Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey

Anyway, I was trying to illustrate that Apple's obsession with minimalism has resulted in a very sterile and boring design language that wouldn't necessarily translate to success in the car world. Vehicles are considered very personal expressions of taste (Which is subjective, I know).

Shiny chrome bits and fake air intakes etc. are added because consumers want them. Car companies do everything in their power to shave a penny here and there, yet time and time again they add these in because that's what consumers generally like. High-end cars are littered with shiny bits, bodywork creases, and even crystal (BMW). Stuff like this is the antithesis of good design at contemporary Apple.

Even the iPhone 1.0/2.0 had a fake chrome rim, and their old Macs had clear plastic and pin stripes!

I'm not saying fake chrome bits etc. are good/bad design, I'm saying consumers have spoken, and the most boring cars are all at the low-end with even lower margins. Teslas seem to be as minimal as the general consumer is willing to tolerate, and even they have something relatively exotic with the Cyber Truck.

Apple's current aesthetic isn't suited towards high-end cars, and they haven't proven otherwise with recent releases. I know some would love a minimal Apple car, but it would still be a very niche, expensive, and not very profitable proposition.

It's amazing to me how they were able to make both the best trackpad and the worst mouse ever.

To each their own I guess but it's very weird to me that someone could consider the Magic Mouse comfortable, maybe something to do with the size of hands?

Starsky Robotics understood this but AFAICT the lesson hasn't really sunk in across the industry; the big money is still chasing a mythical computer-only Lv5 solution.

Anyway, I don't think Apple would be the right company to pull off that kind of thing either, all of which is to further reinforce that trying to make an electric, autonomous car was always an odd choice for them.

The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough.

But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does (existing Apple stores wouldn’t cut it). And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.

If they a fully self driving car by 2018 and beat everyone by 7 years maybe. But as time went on it went from little to almost no sense.

I enjoyed following it for that reason. But I never thought it would happen.

Apple have always developed core products that are essentially a computer.

Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.

Everyone wanted to see what phone software developed by an actual computer company who knew software would look like. Everyone and their brother wanted to see what an iPod phone would look like.

The Apple phone was perhaps the most anticipated device in years. What surprised people wasn't that they released one, it was that they went all in on a capacitive touch screen, which was novel tech, and that it didn't have real mobile data or native apps. There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages but people were still skeptical.

A car and a cell phone, or anything Apple has yet made, are wildly different. They may as well have had a battle tank program, or started making airplanes. Those things have screens and "infotainment systems" too.

You had your Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, which were popular among hardcore turbonerds, but normies weren't interested in them. And that goes double for the US; there was more uptake of WinMo and Symbian in Europe, but very little in Apple's home market. The closest thing to a "normie" smartphone before the iPhone was BlackBerry, but most people who had one were business users who had their device issued and provisioned by their employer. And enthusiasts always pooh-poohed BlackBerries as "not a real smartphone" because it was basically just a messaging and groupware beast with limited general-purpose capabilities.

So there was a big gap to be filled. Enthusiasts had their market segment, business users had their market segment, but the ordinary consumers had nothing. And Apple gladly swooped in to fill this gap.

The problem is that cars are already ubiquitous, especially in the US. What can an iCar offer that a Toyota can't? Hell, even if you specify electric cars, other companies still have this covered. What can Apple offer that Tesla can't? And if you look internationally, it's even worse. You start selling electric cars outside the US market, you're going to end up going head-to-head with Chinese giants like BYD that are already kicking Tesla's ass outside the US.

The only real path forward for an iCar that does to cars what the iPhone did to phones is if Apple were to perfect true Level 5 self-driving. If they could actually pull off "Siri, take me to work", it would change things enough that normal cars would look like dumbphones compared to the iCar. But that's a pipe dream. Our roads are too chaotic for Level 5 to be feasible for a long, long time. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the reason this project lasted a whole decade was because Apple was throwing everything they had at Level 5 self-driving, and they canned it because after an entire decade they still couldn't make it work.

Not true. I helped cover Apple for a large investment bank before and after iPhone's launch. If anything, Apple was the one company that had the technology and market credibility to immediately make a splash in the market despite being totally foreign to it.

>and that US carriers would never give them enough control.

We did think that there was a real possibility of Apple launching its phone in conjunction with an MVNO. But this was again out of belief that Apple had the credibility to immediately have millions of customers switch to it as their carrier, not because Apple—of all companies—could not get what it wanted from carriers.

And I just doubt any existing manufacturer would want to partner with Apple to the level they’d want.

I suppose Apple could go after the Corolla or something if they really wanted to but that just doesn’t seem like an Apple move to me.

Ford, on the other hand, came out and said that they lost that battle 10 years ago and are going to keep them.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/general-motors-removing-appl...

One of the pain points that CarPlay and Android Auto solve for is that any car I rent or buy has the same media controls and all of my presets. When I travel for work, I try to always pick a rental vehicle that is compatible with my phone in order to reduce cognitive load of learning a new vehicle's unique controls.

But then again they’ve changed things so many times according to the rumors maybe both were true at various times.

Lamborghini may be a little small for that list, I don’t really know. But I would think they would stay pretty boutique due to output size.

I don't disagree with what you're probably trying to say here, but I disagree with how you're stating it.

First, "car enthusiast" != "performance enthusiast". There are plenty of people who like cars for reasons other than going fast, and sub-interests in the car enthusiast community that are not performance oriented.

Second, people who actually do enjoy the art of performance driving don't have to do it on the road. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US that have driven on race tracks.

Third, there are certainly performance cars that people do take to the limits on the streets, often in violation of some traffic rules. Not every performance car is a 911 GT3. Probably a very high percentage of Miata owners have approached cornering limits on the street on cloverleafs.

Apple car would have absolutely been a pickup truck-like status symbol for highly urban people.

I do agree that there's a huge amount of specialization for cars that doesn't overlap with gen AI in any meaningful way.

Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches.

A bus network would provide recurring revenue for the actual thing a vehicle is for, instead of DLC headlight patterns.

But a bus? Yeah, that's just weird.

it's no longer concept.

I appreciate early cars when people didn't know what they should look like, and were just building all kinds of weird stuff. That awkwardness was charming. Now it's just generational pandering, and my generation is left out (apparently my generation is 1920's-1930's).

Apple would likely have made something that evoked elegance. It would have contrasted with Tesla in the same way a Macbook contrasts with an Alienware.

More impressive would be shortcut automation/smart shortcut tips IE; "Create a shortcut routine based off my device habits for week XYZ."

Is there any other examples you've heard talked about?

It's off by default because if you lose the password then you lose everything and that's a support nightmare.

From Apple’s legal page [0] for e.g. maps: “Individual usage metrics are associated with an identifier that rotates multiple times per hour, and is not tied to your Apple ID. This means Maps cannot search for information about you based on an identifier linked to you or your device.”

[0]: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-maps/

One theory was that Apple started their own car project in the mid-2010s to retain their top UX and SWE (and AI) talent because Tesla was poaching them all (and it shows: Tesla's visual UI designs is very Apple-ish: clean, consistent, tasteful, especially when compared to the mishmash you get on a Ford, Toyota, or even BMW); and I don't think it's a coincidence that Tesla's self-driving project really took-off after Siri started getting worse...

The other plausible theory was that ever since Apple launched CarPlay, they realised how inept the bulk of the carmaker industry is when it comes to software/high-technology and they saw an opportunity to make their own self-driving software platform and then license it out to automakers, and using CarPlay as a beachead into the carmaker industry; I want to believe this because it does make the most sense... excepting how those same automakers tend to be very protective of their brand identity: we've seen how GM and others clearly resent having to share their platform with AndroidAuto and CarPlay, so there's no way they'd publicly license Apple's tech - though still, some might. I speculate that had this plan ever worked Apple would have spun-off the company rather than try to put the Apple brand on it - but I don't think Apple has really spun-off any companies since ClarisWorks.

At the other-end of the plausibility spectrum, I noticed a lot of people (MacRumors' forums, et al) wanted to believe Apple was somehow going to ship a one-size-fits-all "iCar", with styling right out of the Bondi Blue iMac G3 book - and as the 1990s jokes go - it would only work driving on Apple owned highways, require an proprietary EV charging connector on a cable that gets frayed after only a few months, and if you get a chip in the windscreen you have to replace the whole thing.

It's all about timing and the brand.

Apple coming into the car market will have the same media scrutiny as Tesla. There might be 1000s of Toyota motor vehicle accidents weekly, but if there's one involving a Tesla and particularly one driving autonomously, you can bet it will be on the front page.

It's an enormous PR challenge for Apple if one of their cars kills someone, especially in any autonomous mode. They likely won't be about to stop that from happening completely but either way it's still a challenge they will need to deal with.

Finally, Apple historically have not been associated with building high speed vehicles that can kill people. That is an inherent risk if you are entering the market as purely a car maker.

I don't think that awareness is built in to every consumer brand.

It really depends. I think it happens more frequently than you thought. From life supporting software and automated planes which are obvious, to suicides caused by buggy software (see the British post bug) but also all the harm that social algorithms or private data leak can do.

In fact, there is a lot of things that can go very wrong with most software systems.

I have similar concerns about the Apple Vision Pro, given its small yields and current high ASP/muted demand, but at least there you can see the vision (pun unavoidable) of how it could eventually be an iPad-sized business or greater. A car only works if you do go after Tesla and Mercedes and BMW, etc.

I just don’t see any reason Apple would enter any business if not to take it on as a mass market player. Selling a $10,000 variant of a $500 watch is one thing (and that strategy failed, for what it’s worth), selling a low quantity machine that you still have to maintain and support that isn’t part of your core competency as a company is something else entirely.

Edit: I'm a dumb dumb and the brakes example was bad. I don't edit my mistakes in forums so peoples replies make sense. I still think the rest of the point is valid.

Research for the sake of research sometimes pays off. Who knows if this product will recoup the billions spent on R&D but that’s how the game works.

aka The Innovators Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator's_Dilemma

The solution the follow up book to this one ^ was to build isolated teams that are flush with the resources/capital of the parents but aren't at the whims, or constant meddling, of the parent company's management class / stockholders / old ideas.

For all the effort Google/Apple/Meta/Xerox/Bell/etc put into their internal moonshot divisions the whole concept mostly hasn't been very successful.

But at the same time they also haven't been great at buying young up and coming startups either, often ruining them the second they arrive by the same impulses which demands R&D moonshot teams be isolated from the host.

I beg to differ; when I was at AT&T in the late eighties we tried to enter the computer business, on the PC side with Olivetti, and on the UNIX side with the 3B2 minicomputers made with our own chips running System V UNIX. I even had a 3B2-200 in my house for a couple of years.

Entering a new business is hard: although the engineering was solid, we didn't have a saleforce trained in selling computers, and we didn't have a rich ecosystem (Oracle! Ingres! Informix!). AT&T didn't throw UNIX out the window, but found that capitalizing on UNIX was hard.

If anything of !35 years of cyberpunk input - and output building shit that spies on you:

Apple is Ono-Sendai and your iPhone is your deck. - the real battle is going to be how much agency does a Human Being have over all PII - all their data?

Your jack-in is your screen. Your data is your ID. But, who are YOU?

AT&T (owner of Westinghouse and Bell Labs) then proceeded to take their monopoly and patent factory, and started buying up competitors and new small companies. Eating their golden goose in this way is what caused the government to break them up.

Bell Labs was independent for a few years doing... Stuff. Spent their remaining prestige on falsification scandals because of the publish or perish culture this new profit motive created. They were bought by Nokia a few years ago (now called Nokia Bell Labs) and now only employ a couple theoretical physicists last I read. The lab that put into practice the foundations of modern tech (Unix and C are in almost every non-consumer-facing device) just does some Nokia product development nowadays. What a loss.

I'm curious what makes you say that about MS? Out of three, I'd actually put MS first and Apple last if for nothing else than Microsoft Research which is like a separate entity in its own strong right (judging from the outside). So many things useless to Microsoft business from them, yet so many many things..

But the really big stuff all requires working like your future depends on it. They can't do that, so they usually just end up with laundry lists of fancy PoCs.

Even when they work, the rollouts can be glacial at best (eg, Waymo).

Tim will only tell.

...I'll walk myself out now.

I hope so. That would be a great result, even if the consumer product didn’t land. That said, I would argue that sometimes you do just have to call something and move on. You’re right that Apple is one of the few places that can do research for research sake, but this wasn’t a research project. By all accounts this had a real goal of making and manufacturing a car.

It appears this project was in the works for more than a decade, had numerous stops and starts, leadership and focus changes and if your goal isn’t just research for the sake of research (which I do actually think is demonstrably different from Bell Labs or Xerox Parc which are more akin to things like Microsoft Research and Google X and the like), you need to ship at some point.

I think giving ten years to something like this is definitely a gift and I hope we see fruits from some of the work that went into it other places. But at the same time, there are other moonshots you can try if one doesn’t work out and there is arguably a cost if you keep focused on one idea that isn’t going to pan out for too long. Ten years for a project like this seems like a fair amount of time to try and a fair time to pull the plug.

Do you think Apple and consumers are gonna grow a conscience right now?

In the short term, Google is going to fully integrate Gemini into Google Assistant (the takeoff has been bumpy but there is a chance they stick the landing). The risk there being that Siri will fall further behind.

In the long term, capable models will be running locally on device. Google's past mobile AI plays haven't moved the market much. But the risk is that generative AI is a paradigm shift that will unlock some game changing capability that could catch Apple off guard.

Same story with Microsoft and Copilot on the desktop.

If your two primary competitions are doing similar things then you start paying attention.

And Apple is showing off parts of Car Play that could be fully integrated by manufacturers in a much deeper way, assuming they want to give up control (which given GM’s decision to drop Car Play and Android Auto, seems like it’ll be a challenge).

There is certainly a world where Apple could be a modern QNX unencumbered by its parent company baggage and a better business model (ongoing subscription and not 50-cents a car or whatever it is QNX gets) and provide the software for all that stuff, but based on everything that has been reported, that wasn’t what Apple was doing here. They were trying to build a real car. And as challenging and interesting as that might be as an R&D exercise, I just don’t see why that would be a business you’d willingly want to enter when you are so successful in other areas and the margins are so poor.

Interesting, it doesn't feel like this at all, to me. It seems that, relative to its market share, a lot of Tesla buyers make the brand part of their identity. Who "settles" on a Tesla when they don't care about what they drive?

If it were easy, we'd see a lot more profitable car companies.

I don’t work at Apple (so I don’t know for certain), but I don’t think the point of the Apple Car was ever to just copy the industry and produce an EV; it was to reach the holy grail of a fully autonomous vehicle, which no manufacturer has been able to successfully build.

Lucky for Apple, generative AI doesn’t need to work for 100% of the cases to be successful, unlike autonomous vehicles, so maybe Apple has a better chance to be successful this time.

Generative AI is significant enough to Apple's use cases that there would seem to be a very strong business case to bring it in house.

They are laughably behind the curve. Android should see widespread deployment of Gemini baked into the next generation of phones, and this could have a significant impact on Apple.

The fact of the matter is it remains to be seen how smart either model will be.

Adobe seems to be the only one with an empowered product team that's consistently finding sensible and profitable uses for machine learning.

Apple's biggest successes have come from being the first mover in a brand new space.

Apple II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Airpods, Watch were all category defining rather than "me too" products.

In fact Apple is terrible at throwing its hat into an already crowded space, and doubly so when it comes to software.

That's not savvy that's desperate.

Apple can arrive last to a product market. They can take six years of iterative releases to refine their vision on a product market. They will still dominate that market. Cue the "they can't keep getting away with this" meme, because this happens with EVERY PRODUCT THEY RELEASE and these people still keep thinking this time will be different.

The whole "Siri sucks" thing is also hilarious, because you have to ask: So? So what? Apple, Google, and Amazon invested billions upon billions into these systems (Amazon especially). Then LLMs came around and are absolutely eating their same lunch ten times faster. Apple, again, looks like a genius (intentionally, or far more likely, not). They didn't over-invest. They're not laying off a thousand people from the Alexa division [1], or removing a ton of Google Assistant features [2], or releasing hardware no one is buying. They built exactly enough of a voice assistant to be competitive throughout the 2010s, and now its time for the next generation of all these things anyway.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/amazon-alexa-job-cuts-generative-...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034262/google-assistant...

Better keyboard text prediction and power management. A competent Siri.

Simple example: Adding something to a reminder list, but the name of your lists don't exactly match the list you said to add to.

Prompt: "Add milk to my shopping list"

Siri: "I didn't find a shopping list, do you want to create one?"

ChatGPT (when asked to pick from my actual lists), properly identifies the "groceries" list as the intended list.

It doesn't even seem to matter anymore. The tail is fully wagging the dog. Wall Street doesn't really care what companies are doing with AI, how they are using it, or whether their use of AI is going to actually drive earnings. They just care that they are using it. If a company says "We're doing AI blah blah blah" that's enough: investors are happy and stock price goes up.

But I have heard it said so many times and seen so many people simply agree with it that I believe that for many many people out there, it is true.

> That’s why people are going for Apple and Tesla.

I think you misspelled Toyota...

The post you are replying to has a stronger focus on the second part but still wants the same thing.

Same reasoning for getting debian instead of windows. The preinstalled option seems easier at first sight (someone else prepared the box for you), but then windows has McAfee trials, hey sign up for this, oh you don't want updates right now... too bad, your microphone does not work in Skype and you have no clue where to even look to fix it. I don't have the time or patience to deal with this, so debian it is.

I hear this since 30 years. Yet absolutely nothing works out of the box. Everything has a learning curve, sometimes only for the sake of change (see Windows, iOS, etc)

I still have to think about them on the new shinies. It's just harder to understand them.

If a crank-based mechanism would have made that less likely to happen, or at least if it would be easier for me to get the window back up with simple tools, I would have been all for that at the time!

For me to return to the EV market I would require that I be able to source a third-party battery pack, at the very least. I'd be fine with government regulations to block the cheap packs that catch fire. I just want the option of swapping out the pack on my own terms if I want in the future, including getting next-gen battery tech that can increase range with less volume and weight. I'd also insist that they have a "do not phone home" mode of operation, along with buttons and knobs and a small screen. And a pull-brake. And a charging infrastructure that works. And that I can use with cash.

This is kind of a weird take: I was reading about the Therac 25 (radiation therapy machine that killed a few people because of software bugs), and one of the reasons why they were so confident it was going to work is that software isn't vulnerable to two classes of 'bugs' that analog devices suffer from: wear, and manufacturing defects.

I mean, they turned out to be wrong, but they have a point: physical devices are subject to entire categories of bugs that software can be reliably proofed against. All worm screws will ultimately fail, while software can (if done correctly) run forever. All manufactured devices are unique and have unique defects. Software can be reproduced without any defects whatsoever.

Even now, my phone's Bluetooth is my key to the car. I don't normally carry any other key.

My phone is a Pixel 7a running GrapheneOS. My laptop is a Thinkpad T80s running Debian Stable, and I'm waiting for my Framework 16 to ship. My vehicle for out-of-town trips is a GR Corolla, but for around-town stuff I use a custom steel frame e-bike.

When I have the time and energy I try to protect my privacy. For the GR Corolla I followed some steps* that might have done the job, but I can't say for sure. This summer I hope I have time to play with the hardware, up to and including replacing the headunit with something OSS-based.

* https://www.grcorollaforum.com/threads/sos-call-disable.2357...

Pretty much for that reason the only piece of tech in the last 15 years that I've genuinely liked is the Kindle (or comparable ereaders).

Literally just displays books in a format that feels pretty natural and does almost nothing else.

Already are, company replaced a natural biodegradable material with a micro-plastic shedding plastic weave

But make no mistake, Intel knows when to hold 'em and knows when to fold 'em. You heard it here first.