: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265125/total-net-sales-o...

Obviously, these numbers are quite sensitive to starting and ending points, but to me, it looks like Apple has managed to grow at the same overall rate as Amazon, while being massively more profitable.

I totally didn't say this in my post, so perhaps it sounds a little wonky when I put it like that. Apparently, the only growth that the finance analysts care about is growth in market share. Apple has always eschewed market share in favor of profit share. The markets don't really seem to care about that.

Apple destroys almost every other company on the planet in profitability. Amazon owns the market share for online sales and makes almost zero profit. Somehow that gets a better P/E for Amazon than it does Apple.

Anyway, short version, I think people use the word growth in very specifically different ways.

Well, for a long time their name was Apple Computer and throughout their history they've basically made computers in different form factors - first desktop then laptop then music player form, phone form, tablet form and watch form. It now seems cars are going to become basically computer systems with wheels attached so it may make sense for them to get in on that.

If Apple could built a nice, reasonably priced electric car, it would sell like hot cakes, self driving notwithstanding

In Jony Ive's words, a robotaxi presents Apple's best opportunity to "Reinvent the mobility experience"

A couple years ago amid reports that project Titan was an gigantic, unfocused clusterfuck, there were rumours of a rift between project lead Steve Zadesky and Jony Ivy backed by a bunch of top engineers about whether to build a more conventional vehicle for private ownership or to work towards an autonomous mobility service, and that they were going in two opposing directions at once, before doing a reboot.

> but I'm just not getting what the vision here is.

A place where Apple is working hard to improve is maps. Instead of thinking of the self driving car project as something to sell, think of it as powering Apple Maps. Although it's probably cheaper to just pay a bunch of people to drive around the country 24/7/365.

> I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space.

When operating a $200 billion/year business and needing to grow, entering a $X billion/year market will barely move your needle if $X is too small.

There are only so many large consumer industries (current or future) that Apple can pick to enter.

Google and Apple have a theory of why it's important to control the autonomous car market. It may be tied to smartphones dominance just for the reason that the two market leaders in smartphone platforms are putting in significant capital into the field.

I don’t recall the specific numbers anymore but the amount of metal that Apple machines, transports and sells each year is similar to a smaller car company. Why should those pieces of metal only be small?

Exploring new verticals might make sense, which is why I am still surprised they didn't capture the high-end TV market long ago.

They should have moved into health and personal medicine instead.

It’s about inventing a future we want to inhabit — not just selling phones.

What confuses me is why they aren't just bringing to market a classy simple EV with a giant ipad in the center console.

This autonomous stuff is stupid. In the mean time people are buying more new ICE vehicles or a poorly made Tesla as a poor substitute for what they really want - a Tesla running iOS with an Apple logo.

Partially because giant touchscreens in non self driving cars are a horrible UX.

Also probably because they know they can't outcompete actual car makers at making cars.

Apple could buy the actual car maker competition in cash if they needed to.

Apple can buy Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, Ford in cash? Today I learned.

Ford's market cap is just under $38B. IIRC, Apple has >$250B cash on hand. Moving that money around (across borders) might be a little bit of a pain, but it's certainly doable.

They could easily buy one to instantly become a major player.

How much thicker do you think the margins would be on a Ford if it carried an Apple logo and access to their walled garden on the software end?

Yup, every one of these companies is valued less than Apple has in available cash.

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