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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.

The idea of making the infotainment guts is interesting but I can’t see any carmaker giving up that much control. If they don’t like CarPlay they’d never like full Apple infotainment.

Sure Apple could do ADAS stuff, but why would an OEM choose Apple instead of others they’re used to and are likely far easier to work with.

Unless they went highly left field for the US, like tiny city cars more like Smart, I just don’t get it. And if they did that… well Smart isn’t breaking records in the US are they.

The initial idea seemed to be self driving cars, but for individuals you have the problems above and for fleets why would they want to buy from Apple? So unless Apple wanted to be Uber that doesn’t make much sense either.

An odd move all around.

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To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola and that US carriers would never give them enough control.

The phone made sense to me because by that point Apple had clearly proven themselves as a consumer electronics company. It’s wasn’t as big a jump and cell phone software was largely junk.

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 is still waiting it out until most of the existing EV issues are resolved. Then, they can swoop in and leverage their walled garden to get buyers/users. They'll also be different than Ford, Mazda, Honda, etc since I don't think they will try to sell their cars. It'll be a subscription fee and Apple will own the car.

All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.

What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with buying a car?

I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?

I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competition.

What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with bluetooth headphones? Now, look at AirPods, simple bluetooth headphones, with tight integration with iOS. I was the one ridiculing Apple for even entering this market and I thought they looked dumb. Sony XMs looked way better.

Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.

You still haven't said what the differentiator of an Apple car would be.

Maybe an enhanced version of CarPlay or something more nefarious like cutting off other auto makers from using CarPlay anymore. People that are used to CarPlay might be inclined to jump ship. Trust me, Apple will find a way to leverage their walled garden, to my chagrin. Just look at how they’re maliciously complying with the EU DMA law. I want to leave Apple’s walled garden myself, but can’t deny it exists.

Green bubble vs blue bubble another example.

Proprietary tires that you can only blow up with special hardware that you rent from Apple

> simple bluetooth headphones

That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform.

Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?

An enhanced CarPlay or even going as far as removing CarPlay from existing car manufacturers.

> Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users?

Uh yes, of course. I would be highly surprised if there weren't. That's Apple's MO.

>Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?

Given that 30k is the difference between an entry level and mid level car, sure. The premium brands would definitely want to get Apple's branding under their wing, and those buyers are already used to paying a premium when they can buy a $30k car.

The problem is I think Apple would want to be premium above existing luxury cars. I don’t think it would be 60k. I think they would be 90k or even 120k.

Sure Apple’s $60k car is better than a $30k Honda. But is it better than a $60k Acura or BMW or Lexus?

That’s where I think the trouble would be.

And this truth is probably the biggest reason why they killed the program.

> Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone?

Yes. People happily pay an extra 1-200% for something because it's Apple, all the time. I'll probably never understand why, but I've come to accept that they do.

That’s some Apple fan boy cope.

Nope, just seen it in action over and over.

No one thought they would do VR and they did.

No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now.

No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did.

The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.

> No one thought they would do VR and they did

What has this VR achieved? Nothing so far.

Cannibalising your own product isn’t an achievement

They have never shipped a large physical product or anything mechanical in the entire history of the company, this is outright delusional.

It’s been like a month. Seriously. That’s a ridiculous hurdle to clear.

“The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”

That’s what’s weird though.

A month of near 0 buzz for apples introduction to the era of “spatial computing”

Usually Apple parades around a few exemplar apps or use cases, but for the vision pro, it was just business meetings?

imo just having infinite floating screens is a better feature to show off.

Cannibalizing your own product is an achievement when done correctly. You don’t see Apple running to add a touch screen to MacBooks because that would cannibalize the iPad.

Let’s take iTunes. People were clowning Apple for releasing Apple Music because they had millions of people buying Music on iTunes. Spotify showed it could work but they weren’t exactly making money over fist.

Its strange to me you have a list full of "no one thought" statements that were all things that most of the people around me at least seemed like things Apple would do. Especially the movies and TV stuff, they already had a big marketplace for movies and hardware for watching movies and TV, other competitors in those spaces were producing original content, it seemed absolutely logical for them to do so as well.

The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.

Apples strategy is to wait and see they are rarely first to put money into something where they can't learn from mistakes of others. iPhone wasn't the first mass produced smartphone and I'd argue Apple is a software company first and foremost, the hardware part is just the means to lock you in.

It's more "fuzzy thinking" than fanboy cope.

Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.

I wish we could read the internal emails on it.

I think it’s a lot more simple than that. They’ll probably buy an existing EV company when they’re serious about entering the market. That’ll give them a head start and they won’t be reinventing the wheel. The acquihire will help bring in talent as well.

Before they released the AirPods, they bought Beats. It would along the same lines but with a way more complex machine.

This is how the iPod got "invented" :)

>Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist?

Same as the rest of apples brand: "it just works". The seemless, polished integration of their products gave them a devoted fanbase that pays a huge premium over competition.

That is what a toyota already is though.

Not my point. Why doesn't Apple start manufacturing airplanes that "just work"? Fridges that "just work"? TVs that "just work"? (they did try and give up on TVs because it made no sense) Their brand marketing focuses on creative people; why don't they start making grand pianos? Those make as little sense as a car, and are just as far from Apple's competencies, competitive advantages, and market as a car. Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.

>Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.

Sure they do. Facebook was so confident in VR they rebranded their entire company. Elon Musk got his horrible bluff called out and he owns the largest social media site (for now). It's not business related, but the CEO of Amazon owns a national newspaper.

Apple car didn't come out of nowhere. They and Google were working on Car Os's for years and we both know Apple cares hough about vertical integration to shun off Intel and Nvidia in order to make their own chips. Regardless of my confidence in the idea, the act itself is consistent with Apple.

Subscription would be odd. All my other Apple gear I've bought for cash.

Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.

If a car model won't run, you can't all your customers they're "holding it wrong".

Tesla is employing that strategy with some success.

I see no reason Apple couldn't tell their customers that. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.

> And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers.

The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product.

Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain.

Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry about any of your infotainment solutions? We'll build the unit, in exchange for owning the exclusive app store it uses. And you'll get to say your cars are powered by Apple." Win/win.

Instead, they dicked around until the automakers figured their consoles out (mostly... still looking at you angrily, Nissan) and Apple was left without a key differentiator.

Hell, the mind-numbingly obvious reason for Apple -- do it at a loss for the real-time mapping and traffic data!!

I think the risk to the carmaker is your customers getting used to the apple infotainment system. Maybe they start to see the car as less a Fiat and more an Apple car. Then the exclusive expires or needs to be renegotiated.

From Apple's perspective, yes. That's exactly the playbook that built the iPhone into what it is today.

People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands."

iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.

The carmakers are unfortunately well aware that they can mine and sell data. They just suck at it.

I saw Huawei cars being sold in Huawei stores in China. (Huawei stores are like Apple Stores). They were incredibly normal, beautiful cars. In contrast, Apple would have to make a gamechanger. Too big of a risk?

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

That’s not quite how that happened. They were turned down and laughed out of the room by nearly every carrier they approached. The only one that didn’t was AT&T; but they definitely weren’t “desperate” at the time.

They had lots of leverage, which is how they got exclusivity.

Sorry I meant the carrier was desperate, not Apple. That was the case with AT&T (Cingular when the deal went down). They wanted customers so bad they were willing to give up everything for a possible hit phone.

And it worked out.

You’re right Apple was riding high on the iPod, they weren’t in any danger of going under. They could have waited longer.

I think it would have been funny if they released it in Europe or something where the carriers weren’t in control and then told Americans “call your carrier, sorry, they wouldn’t let us”. Not that that would have ever happened.

I'm not sure if the GP here was edited to be substantially different, because your response doesn't match what they are saying.

AT&T wasn't desperate, and I'm sure Jobs would have preferred to skip on exclusivity, since that really didn't serve iPhone.

"Desperate for more customers"? Well sure, but I'm sure Verizon was even more desperate for more customers considering they were so close to being number one (AT&T was number one at the time, by a slim margin). After all, Pepsi literally bought restaurants and forced them to serve Pepsi in order to force consumers to drink their sodas from the runner up spot.

I don't have any reference for this, but just on its face it would make sense that if Apple needed to sweeten the pot for a carrier to allow it, exclusivity was a way to do it, and it would have been in Apple's best interest to pick the carrier with the biggest market share at the time, which was AT&T.

EDIT: Others corrected me that at the time the deal was signed in 2005 and during the famous 2007 keynote, the partner was Cingular. Through a series of M&A Cingular became what we know of as AT&T, and by the time the phone launched in July 2007, it was AT&T who held the deal.

Interestingly,

> Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.

In Jobs' keynote he referred to Cingular as the #1 carrier with 58 million subscribers. I think the logic above still makes sense given that.

The carriers were probably right to be concerned. They used to be the ones with the ability to charge an "app store tax"

> 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

And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.

I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.

> Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.

That cash ironically is an obstacle to Apple being able to innovate. Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is nothing but a “phone company” with a bank attached, which is fine, it will continue to operate, but it won’t continue to grow and innovate.

>Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status.

Apple is rather frugal with acquisitions and hires and somewhat frugal with salaries.

Hmm I don’t think the SpaceX metaphor works super well here.

One is an established tech company trying to do business in a space it’s unfamiliar with. It has existing forces pulling it in a certain direction because it already makes money in those ways. Google is the perfect example of how this hampers innovation. It’s one of the reasons the concept of Alphabet exists.

SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal

> SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal

Apple used to be organized differently than other big companies, and more like multiple startups. Just look at the trajectory of other PC builders of the 90’s.

> And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had.

But they were working towards that all the time. And then SpaceX didn't try to make a car, Tesla was started as a mostly-separate company to make a car. Because there's very little business synergy between those two things.

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

The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?

Actually, it was Cingular, which got purchased by ATT (I think)

Oh, it was Cingular at announcement and AT&T at launch. Interestingly,

Actually, it was the other way around. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, which was _not_ part of the original AT&T at the time.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Wireless_Services

Yes this seems to be right, although in short order the resulting firm was once again branded AT&T.

Rumor I heard at the time is Apple went to Verizon first but Apple insisted no one see the phone until shortly before launch and Verizon balked.

Tesla doesn’t use dealerships.

> The phone made sense to me because…

Only in hindsight. At the time Apple had tried once before with the Rockr, and it really sucked.

The iPhone launch was wonderful because it changed the game enough for a 2G phone to be an acceptable trade off in a 3G market.

It was not clear at all that would happen before the launch presentation.

> At the time Apple had tried once before with the Rockr, and it really sucked.

Steve Jobs said that Motorola were calling the shots which is why Apple decided to do its own phone.

Not really the point. Apple succeeded because they applied their strengths, product and user interface design, to what is essentially a small computer.

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.

I think that’s why they were a bit more interested when the original idea was to skip all that and do all automatic driving.

But as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option I don’t understand why they didn’t just give up and instead seemed to try to shift towards a more normal car.

I agree that a car is on a different scale, but I think it's only in hindsight that a phone is obviously just a computer and that the user interface is important part.

Do you really not see how a car is a much greater departure from their core expertise than the iphone? They were already making handheld electronic devices well before the iPhone. And they were making computers pretty much for the whole history of the company. Ipod touch was a natural evolution of the ipod and the iphone was basically just an incremental improvement on the ipod touch.

The closest thing they've made to a car is those wheels for the mac pro.

The Mac Pro comment is an unfair comparison. It's closer to a car on cinder blocks since the wheels cost extra.

iPhone predates iPod touch, though.

Wait, you're right. I could've sworn I remember the ipod touch being first.

Now I'm wondering why it existed it all.

Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.

iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.

Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.

Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.

It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.

Interesting, thanks for the history lesson. /g

> Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.

Yep. Well said. The cost of a full phone + expensive plan is a lot.

Plus kids wanted the apps (really games) the iPhone had. Apple wanted to sell them games.

And besides that parents were far more hesitant to give young kids phones than (for better or worse) than today.

The final reason I’ve heard is the number of hand-me-down phones given to kids now that smartphones are ubiquitous means sales slowly fell to ver little compared to when introduced.

And further, buying your kid an iPod Touch at the time served the same purpose (for Apple) as buying your kid an iPad today. It gets them into Apple's products space, develops brand affinity and trust, and gets them familiar with iOS so that they are more likely to buy an iPhone.

It would be surprising if we had stats on iPad versus non-iPad kids and what percentage of them ended up being iPhone users, and those stats didn't show a strong correlation.

> wheels for the mac pro

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

700 bucks, now just imagine what one would have to pay for the wheels on your shiny new applecar

Turn your thinking around. The only reason we still call it a phone is because that's what the original function was. They are pocket computers in everything but name. A significant percentage of the population doesn't even use them for voice calls anymore.

And yet we're fine having the draconic business model of phone carriers from the 90s and early aughts carried into the modern day, just wielded by Apple instead of AT&T.

Computers run software the user asks for, phones run the software the phone manufacturer allows it to.

> 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.

Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.

Rumors of Apple making an “iPhone” were rampant and always seen as the next step from making the iPod.

Phones are just networked computers though.

A connected PDA was always a thing. Palm/3Com made phones. HP/Compaq made iPaq phones. Sharp made their Zaurus. The were OEM phones you could get branded. The Qt guys had their Trolltech phone.

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.

> There was this long song and dance about how apps were to be replaced by web pages

Yeah and the first iPhones were terrible if you didn't jailbreak them

Terrible compared to what? At the time, mobile applications were universally pretty crap. Browsers were atrocious, not being able to render real CSS or anything (they’d give you a simplified broken layout). I didn’t have the first iPhones (my first was the iPhone 4) but I had a first generation iPod Touch, and Safari felt pretty magical at the time compared to anything else on the market. The capacitive screen, multitouch, being able to decently render pages - lots of stuff we totally take for granted now…

The App Store became publicly available just one year after the original iPhone was released too - people seem to make out as if Apple held on for years and years but the SDK was announced less than six months after the iPhone’s release and was made available to developers a couple of months later.

Opera Mobile would render pages with heavy CSS (for the time) pretty accurately.

Even with Pocket IE, a lot of pages did render pretty decently. I was able to browse and post on phpBB boards and what not with it.

The browser built-in on the various Symbian devices I owned were also pretty decent. They were built on WebKit, supported real CSS, working JavaScript support, and more.

When you're talking about browsers on mobiles, are you talking just WAP browsers on dumbphones or actual smartphones?

To be fair, Symbian apps were quite okay-ish. I had Nokia 6600 and it had a lot of great games and apps. Of course, when Apple finally launched the Appstore, and apps there were able to use iPhone's touchscreen, it was over for Symbian.

No, that's like comparing apples and oranges

Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins.

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.

> Yeah but a cell phone and a computer are close cousins.

Were they really close cousins in 2006?

Yes. Anything that has machined and injection molded housings, a screen, pcbas and software/firmware. Basically all consumer electronics are cousins in this context. Time doesn't matter here, industry verticals do.

Cars are wildly different, 50 years ago GE would have seemed like the one that would make a phone, not ford.

Before 2006 my phone was already my portable media player, my internet modem on the go, a quick web browser, my portable email machine, my internet instant messenger client, a mapping tool, and more. By 2007 I was even using it for video calls.

In 2006, yes. J2ME apps were already fairly broadly supported by feature phones and somewhat popular.

The problem is that smartphones had very little consumer uptake before the iPhone came out.

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.

>To be fair, that was what a lot of people thought about Apple making a cell phone. That they'd never compete with Nokia or Motorola

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.

There are generally 3types of car buyers today.

1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.

2. People who want cheap modes of transportation. This is your cheapest level sedan buyers.

3. People who want specific utility and are willing to pay for it. This is the largest group of buyers that ranges from people wanting the convenience/novelty/technology of an electric vehicle, to people who want the safety/robustness/cargo capacity of a pickup truck. Apple car would definitely fit in here.

Apple cars would aim more for the (1) bracket than the (3). Apple products are status items. Same particular utility can be had much cheaper.

How can Apple products be status items when over 60% of smartphones in the US are iPhones? Is Coca-Cola a status item? Is it possible that they're just good products that deliver good value to the majority of people who buy them? Is a $1300 Galaxy S24 Ultra not a status item?

> How can Apple products be status items when over 60% of smartphones in the US are iPhones?

How can an official suit and tie be a status item if most men have one?

How can a good beard be a status item if it grows for free?

I wouldn’t say a general suit and/or tie are a status item. Maybe if it’s a expensive one.

A beard definitely isn’t a status item. That’s like saying black hair are a status item

https://nypost.com/2023/12/28/lifestyle/android-users-less-a...

Hmm good question

"I spent 50-200% more on an item of similar utility" is a status statement, even if every other guy can afford it. Bonus points for a new iphone every time one is released.

You can make your own conclusions about people who are affected by such status statements.

> How can Apple products be status items when over 60% of smartphones in the US are iPhones?

This is an incredible achievement of Apple marketing.

In order to be in 1, Apple car has to be a complete package with performance as well. While Apple can build an electric car, you can't outsource design of something that feels sporty.

> 1. People who are into cars as status items (which encompasses car enthusiasts, because lets be real, very few of those people who are into "performance" even touch 50% of the cars capability on public roads). This is your BMW/Porsche and other buyers.

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.

I don't think that changes the parent's point at all. Whether the focus of your enthusiasm and status is performance or luxury is irrelevant if you're spending more than you "need" to for your vehicle.

It's like custom PCs - some go for EATX systems with Threadripper and dual graphics cards and NVMe RAID 0 while others go for 4L ITX systems or fanless configs. But a Dell tower is functionally very similar.

Someone buying a S-class Mercedes probably isn't doing it for the V8 but for the comfortable interior. They're still spending $100,000 when a Camry could do a similar job.

Yes, that's what I was recognizing in my first sentence.

There are an extremely small number of car enthusiasts that are in it because they like working with their hands to make performance mods to try stuff. The rest is all about status. I know this because I used to be solidly in the car world back in the early 2000s , my friend from college had an Integra Type R that he raced in the Honda Challenge that we both tracked and worked on, and I got to experience pretty much all of car culture first hand.

People who are into modifications for power to roll race on the street do it solidly just to show off how much money they can spend.

People who drive "hard" on the street really arent even close to performance capabilities of their car. Give me most any ~250 hp sedan, no matter which wheel drive, Ill redo the suspension and stick on good tires, and I can keep up with any 911 on twisty roads. The culture in this regard is pretty evident because I will be seen as a poser if I do this.

As for the track, there is a separate subculture that happens at the track. Sure there is a minority out there to just have fun in their regular cars, most everybody including them are oogling the expensive track toys, and nobody is paying attention to actual driving skill of the people. At one point and time, a husband and his wife pulled up with a mobile home towing a garage with 2 Ferrari Challenge cars, with the entire setup costing more than I have ever made in my entire life even now 10 years later, and of course they were not any faster around the track, but they were the stars of that day.

Racing series are also literally about who can spend the most money, until you cross the bridge of being good enough to run sponsors. Not even on the car parts either, for example, we would camp at the track, while other people would pull up in their trailer homes and get a much better night sleep with AC, which gives a huge advantage come racing.

I know, I've been to the track with a couple of my cars too.

My point is that you neither have to reach the limits of a car's performance, nor do you need a high performance car, to appreciate cars for what they are. Many of the people who ended up on the track in the 00's and 10's are people who enjoyed whippin' 90s shitboxes around country roads, but couldn't afford the track. These are hardly people who buy cars for status.

Your categories are largely correct, but #1 is way bigger than you think and not just about performance (unless it's the performance of being seen owning the car). For example, most pickup trucks are status symbols and lifestyle choices, not purely for function. If they were purely for function most of them would be transit vans.

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

> I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini.

Jaguar is owned by Tata motors, Polestar is a Volvo subsidiary, Lamborghini's ownership is Audi -> Volkswagen, so not really small makers in any sense.

But generally I agree, I think Apple making the full car is an odd choice. I think so much of their DNA, though, is "hardware and software working in concert together", and that's probably what they thought this was a good idea to begin with.

And Volvo is a Geely subsidiary.

Don't have a source ready but if I remember correctly they never planned to build the car themselves. There are plenty of contract manufacturers out there that build for a variety of brands (Magna Steyr in Austria is a typical example). Then Apple adds it's custom electronics and AI driving assistants and voila you got an iCar.

I believe you’re right, but I thought the plan was to design it all themselves as opposed to buying/licensing an existing platform as skinning it + their electronics.

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

That’s true; and I think even more recently they were in talks with Kia, who publicly let the cat out of the bag

From the other side, phone and home electronics producer Xiaomi invested few billions into car business and now is producing car similar to Porsche.

Why you think Apple can't do the same if focused?

I was under the impression that Xiaomi did not target only the top end of the market as Apple tends to. I would expect an Apple card to start at $120k or more.

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.

Apple does not target only top end. New Iphone starts from under 500$.

Do you really think Apple would come out with a $25k car?

They convinced everyone to increase what they’d pay for a phone. , and to be fair a smartphone is for more capable so that’s understandable.

But they would make a luxury level car and I don’t think they’d convince much of the public it would be worth the premium. Even if everyone wanted it I doubt many would buy.

They might come out with a car that is quite expensive, but within reach of a fleet purchaser who can use it to create a turnkey Uber? /halfbakery

Xiaomi is better at being the New Apple than Apple is. Apple should be selling micro transportation appliances that fit into a higher urbanized environment. Extremely small cars would be the largest thing I would rent.

Why would they do so? People wants huge premium cars. Land Cruiser! Panamera! Not many are dreaming for a luxury Fiat 500.

The electric Fiat 500 is super cool though.

Not everywhere is the US. Xiaomi doesn't appear to enter the US market. European sales of the smaller car would likely outweigh a Land Cruiser lookalike.

> micro transportation appliances that fit into a higher urbanized environment

Xiaomi bought Segway (Ninebot) and released tons of e-bikes, e-scooters and even an electric gokart.

I’m interested about the Sony/Honda joint venture car (Afeela), and I’d buy an Apple/Toyota joint venture car in a heartbeat.

I’d be far more willing to buy a partnership as reasonable, but that didn’t seem to be the plan. At most they’d find someone to act like Foxcon and built it, but not a real partnership.

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

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

It’s increasingly obvious that Apple has ensured by their cutthroat and rent-seeking behavior in the one place they have market power (the App Store) that no sane business wants to partner with them on anything. Everyone knows Apple will leverage any partnership to get a firm foothold and then extract as close to 100% of the possible margins for Apple, leaving them with crumbs, or possibly just losses. And the whole time, Apple’s corporate personality seems to genuinely believe that all of this is not ruthlessness, but just Apple being fairly compensated for their great work.

By the way, this doesn’t make them bad, lots of companies are known for margin extraction, like Walmart famously did with its suppliers. Apple are very good at Doing Capitalism in this way, but competitors are rightly going to defend themselves by ruling out anything that could help Apple expand further.

Even if you ignore the App Store, Apple’s ethos is to control their own destiny. That means they try to bring everything in house or control it with an iron fist.

And they have more money than god.

So if you parter with them, they will learn from you. And you’ll get “the Apple bump” if the car is successful.

But don’t expect to be partners in 10 years. Expect to be competitors or a new division.

The comments here are all so off-base. People who work on cars don't get moved to gen-AI. People who work on robocars get moved to gen-AI.

All we have on what this car was supposed to be was rumors, but the rumors seemed pretty consistent, that this was going to be a self driving car.

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

It's no rumour that Apple was developing vehicle autonomy. Their test vehicles were driving around Cupertino for years.

The "car" part would have been subcontracted and must have been seen as inconsequential as say phone screen suppliers. I'd speculate there were some hard realizations in both the car part and the robot part.

I'm more surprised they haven't bought a smallish car maker with proven automotive engineering experience that is already making EVs and then focus on the software and self-driving aspects. Polestar would have been a nice fit and Apple could easily afford it.

As a subsidiary of Geely it seems unlikely Polestar would be available, but perhaps one of the US-based EV startups like Rivian, Lucid or Fisker would be interested. I am not sure how that would work with the Apple brand though.

If anyone could have created a new category for cars. And NOT gone head on against others. It would of course be Apple.

What is possible is that after spending enough effort on the project, they couldn't see what that new category could be. And that just making one more (like one more monitor perhaps) had not enough margin to bother.

> I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini.

None of these are practical luxury car brands. Certainly their competitors would be, say, BMW or Porsche?

I was trying to pick brands that we’re both expensive and low volume. If I don’t think Apple could get the sales of some of those makers then I definitely don’t think they could target numbers like BMW.

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.

> not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.

Very odd, why would you mention these? These brands neither have the brand recognition Apple would strive for nor the scale they are interested in.

To develop patents to license and further develop CarPlay maybe. If they hit it big with the right patent they could become the Qualcomm of the carspace.

Car manufacturers must be coming around on CarPlay. I made a purchasing decision largely because one of the car suitable cars supported wireless CarPlay.

You'd think so... GM has stated that they're doing away with CarPlay and Android auto in favour of their own thing, which will most likely suck on large ways.

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

Which rules out GM for me as an option for my next vehicle. Maybe they can make up the lost sales by data mining the rest of their customers.

GM is hardly a car brand that knows what consumers give a shit about, this is just enshitification to squeeze their remaining customers.

Their trucks still sell massively and the Blackwing Cadillacs are both on many 10-best lists.

Ok? That doesn't contradict anything I said.

> GM is hardly a car brand that knows what consumers give a shit about

> Their trucks still sell massively

If they didn't know what people wanted, they probably wouldn't be able to sell a massive amount of them.

Their own thing is Android Auto(motive) developed by Google.

I’m pretty sure when you hand in the paperwork for creating a car company, there’s a little pledge you have to take: I will make the crappiest possible OS to include in my car.

It is really bizarre that they insist on continuing to try. Just give us AUX in (stereo or usb). Cellphones can do it all now anyway. The car’s entertainment system should be about as complex as a pair of headphones.

Tesla has never supported Apple CarPlay and their sales keep rising. GM recently dropped CarPlay from new models so we'll see how that impacts sales.

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

In my mind Tesla is sort of special because they offered something no one else did. For a long time the only other electric cars were the volt/bolt and the leaf. None of those are performance cars in the slightest.

As other brands get more and more popular in the US I wonder if the CarPlay issue will really start to hurt them. But we won’t know for a while.

I’m certainly very curious to see what happens since GM was dumb enough to remove CarPlay. I expect that’s gonna hurt. But maybe I’m wrong.

I haven’t driven a Tesla, so maybe I’m way off base here, but their infotainment software seems modern and at least reasonably well designed.

Legacy automakers have thoroughly demonstrated that when it comes to making a decent infotainment system they are unwilling, incapable, or some mix of the two

Agreed about Tesla's software being modern and most other automakers' being garbage, but I'll take physical controls for things like climate, turn signals, windshield wipers, and lighting with a side of crappy infotainment software, over slick software with everything being crammed onto the touchscreen and few (capacitive) steering wheel buttons. I don't understand how it's legal for Tesla to delete the turn-signal stalk and replace it with a pair of buttons on the steering wheel...

Car manufacturers have ISO standards for symbols/icons on controls: https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/68409/6480e873c14b4e56...

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.

Any of the car companies are more likely to give Apple business after this announcement that they’re not competing.

> I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.

Why were you puzzled? What is so impossible about making a car from scratch, then making money on it? I don't own any Apple products, but I know they could do it. Yes it's difficult, but a lot of the difficulty comes from a lack of resources, not something Apple is worried about.

I find it really interesting that you (and those who did not contradict you) choose to form this opinion. I suspect Apple shares it. But to me it's a missed opportunity combined with a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's probably the lack of this very characteristic that makes Elon so successful. He never lets FUD get in the way of his goals.

There are some companies out there who don't seem subject to these artificial limitations, at least, at certain points in their history. For a while Mitsubishi made both cars and televisions. Panasonic made both batteries and bicycles.

I think what really separates winners from losers when it comes to developing a product and selling it is the willingness to set aside artificial limitations and really commit to beating the competition. Core competencies matter more for companies who are no longer interested in growing. Apple definitely wants to keep growing. So if Apple really was putting R&D money into cars and then quit, then I see this as a failure of Apple leadership. Apple can make a great car, and people would buy it.

Because just being able to do it isn't the point. The real question is whether or not it's a good use of the cash they have available. OP is saying that it doesn't make good business sense for Apple to do this, not that it's impossible for them to pull it off.

I can't help but think of Sears and all their decisions that probably made "good business sense".

Right. If Apple spent a total of $10B on this, did they get the best ROI they could have?

If they went through and released a car, would it be profitable enough for all those costs?

Or would spending all that money on insourcing some manufacturing or getting more manufacturing out of China pay off more?

Tim Cook is a finance guy, not a “what the hell we’ve got money to burn” leader.

> If they went through and released a car, would it be profitable enough for all those costs?

Why would that matter? Those are sunk costs.

Yeah, so glad they're ditching the car.

CarPlay? Cool.

Actual car?

The world doesn't need another tony, luxury car. The world needs an affordable (preferably electric) "folks" car (and I don't see that as Apple's market).

>I was always rather puzzled by the car. I can’t see them ever competing even with the small makers like Jaguar or Polestar or Lamborghini. They’re certainly not going to take on Ford or Mazda or Honda.

That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches.

The average car is crap compared to what it could be - and that's without any self-driving involved either: purely the basic car functionality has seen little thought UX and convenience wise in 50+ years.

> That was what people saying about them getting in music players, phones, and smart watches.

Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches.

When Apple got into music players no one cared because they were waiting for the company to die.

When Apple got into watches there were lots of rumors they were for years first, and it made sense as an extension to the iPhone. Remember the Pebble already showed the basic idea could be useful.

>Nobody was saying that about music players and smart watches

Those things were said for both music players and smart watches, by pundits and competitors alike.

E.g. re the Apple Watch, here's a Forbes summary: "In 2015, the year the Apple Watch was launched, LVMH watch division president and Tag Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver said the Swiss industry was not afraid of Apple’s new product, because it could not be repaired in a thousand years or eighty years, nor inherited by children, nor would it ever become a status symbol. As is always the case when disruption occurs in an industry, traditional competitors are not able to see the threat, and continue to try to analyze it according to the variables that were important yesterday."

yep, Tesla has won the war.

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