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Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

They stopped making routers and monitors not because they are non “core” products, they stopped making them because there is not much money in it. You buy routers ones every 10 years probably, and margin is limited, but supporting them throughout this period is quite expensive. As for monitors, there is so many competitors right now, that it’s hard to make it worth building your own monitor, Especially if you want to win the market share you need to distinguish yourself from competition, and there is very little you can do to make your monitor distinguishable from your competitors.

Automotive AI meanwhile is a future and they have to think about future with all the money they have now.

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If Apple truly cares about the user experience they would have kept the wireless routers in their portfolio. A great opportunity missed to have a product that is more user friendly than the competition.

I'd argue the wholesome user experience will prove be more important for Apple in the long run than having a big profit margin on every product.

The “user experience” for most users trying to use a third party router instead of the one bundled with their internet service where support comes from their ISP would be worse.

Sure, they could have been the ones launching the Unifi line of routers and switches, instead of Ubiquiti, but that would mean caring about and supporting non-mac equipment and computers in the offices.

Another option, assuming core Apple processes don't need more funding: they could pay out that cash as dividends, and let the market think about the future (getting the money to companies who's core actually is about automotive AI, if investors actually think so).

The other way of thinking about it is that autonomous cars are so obvious and will eventually be so commodity that Apple not sticking their logo on this market would be about as dumb as them not making the bigger phones the market demanded.

  autonomous cars are so obvious and will eventually be so commodity

Apple's core business (smart phones) will be commoditized way before autonomous cars - we're already seeing smart phone improvements becoming more and more incremental, longer device lifetimes, people less willing to spend for the latest and greatest

Would you buy an autonomous car from a company that can't build a reliable keyboard, and is still struggling with its maps?

I would be scared to buy an Apple car. Let there be a design flaw: It will take a class action suit for them to acknowledge it. Until then, anyone who drives to their Apple Car Store will be told to pay out of their own pocket for fixing it, that they obviously mishandled the car, Apple is not to blame, it is not covered under warranty.

As opposed to Google with their world class customer support or Uber with their great reputation for safety and ethics....

Or a GM car where they do the math to see if its worth it to issue a recall for cars that shut themselves off out of nowhere or Ford where they did a cost benefit analysis on a recall of Pinto fuel lines.

In other words, like every other business....

Apple does pay out dividends, as well as pursuing stock buy backs which pushes share prices up, rewarding investors.

> Automotive AI meanwhile is a future and they have to think about future with all the money they have now.

Automotive "AI" is not a future, more than so than the automotive "cloud." It does not even takes one to have a computer science background to figure out that claims of artificial "intelligence" there are a joke.

That's going to be an unpopular opinion on HN, but I really agree. Getting self-driving car to where they are currently is impressive, but the technology isn't close to where it needs to be.

The technology is 90% there, perhaps more, but the last percentages that it will required for this to be a mass market product is going to take 20 or 30 years to reach. The current solutions are built using ideas and research grounded in the field of "Artificial Intelligence", but they are not "true AI".

There's also no AI in your Huawei phone. There's software using machine learning, which is a discipline under the umbrella of "artificial intelligence" as a computer science discipline.

non “core” products, they stopped making them because there is not much money in it

The idea of Mac was always “it just works”. You could go to the Apple Store and get everything you needed and know that while it wasn’t cheap, it was amongst the best you could buy. You pay the premium for that experience and you remember how nice it was and come back next time.

Now that experience is broken, you need to shop around and make it work yourself. And if you need to do that then the experience is no better than anyone else’s.

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