Apple buys autonomous driving company Drive.ai
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In fact the only case I can remember when they didn't do this was with the liquid metal company, and that one didn't pan out. (there are presumably others but I don't recall any off the top of my head.).
They have bought a few products, like iTunes, without buying the company.
But indeed, not the rule.
I found the desktop app pretty useful in just identifying songs friends played when people were over, popular songs in commercials, and just popular songs that played when I lived abroad on tv. But as I thought about the security implications of apps like Alexa and Hey Google I eventually uninstalled it. Siri was always basically useless so I kept it off mostly for that reason.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit...
I know, but they don't accept new customers ever since the acquisition. Apple recently added a screenshot/feedback function to TestFlight, which is just one of the many things BB could do. Anyway, I'm hoping TestFlight will become a full CI tool or otherwise, what was the point of this acquisition? However, it's been more than a year already...
Similarly for the key-value store FoundationDB.
They open-sourced that, and not in a "dump the baby on the community doorstep" kind of way. It's active:
https://www.foundationdb.org/blog/foundationdb-is-open-sourc...
And I don't think they acquired Liquidmetal the company, they only signed a deal for Consumer electronics exclusive use up to a period of time, and my guess was LiquidMetal were too expensive and they could not figure out a way to hit High Volume Production.
Although I generally do agree Apple pays bottom dollar for acquisitions. One reason why I am not hopeful of them buying the Intel Modem business along with all the 3G - 5G Patents.
Alice wishes to buy a house. She narrows her choice down to three candidates, and is looking to pay the lowest possible price for one of the three.
Bob has a house for sale. After showing it for a week, his agent puts it up for offers, and he is looking to accept the highest possible price.
If Bob's highest possible price is also Alice's lows possible price, they both win.
So it is very possible for one party to sell for the highest possible price, while the other party is buying for the lowest possible price, even if both have the same information about the market.
---
So yes, Apple could have paid the lowest possible price while simultaneously--and you would be correct--they sold for the highest possible price.
But if you want to buy a business that makes a lot of money, you'll be hard pressed to find one if you only look at small companies on the cusp of bankruptcy.
Yes in terms of raw $, you are right. As it's meant to be read (profitable and stable? within that industry).
Siri had limited value as a standalone app interfacing only to public APIs and services, but huge value as a deeply integrated platform interface with links into all the platform services. The original company could never realise that sort of enhanced value, so as a standalone player it's value was limited and Apple could buy it (relatively) cheap.
PA Semi as a small independent chip designer could eke out a decent living doing small bespoke designs for companies here or there. That has value, but it's limited. However as the designers of the undisputed heavyweight champion mobile CPUs, in the most successful consumer product of all time, providing significant product differentiating performance and features, they have enormous value but _only_ if Apple buys them.
User ksec gave a great list of successful Apple acquisitions for which their core products still exist and are thriving and the above pattern applies just as well to all of them. That's the primary model for Apple. I'm sure there are cases where they buy teams for talent, but it's usually talent in a specific area Apple can directly leverage somewhere in their products.
EDIT: I would into be at all surprised if Apple went into these negotiations saying "We love your technology, it;s great. Here's an offer. BTW here's the brochure of another similar company with almost as good technology we could buy instead, integrate into our products and kill you with.".
Not always, Beats headphones was them buying a company producing complimentary products, most of the value was in the brand, marketing and the distinct visual design of the products. There's nothing special about the technology and the company was very effective in bringing their product to market.
“'You either got Chill Steve or Very Mean Steve': Dropbox founder remembers being summoned to Apple by Steve Jobs — then told his startup would be killed”
https://www.businessinsider.com/drew-houston-dropbox-steve-j...
Apple is just more careful on their acquisitions.
And on the other side of ads, Google Analytics started as Urchin.
It seems to be a victim of Google’s schizo approach to product in the sense that every 12 months it seems to be following a new strategy or launching a new product to replace an older one Id never used anyway. Their whole YouTube Red stuff, and YouTube Music, I have no idea what the long term strategy of this company is. Outside of ads of course.
Apple has been filing its own patents for liquid metal alloys and technology since then. It's still a nascent area, but Apple has had a consistent broad thematic focus on materials science in R&D for the last ~7-8 years, so I'm not sure how one could reliably determine this licence to have not panned out.
As far as I know the only direct application of the technology we can see today remains the SIM-removal tool shipped with each iPhone.
Speaking of “bottom dollar,” how does Apple pay their engineers compared to other big tech?
https://nofilmschool.com/2011/12/avid-apple-excerpt-timeline...
Only when your a 'special person' do you get something competitive, but that applies to any company.
I think the first sign was the near continuous sightings of Apple’s self driving cars in Cupertino. At one point i literally saw four of them at the intersection of Homestead and Wolfe (next to the spaceship), one going in each direction.
Uber & Tesla are showing us that just because a company is culturally SV/startup, it doesn't necessarily mean that their business becomes a (taking Thiel's definition) monopoly in the Google/FB sense.
If/when autonomous driving starts living up to predictions, it will be a massive crucial industry. Hopefully every part of it will be a competitive market. An Airbnb of autonomous trucking or a Microsoft of autonomous taxis would be disturbing.
Tesla has a self-driving functionality in their cars right now on the market, and a quick youtube research will show you that it blows the competition right off, they are better by an order of a magnitude.
Now, it is nowhere near full (level 5 or whatever) self-driving, but noone says that it has to be. The point is that you bring up all other car manufacturers, and they all have obviously inferior products compared to Tesla's (if we are looking at commercially available general personal vechicles). The self-driving as it is right now (even though not level 5) is obviously very useful to many people, it is a good product, the market is right there. And yet these Every Automotive Companies have failed to produce something that Tesla already has on the market. So the problem is not that it is not an "unrealistic dream",(if it exists already), the problem is that other automotive companies are basically behind on this.
My guess is that they are not software companies, they have never had to develop really complicated software, and while having expertise on the mechanical side of things, they are ways behind on the software.
It’s semi-autonomous, requiring constant attention from the driver and operating in an extremely limited set of conditions.
Truly autonomous cars are decades away.
And Tesla’s assisted driving tech isn’t that much better than other manufacturers.
For example, Volvo’s current breed of cars has everything that Tesla has to offer. However, their approach is “no person killed by Volvo by 2020”, so their tech is rightly called assisted driving. Other manufacturers have similar tech and approaches.
A few years back European truck manufacturers even had a competition that involved autonomous driving on general roads across multiple state borders in Europe.
However, Tesla’s marketing keeps insisting that their tech is full autonomous driving, and their lawyers correctly insist that its not.
Now, back to the “not realistic to work on”. Because it’s not realistic. Real autonomous driving is decades away. And “state-of-the-art” is barely semi-autonomous (requires driver’s attention at all times), barely works under ideal conditions (read: sunny California weather with good roads, signs and road markings), can barely handle a very restricted set of road and weather conditions etc. etc.
Have you actually tried it or did you just read it off some anti-tesla rant on the Internet? I desperately want to believe that statement because Teslas are very overpriced for the amount of comfort they provide, but every time I test any other car, the "lane assist" and similar things are nowhere near what Tesla offers. They are all "just as good" on paper, and then you activate lane assist and smallest problem like one small segment of the road line being off makes a Volvo or something else scream in panic and force you to take the wheel while Tesla gracefully doesn't even notices at as a problem and keeps driving. Just because the other manufacturers say on paper "we also have lane assist" does not mean it's the same function.
Look at this latest Audi e-tron. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjsfMmJ4AiM
When you say that other manufacturers are not doing as much marketing for this, you are right. But you got it the other way around: it's not that they are behind on the marketing, and that's why they are failing. They are failing to implement these features that Tesla's already have in great quality on the mass-market, - and that's why they don't have the audacity to market those features, because they know that if they forced people to actually take their "lane assist" seriously, they would be scrutinized by the market even more and all those flaws would be brought to light.
Go actually test a Tesla autopilot, on a long drive, and then go actually test a Volvo, VW, BMW, etc lane assist -and then come back and review your statement. Your mind will be changed.
> barely works under ideal conditions (read: sunny California weather with good roads, signs and road markings),
Watch more of videos on that channel. Many rain situations are fine, and barely some visible road markings is all that is needed. Yes level 5 might be a decade away, but even as it is - that's like 80% of driving time covered. What part of it is "unrealistic" when it already exists?
I have.
> They are failing to implement these features that Tesla's already have in great quality on the mass-market
> Go actually test a Tesla autopilot, on a long drive
You keep buying into Tesla's marketing.
Here's a riddle for you: every time a Tesla fails and kills a person, Tesla quickly blames the driver. They say that the driver has to always keep watch and grab the wheel at the first sign of trouble.
Here's an official statement by Tesla in such an accident: "We also ask our customers to exercise safe behavior when using our vehicles, including following the car’s instructions for remaining alert and present when using Autopilot and to be prepared to take control at all times" [1]
Why is that, do you think?
Other companies are just less careless about human lives. They don't pretend it's a full autopilot. They don't pretend that the system can handle 100% of situations. They don't pretend that you can safely fall asleep behind the wheel, and nothing will happen. They call it what it is and introduce the features gradually because they are fully aware of the current capabilities of autonomous systems.
Tesla is fully aware of that as well, but their marketing is willfully engaged in deception tactics.
> What part of it is "unrealistic" when it already exists?
The part where it doesn't exist. In all cases it requires the driver to be fully engaged and alert at all times.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/teslas-autopilot-blamed-driver-acc...
A plan means either you have a division, or you have an agreement that you can use someone else's if it works out. Either works.
As car makers discover self driving cars are hard they worry less about the risk and put less into development.
For video, you don't need any 9s of reliability. For a product, you need to have a lot of 9s, and each nine is getting exponentially harder.
By that logic, perfection is not enough because perfect is better than humans.
I think we can get to human level, by pure fact that we computers don't get distracted (they only crash ;-) ) and can also pickup signals, we cannot, due to 360° sensors. But computers are still bad at dealing with cases that are obvious to humans, due to lack of context and awareness.
I don't think that public will accept technology like that. I think there'll be a lot of public backslash once videos showing crashes in cases that are extremely obvious to humans. Videos from avoided crashes, that wouldn't be that obvious to humans won't be enough to change the sentiment.
Distribution of headlines that say "car crashed" vs "car avoided a crash" will be the same as "someone does a bad thing" vs "someone does a good thing".
I might be totally off, though, since I've never heard of the nines being used in the context of autonomy but it does make sense in context of the conversation being had.
I think it's reasonable to think that I can share that nobody bought my shares. I can't talk for any other employee or anybody else.
This sounds more impressive than the Cruise cars I see with one driver-engineer at the wheel. Has anyone been shuttled in one and can comment on the experience?
I know some cruise guys, and they say it’s a similar experience. They basically run a free, autonomous Uber for employees. They’ll be full in the morning and afternoon and then drive around the city alone midday to build up miles.
There are opportunities to buy pre-ipo stock, so yes you can just use money.
But the original point stands. They should be able to get good paying jobs somewhere.
Why would engineers in a highly sought-after field not make that much at Apple?
And your 300k from levels.fyi is not base salary. Base salary is listed as 180k, more in line with reality.
Apple never extended an offer, or an offer was not accepted. Either way, they were not at any point an employee of Apple, or any other company.
iDrive is a brand used by a German car company (BMW? Audi?).
When the iPhone launched, it turned out after launch that Cisco owned the trademark.
When Apple got going they had a trademark dispute with Apple Records (the Beatles' publishing company) which was easily settled as Apple in California was clearly a computer company....until decades later they launched Apple Music.
So...your joke may not be off the mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
They should name it uDrive.
Does anybody, anywhere, have a reliable self-driving car in use on public streets without a "safety driver"? Waymo did briefly, but backed off.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18758820/drive-ai-self-dr...
Edit: It looks like they aren't [1]
1: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18536003/waymo-lyft-self-d...
The case where companies run into the wall at full speed (a funding round fell through) mostly were very mismanaged.
A couple of months ago I read that he decided the problem is basically unsolvable and a human will always need to be involved.
He's still right about being "before Tesla" as long as Tesla never figures it out either.
Are you referring to the Engadget article? I understood him differently.
Now it is clearing pushing a driver-assist angle ("improves your stock ACC and LKAS," "copilot," "augment"). No mention of "self-driving," "autonomous," or the like.
Previously, it was clearly marketing a full-self-driving, no human involved system: "ghostriding for the masses," "software to make your car self driving."
They may be good enough some decades from now, but they are not now and we are a long, long way from getting to the point where they are.
This has been proven too many times already to trust my life in a machine doing highway speeds, and I trust them even less on streets and roads.
For the record, I've never caused an accident in my 46 years of driving. The only accident I've been in was with a dumbass who turned left in front of me at an intersection I'd already entered and I was able to minimize the impact by slowing down before they did that and steering into the least damaging hit for me because I was watching the driver's eyes and body and could see they were thinking about it and then decided to do it.
No self driving car can do that now and it will be a very long time before they can.
Given that “free will” is limited, and doubly so when operating a vehicle, that’s not very much of a rebuttal.
Obviously it is up to the individual to quantify the loss.
Hooked up to machines to record microsecond by microsecond we can then watch things happen in order on the playback and see the trick done. First the human does something, then their brain assesses what was done and it constructs a story explanation for what was done. The human comes to believe that they did what they did on purpose for a reason - an exercise of free will, as established in the story, even though we can see that isn't the order in which it happened.
If you're sure you would know about this distortion I've got bad news. Your vision already depends on a similar trick that's been known for decades. Your eyes can't see anywhere near well enough to achieve what you think you can see. Instead a mechanism refreshes the details periodically while not giving you access, your image of the world is a composite assembled from a recent-ish focal image and guesses about what everything else probably still looks like. You feel like it's a live video feed, but it isn't, and it never has been your whole life.
Maybe this trick is only happening a lot of the time for small decisions, and we do have some mysterious free will, exactly the way we think we do but it's just much less often relevant than you intuit. But maybe the fact is that trick is all that was ever happening, we're not special except that we've deluded ourselves and that is sort of special in its own way.
The underpinning idea in the free will thing is Wegner's idea, he's done various experiments about this e.g.: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10424155
The self-driving car could very well have reacted faster than you ever could have, saving your life even in the many crash situations where you wouldn't have had any idea of the other driver's intention.
There’s an assumption that self driving will be safer, but it’s not necessary (there’s very little public data with any reasonable detail), and plenty of anecdotes where the car did something very abnormal. Furthermore, you have self-driving backers like Andrew No, publicly moving the goal posts to justify the investments.
My point is, in 2019, self driving cars don’t work very well, and there’s little expectation that they will work well in the near to medium future, so it’s silly to sing their praises now.
Southern Illinois, destination Niagara. Going through one small town after another. Flat. Boring. Autopilot is on. Highway is 4 lane divided, no service road. Occasional farmers market roads.
Driving for a couple of hours, not much to see (and smell) but farmland. Southern Illinois is incredibly boring. Start to pass an 18-wheeler on my right.
Not paying 100% attention because... boring.
Car starts freaking out, loud warning signals. Engages the brakes, hard. Some old lady had pulled out to cross the highway, so that she was halfway in my lane. Couldn’t see her because of 18-wheeler. She couldn’t see me for the same reason. Stupid.
Car saw her before I did, took appropriate measures. I would have been in a nasty wreck if if I hadn’t had it. She probably would have died, because I would have hit her driver’s side. Would have been nasty regardless.
So three cheers for autopilot from this driver. Saved the day.
More. Please.
Note that you didn’t need autopilot here, just collision avoidance system.
He was in the right lane.
Not to be demeaning but that is the cause of most vehicle accidents. So, you scare me more than self driving cars.
Assisted driving technologies can help with the natural shortcomings of the bloodbags behind the wheel. Recognizing that I'm susceptible to those same flaws is one of the reasons I paid extra for Autopilot: I wanted the added safety. And it was a worthy investment.
I do think I am among those who make a point to pay very close attention to my driving and others on the road with me. I may be somewhat unique in this regard because I grew up working on cars that had been in crashes, and then went on to design and build vehicles for severally disabled people for over 15 years, many of whom were disable in vehicle crashes.
I don't think I'm flawless though, but I know for sure that no self driving car could have avoided the one accident I was in. It was similar to the Tesla that hit and killed the person who walked out in front of it. No person or computer could anticipate or avoid it.
As of right now, Tesla autos have been in way more accidents than I. I'm sure that collectively they've driven many more miles than I, but many of the accidents they've been in involved conditions that I have driven in many times and never made the mistakes they have.
My GoPro has a USB-C port on it. My USB-C to USB-C data cable won't recognise it on my MBP. Have to use USB-C > USB-A -> Dongle -> USB-C.
My left arrow key sticks after my keyboard replacement.
I still keep ghost tapping that damn escape key on the touchbar after 3 years.
Apple: Forget all that, let's invest in self driving cars and new watch bands.
The lack of standard labeling on type C connectors or cables is a slow motion disaster I agree. But your experience is quite a surprise.
Interesting problem that I hadn't fully realized. Labeling would seem to be a good thing, that will never happen :)
These Type A charger cables are out of spec though, I believe.
As far as Type C goes, AFAIK there isn't a true "universal" cable available and probably there never will be (though a thunderbolt cable today is pretty close...but unlikely to support 100W power distribution). The reason I say "never will be" is that some of the high performance data transmission or power transmission are expensive and someone who only needs 15W of power and/or USB 2 won't want to pay for that. Plus new modes are being invented all the time.
What's sad is they talk about being a green company, and yet they choose nonsense cables, rather than just USB for their phones.
source? intuition about what volumes/margins you think they sell at is not sufficient.
Also, every one of their products but their phones have switched to USB-C, including iPads. It's just a matter of time until iPhone is USB-C as well.
USB-C didn't exist at the time when Lightning was released, so calling it a 'nonsense cable' is really just ridiculous.
I am using one of these exact cables to transfer data off of my GoPro Hero 7. The standard one that came with my MacBook also worked.
There literally exists no male to female thunderbolt extenders in the usb-c form factor. I tried buying a non Intel approved one and hesitantly, after weighing the risks of even plugging it in, found it would power the Thunderbolt device but couldn’t move data.
(For the information of the reader, Thunderbolt exists above USB-C and USB-C connectors lack Thunderbolt data pins and hence downgrade Thunderbolt back to just regular USB-C)
Voided quite a few warranties working around the awkwardness
(Mostly what I cannot suffer is the fools who position these limited passive connections on the wrong damn side of the device.)