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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I see that. Clearly they are good at making computer like things, but it's not like they're God's gift to supply chain management. There's been quite a few mistakes over the years. Hard to see them doing better than car companies that have been building cars for decades.

I'm also not sure what Apple's edge here is. At this point all I really want out of an entertainment center is a screen for my phone to plug into. Everything else is better done as knobs and buttons.

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> Hard to see them doing better than car companies that have been building cars for decades.

I'm sure Nokia had the same confidence in 2005.

Past performance is not indicative of future results etc, but you’re right, this is basically exactly what Palm CEO Ed Colligan said about the rumored iPhone a few months before it was revealed[1]:

> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

1: https://daringfireball.net/2006/11/colligan_head_stuck

And they didn't. Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success. 3GS was the first one that approached the cult status.

It tool them 4 generations to get there, and a lot of money.

> Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success.

I don't think that's true. For example, less than a year after its release, the iPhone accounted for 28% of smartphones sold in the U.S. (and presumably for a greater percentage of smartphone-sale revenue): see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/02/iphone-owns-28-perce....

And half a year after that, the news was better still: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/apple-officially-sur...

There weren't that many smartphones then. Most people were using feature phones.

To put that 10 million sales in 2008 into context, the Motorola Razr sold 140 million devices over a 4 year period ending in 2007.

So... by & large nobody had an iPhone or smartphone. They all had Razrs (or other feature-phones) instead.

> Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success.

That's a difficult statement to support. It set the stage for everything that came after, and it knocked the industry back on its heels. I'm not sure of the margin or unit numbers but for lots of values of "commercial success", that alone is hard to ignore.

People were waiting in lines for DAYS to get the first iPhone.

4 years you mean, generating profit the entire time. You have a very high bar for commercial success.

The first couple of generations of the iPod kinda sucked too. It's really hard to get everything perfect in the first generation, probably impossible. Having the agility to iterate on the design quickly so you can capitalize on the initial hype is what Apple does so well.

IPod came out before cheap flash storage. I am surprised it worked as well as it did for shoving a laptop hard drive in a music player.

Would a car be like that now? Batteries are close to too expensive, but 38k model 3 says we are close...

Did they?

Not that much about the iPod changed between 2001 and 2005. A simple to use interface, large storage made it great from the start, but windows support it what made it successful.

It got smaller. The original iPod was…kind of big.

They physical wheel was fragile and the internal HDDs weren't quite big enough for a good music library. They were also a little too big and heavy, and they used Firewire as the interface which wasn't well supported at the time (or ever) on PCs.

Sure, but Apple had a revolutionary new product. They weren't that great at the nuts and bolts of making a phone, but it didn't matter because the concept of the iPhone was so much better than any phone out there. What is Apple going to bring to the car to match that?

Except they were better at making a phone, and then controlling costs in making advanced phones. Nokia could NOT compete. Even Microsoft gave up (despite billions). Even now, with years of competition, their margins are FAR higher than others making smartphones. Eye wateringly higher.

Nokia self-destructed more than failed, as much as Palm, Sony, and Psion did.

I’ll just say that the main benefit of a Tesla, besides driving and handling really nicely is that the electronics are actually good: it’s entertainment system isn’t a hacky afterthought; also, just plugging into the supercharger and walking away makes the whole “messing with payment methods” paradigm of gas stations seem obsolete.

On the flipside, my 2012 "dumb" car with the good third-party bluetooth adapter I got last year is the end-all, be-all of car electronics for me. It can only go downhill from there.

To me, car electronics should be like a Kindle is for reading. There is a period after you launch the Kindle but before you start reading where you interact with it like a smartphone or tablet. But then once you get started, the notion that you're interacting with a digital device just disappears.

I want my car experience just like that - set up Spotify, Google Maps etc. before I go, then hands off any touchscreen until I stop. And I only use the audio driving instructions from Maps.

Come to think of it, the same applies to running - set up music, tracking app etc. on your front porch, don't touch the screen again until you're finished, that's a sign of a good run.

Yeah, that’s sort of what I like about the Tesla: the interactions I care about are almost all accessed through the controls on the steering wheel (volume up/down, next/previous track, play/pause, cruise control adjustments) or through sticks. The screen mostly is for setting up music when you first get into the car, navigation, car status info (speed, fsd visualization, speed limit, energy consumption). Also, when charging, it’s nice to have a big screen for Netflix.

Cruise control and playback control on steering wheel are not exclusive to and predate Tesla.

That’s not my point: my point is that I mostly don’t have to interact with the screen while driving because they made good decisions about what controls to put on the steering column.

This is still very basic car UI desing. Other car manufacturers will catch up with Tesla.

You can imagine why, for many, this is hard to believe. People have said for years legacy automakers will “catch up” to Tesla, while they continue to ramp at Plaid speed.

Culture is hard, but the core of your business. To not embrace the culture your org needs to outcompete competitors is to embrace failure.

Yeah, I think the issue is that most traditional manufacturers have leaned hard into integrating components made by a variety of manufacturers. Tesla (and Apple) differ because they are mostly into vertical integration: so, they can design all the parts for the “system as a whole” rather than having to work around the limitations of particular off-the-shelf solutions.

I will say, telling my car “my ass is cold “ is a pretty fun interface.

Isn't this sort of an argument in favor of an apple car?

With tesla the over all build quality for price range isn't great (they are getting better), but the software integration and UX is really good.

Apple is really good at both those things, if it translates to cars that could be compelling.

Yes, I believe this. I was on the fence about a Tesla for years. Something just didn't sit right with the experience inside one. I don't feel that with a BMW, so I got a 3 year lease, specifically timed for when I think the Apple car will drop.

> it’s entertainment system isn’t a hacky afterthought

It's about as hacky an afterthought as you can possibly get, though? It's a giant tablet on a stand. Effective, yes, but also definitely a hacky afterthought, too. There's no attempt of any kind to integrate it into the lines or flow of the rest of the vehicle. And they still can't be bothered to put some basic physical switchgear in the thing. There's nothing tactile about it, nothing that feels premium or well-designed.

I don’t know, the physical switches on the steering wheel do about 90% of what I need while driving.

Anyways, Tesla computer interface is so much nicer to work with than the system on my 2014 Honda Odyssey: the software there has all sorts of arbitrary limitations that makes things like “playing” music irritating. Plus, traditional car manufacturers do crazy things like treating the “navigation package” as a premium feature or whatever. Not to mention that the Tesla gets OTA updates regularly while I’m mostly stuck with whatever bugs or limitations my Honda had when it was built (unless I take it to a dealership and ask for the firmware to be updated.)

When I bought the car, I was pretty much a skeptic in multiple dimensions and intended to return it in the seven day window if I didn’t like it. It ended up being like my initial reaction to the iPhone only having a touchscreen: the car, to me at least, just feels right.

You've completely missed it. Apple was manifestly incredibly great at the "nuts and bolts of making a phone". That's the entire lesson of the last 13 years and the most successful single product in world history.

You're looking back at this with rose colored glasses. Early iPhones had plenty of issues. Remember "you're holding it wrong"? It took them a few generations to get the nuts and bolts of making a phone right.

Yes, I remember that "you're holding it wrong was" a) actually several years into the product, not at the beginning, and b) was hilariously overblown and not a real issue for about 99% of users, including all users who had a case on their phone and almost all users who didn't, and c) a reliable identifier of cranks that don't really know much about the iPhone.

This is starting to get off topic, but the "holding it wrong" issue It was definitely not overblown; if anything it was understated by the media still infatuated with Apple's latest shiny new thing.

The issue affected nearly every iPhone owner I knew at the time, including a number of individuals who worked for Apple, and almost all of these people got their phones replaced by Apple under warranty as a result.

That antenna was a misstep, sure. And they had others. But for the most part over that period, they were defining the product category, and competitors were reacting to it.

The iPhone did not even have 3G on launch. 3G was a pretty basic feature for an expensive smartphone by that time already.

I think every Apple derivative product built since the iPhone is proof they don’t need to reinvent the initial market conditions of the iphone to yield high ROI. Half of Apples success is just understanding their own customer base and building a car for them. If you are in this group you already know it (i am). You could say at least 10% of existing US car owners would already own one if it existed. Apple just needs to show up and build a car for them and its sold. Same is true for headphones. For TVs. Etc. it is all coming.

Nokia was in a really good position and squandered it as the market shifted.

Nokia's position was weaker than it might have appeared on the surface. They had good hardware and distribution channels but were totally lacking a modern mobile device OS. The Symbian platform was garbage. Nokia never made sufficient investment into a replacement.

I'm someone who enjoyed Maemo and Meego much more than Android or iOS. Nokia sabotaged their position by ditching that platform in favor of Windows Phone.

A phone can be viewed as a small computer for your pocket.

But a car is hardly just a large phone.

Well, so far...

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

> I'm also not sure what Apple's edge here is. At this point all I really want out of an entertainment center is a screen for my phone to plug into.

Apple has been doing CarPlay for years. If they do at least as well with the rest of the interior they’ll have an edge over most luxury cars today.

I don't think CarPlay is ahead what anyone else is doing, Android Auto works in reality much better than CarPlay, at least with my car. The UX of CarPlay makes much less sense, has less functionality and less safety features than Android Auto. And somehow CarPlay is also inverting the rolling control my car has, just like they do with the scrolling on touch pads.

Having an android and an iphone and had two vehicles with both AA and CarPlay, I can confirm that android auto is a much better experience than carplay.

Would a full-cabin CarPlay beat other luxury EV interfaces? I think that's the question. Auto manufacturers produce sub-par software interfaces. Is there a luxury EV that runs purely on android or produces a software interface as good as Apple's?

Not to be pedantic but Volvo already makes atleast one model of an EV (XC40) that runs purely on Android. The android system also allows you to run CarPlay if you connect your iPhone.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906777/volvo-xc40-suv-e...

That's my point. They can improve the car experience through Carplay and the iPhone. There's no point in manufacturing the entire car.

And ultimately buttons and entertainment centers only move the needle for relatively comparable cars. Apple would first have to get as good at Toyota et al at building the rest of the car before a better UX can win.

What other market is large enough for apple to enter? That’s the real question that needs to be answered because if there is no other viable market to deploy their capital then disrupting transportation is a good pick.

If Apple are going for a luxury EV, then they ‘only’ have to get better than Tesla. I hear Tesla still don’t have build quality sorted, and issues can take months to get fixed.

I imagine more practically minded luxury car buyers would jump at an Apple car that met Tesla on the performance front and exceeded them on the ease of ownership.

> Everything else is better done as knobs and buttons.

Apple is quite good at knobs and buttons, and what may eventually become interior finishes.

When they decide to implement a hardware control, it's usually done well. But their records is hit-and-miss in my opinion.

Good: iPod click wheel, iPhone side buttons/switches, old chiclet keyboards, trackpad.

Bad: Butterfly keyboards, AppleTV remote is awful (swipes and edge-clicks for all sorts of things), their mice have always been a pain to use (wanna right click? Better lift your left finger completely away from the mouse)

But they also aggressively remove physical interfaces where possible. One-button mice, removal of home button on iPhone, removal of function keys on MacBooks, etc.

I hope they don't do that with a car. There should be a dozen knobs and buttons that have dedicated features. Not just wipers and signals either. I'm talking about volume control, seat adjustments, windows, etc.

I hadn't thought about this until your comment. While I think Apple building a car is... dubious (both the idea that they would and that they should even if they can), I'd been thinking "well, at least Apple is good at UI," but I really don't like Tesla-esque touchscreen-for-everything auto interfaces, and that would be a serious temptation for Apple.

I think Apple is smart enough to do marker research on this. Tesla used a big tablet to cheap out. Apple is not going to cheap out

A volume knob thats a blown up version of the wheel on the Apple Watch would be something.

Yes. That crown is really nice. Apple is good at tactile, when they want to be.

I just hope they agree that eyes-on-road interactions will require more of that, and less of the touchscreen-only stuff. They probably will. One way to look at it is how much they care about accessibility on iOS. If they put that much effort into those features there, then nailing those details in a car will be natural.

I think Apple is doing car exactly because we should be looking at the road. I am sure their AR technology will be incorporated into windshield head up display

I look forward to steering and shifting gears with a multipoint touchscreen, don’t you?

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