The world's first non-repairable car. Minor fault, major accident, or inevitably-degraded battery? No problem!, just throw it away and buy the latest model, like you would with a phone or tablet! You wanted an upgrade anyway, didn't you?
(Meanwhile, Apple will keep boasting about their green credentials...)
What about consumables?... You'll still be able to change the tyres, brake bads, and wiper blades. But Apple will take 30% from every sale/service of these items, and the vehicle won't start if you install non-genuine-Apple replacements. (And then there's the chargers... don't expect to be able to put electricity into that battery without Apple getting their god-given 30% cut)
Starting at $99,999 for the base model (50 miles range). A maxxed-out model will do 750 miles, but they're really going to make you pay for those battery up-sells, and the well-glued-in battery pack is non-upgradeable after purchase.
https://www.autoblog.com/2023/10/04/rivian-r1t-fender-bender...
Both have cheaper trims available, but the cheapest Lightning is significantly less expensive than the cheapest R1T.
Both are really nice trucks too, especially at the higher trim. I don't see a big difference in luxury between an F-150 Platinum and the R1T.
But it's all subjective I suppose, maybe they meant that either would be 'hyper-luxury', I'm not that familiar, I just thought F150s were quite commonplace. (Not here in the UK, no such trucks are, but from what I've seen in North America.)
The F-150 in general is a little complicated on this scale. They are absolutely commonplace (the #1 selling vehicle in the US!) and the base model for the gas version is "only" ~$34k. But the price range is immense, and it isn't particularly uncommon to see >$60k King Ranch versions either. Higher price trims are available too, but tbh, I don't see them as often. Maybe occasionally a Raptor (~76k).
I've seen a similar fender-bender (i own a rivian, so do some neighbors) get quoted at 3-4k.
Honestly, 40k seems more like "we don't want to do this job" than "it really costs this much".
Given the PDR took 3 days to do it, I can understand the perspective of a body shop that doesn't want to do the job - they can probably get done 150k worth of jobs in the same time period.
So if you're going to have minor bumps result in a repair bill more expensive than many cars, it's not that much of a stretch to say that'd make it virtually unrepairable.
No big deal. Just buy the AppleCar AppleCare plan.
I can open my 2012 MacBook Air right now and expect it to work just fine.
shudders I can imagine their online interactive training right now...
Apple's phones have about 7 years of first-party support / guaranteed useful life, compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2. Yeah I'd never buy a car that will only be good for 7 years, but let's see what they ship.
Also the rest of the industry is not 2. 3 years is very common these days for phones, 5 getting more common. And for computers... Many business computers are supported for a long time, and Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility and support (Windows 10 is supported till 2025, 10 years from its release).
Yes, I speculate and draw my conclusions based on my most recent experience (2017-2019) with Android. I'm glad it's improving, but I'm not in a hurry to "experience" Android again.
A lot of people don't live near an Apple store, and few people are prepared to be without their phone while mailing it off for a battery swap.
Board-level repair is pretty crucial for data recovery when the hardware manufacturer insists on soldering the solid-state storage to the motherboard.
But a lot of people would. There are many people who trade their car after 4-5 years, or turn it back in at the end of the lease.
Apple products can have a hit&miss resale value; I think the 2015-2019 line of MacBooks were bad value at any time and any price point, and will be avoided well into the future. Hence my speculation: let's see what they ship this time.
They'll trade in their old car on a new one and if the payment works in their budget they're happy. They don't really care about values.
You're just making up facts to protect your beloved brand/cult. C'mon. All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/phone-update-policies-16586...
Here's objective facts and my experiences that I used to draw my conclusions.
My final Android phones were: [1] a Samsung A7 (2017), which included a non-replaceable battery, shipped with Android 6 (2015), officially supported Android 8 (2017; theoretical first-party security patches which it never received were offered until 2021), no longer receives updates even from LineageOS, and never ran postmarketOS; and [2] a Nokia 3 (2017), which had pretty much the same story (support ended on Android 9).
In 2019, someone gave me an old, smashed [3] iPhone 7 (2016), and the phone literally worked better than any Android phone I've owned before, including either of the two above. Since it was already physically falling apart, I took the liberty of getting [4] an iPhone SE (2020), which is still with me; the 7 continued to serve in the family for a couple more years.
[1]: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_a7_(2017)-8335.php
[2]: https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_3-8572.php
[3]: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_7-8064.php
[4]: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_se_(2020)-10170.php
> All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
I have a 2002 TiBook, which, believe me or not, continues to outlive my T61 and X200. My MBP (2017) had a spicy pillow though (which Apple repaired for free, outside of warranty).
> [...] to protect your beloved brand/cult.
I'm not a cultist, I'm a pragmatist. I used to believe in things - I had a [5] Jolla (2013) for the longest time, because I believed in Free Software and Open Source and all that stuff, until I realized suffering for your values is not necessarily the healthiest thing to do, and that freedom is not strictly a function of a software license, but of things the hardware+software enables you to do with it.
I certainly wouldn't call that minimalistic. Do you mean the exterior surface? The controls, UI, etc. are complex and difficult. People can even open the door the first time they ride in one. The big screen and all its software are not minimalistic.
Found an iPhone in the snow on Sunday. Had to google how to unlock it / get contact information. "swipe up" it said on the screen. Nothing happened. It was a lie. You need to "swipe from the bottom of the screen". Not intuitive at all.
If a touchscreen was the ideal way to interact with a car, why aren't acceleration and braking done through the touch screen? Why isn't steering on the touch screen?
This isn't even necessarily true for phones. Back when I got the early iPhone and iPad for my parents, one thing that they loved about it is the physical Home button - because, no matter where you were in the UI, even if you ended up "lost" (e.g. by accidentally fullscreening some app), you could always escape to a familiar place by pressing that obvious button.
Fast forward a few years, and it all gets replaced by completely unintuitive swipes. They were not happy, to put it mildly.
You can argue that this gets too unwieldy once the UI gets more complicated. But if the UI is too complicated to be navigable with arrow keys, I would say that it's too complicated for a dashboard of a fast moving vehicle.
FWIW touch itself is not really a problem. Sometimes it is indeed more convenient. But when you can only e.g. adjust volume using touch, that becomes much more difficult to do while driving. Same thing goes for navigation and other such things. A good dashboard UX will let you do this using both touch and dedicated physical buttons.
So a few tactile buttons/wheels/controls can handle those functions...
Waymo's steering-wheel-less vehicle will be the Zeekr CM1e https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a45711737/zeekr-cm1e-waymo...
The buttons were far more discoverable.
Surely you jest. A fart app is automotive minimalism!
So there is definitely room for Apple to take the Tesla route but improve in those areas.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...
Interiors - yes they can improve
Never had an issue with after-sales support.
My 2nd Tesla in 5 years.
Sorry but you probably are not the target market for the Apple Car.
Many premium-market customers (early Model S/X, current Plaid shoppers) have moved to other brands such as Rivian, Lucid, and Porsche due to Tesla’s “cheapness” and abysmal customer service.
But sure, if you’re coming from a Toyota RAV4 or BMW 3 series, Tesla is great. But don’t expect to be the target demographic for a $100K+ Apple car.
There is huge, huge demand for a negative spin on everything and like we've seen a ton of times on the internet, if you say something exaggerated enough times it starts becoming the accepted truth.
Maybe... the situation is complicated and like all manufacturers they have some good points and some bad points and the market is in the process of deciding on what particular traits it values?
I won't say that it has been perfect, but it definitely hasn't been worse than my car dealer experiences.
1. Set an appointment on the Tesla app
2. The day before the appointment my rep from the service center calls me to see if I have any questions about the process.
3. Take the car in, they immediately give me a loaner Tesla of the exact same make and model. When I get in the loaner car, it already has all my preferences imported (Signed in to Apple Music/Podcasts, seat settings, Joe Mode, Phone is the key, etc..)
4. A few days later, I get a notification from the app telling me my car is ready to pick up.
5. I drive the loaner to the service center. The app tells me to park it anywhere.
6. The app shows me where my car is parked.
7. I get in my car and drive away, without having to talk to anyone.
8. Bonus: My car has been detailed
9. Cost: $0.00
This is obviously anecdotal and I'm sure people have had bad experiences. But I was really impressed!
The windshield will probably break from hitting bugs, but fret not, there's a windshield protector you can get from your authorized dealer.
The rest should be taken as a joke.
The issue with Apple and the automotive market is the units don't have enough turnover for Apple's business model to thrive.
And not just technical; the business relationships between cellular network owners, handset manufacturers, and software companies was totally different. Apple essentially had to restructure the industry to make the iPhone what it is today.
I suspect a car would need to have a similar impact in order for Apple to succeed. They would need to launch a new kind of product that just happens to have the shape of a car.
And that would be a fair question. The iPhone never did anything others weren't already doing, nor has Apple ever done that in recent history. They sell products not because they're better, but because they've convinced people Apple is cool.
That's not why I buy Apple products. I buy them because their build quality is impeccable, their software for the most part "just works" (ok they've gotten worse in this regard lately), and all their stuff works together. Having date move magically between my devices without doing anything is really compelling.
Twitter has undoubtedly been a distraction.
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/elon-musks-losing-stre...
A few years ago I saw frequent signs from my social set that Tesla was considered a great innovator and a really cool company. The news has not been good the last year, and I haven't heard any sentiments like that in a while.
And sure, maybe I live in a "woke bubble", but that's a bunch of revenue that would almost certainly have ended up with Tesla that's now going elsewhere.
Also, people who already own Teslas aren't going anywhere. Immense brand loyalty for good reason.
I don't see them becoming more affordable though: it looks to me like both Model 3 and Model Y prices are high, and in fact they're only staying still because Tesla is removing features from the low-end configurations.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F5IQOynIawoXiJPVarLD...
Notably, as inflation rises, they're still dropping prices. Extremely laudable.
I lost nothing, more like dodged the bullet really considering their mileage shenanigans, and I don't give an f whether Musk knows I exists.
> mileage shenanigans
Sour grapes
Apple's MO is to make a premium version of a product and sell a huge quantity of them, and ideally it's a new product category.
Right now there IS a category of vehicle that we don't have in the USA, the cheap small electric cars that have taken over in China.
I could see semi-plausible arguments for mass adoption of those in the USA, as secondary cars for short errands and beginner drivers, and if they were cheap.
But Apple's move is to sell the nicest, most expensive version of a product. It's sort of what their position in the market demands. I don't see any way to put those requirements together in a vehicle, especially considering how we can't import cars from China.
Are you referring to the US tax credit rules around battery origins or vehicle import tariffs? Because there certainly isn’t an actual ban on Chinese-made cars in the US. You can go down to your local Buick or Volvo dealer and buy a Chinese-made car today.
It doesn't look like a huge market, mostly because there are enough alternatives that are all relatively similar.
But an EV at a competitive price would take a very large slice of that pie.
What apple brings is, I think, the same thing they brought to cell phones when we all thought a Palm Treo was the pinnacle of mobile tech. The same basic ideas as Tesla, but better design, better hardware, better software, etc.
I have no idea if they can actually pull it off, but if they can, they have a good shot at relegating Teslas to Palm Treo status.
https://youtu.be/Y6GxDr0L-64?t=1589
The path is building an entire centrally-directed transit network out of custom vehicles. Waymo currently doesn't look anything like that because they're still doing R&D on the critical technology, but if we have good self-driving even in just nice weather, it's very easy to imagine a radical transformation of transit. Of course you can make money on that.
Really? How? Because I don't see it at all, and I don't think it's "very easy" either.
All they have created is a very slightly cheaper taxi service. How does that transform anything? You could be taking a taxi instead of driving everywhere right now - why aren't you?(not literally you I mean people in general)
Is that going to change if the ride is couple dollars cheaper? Of course not.
I mean, BYD is already there. It's mostly a question of tariffs vs subsidies at a geopolitical level now.
BYD has $10k cars and >$150k cars
(a) there's unknown government subsidies going on, and
(b) they mine and refine their own lithium and make their own batteries (also make Tesla's batteries too, I think). So their battery cost is... unusually low