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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

>>> Good. This was an idea that never made any sense to me. It’s high overhead/low-margin and requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business.

Apple, in a twist of fate, is in the same position that AT&T was when it started Bell Labs, and in the same place as Xerox was when it started Parc.

The history of Parc and Apple is well known, the early history of unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed to avoid more anti trust issues is often forgotten. Apples products are built on legacies. "Resting on the shoulders of giants" is probably true in this case.

Apple is now an AT&T, its now a Xerox, it is now the company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS). Apple, unlike google, knows how to make a consumer product, and one of these moonshots could make it even bigger...

I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.

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Embarrassingly, I was eves dropping on a (loud) woman in a coffee shop who worked on the Apple Car project. She did SLAM work. I was evesdropping because that was a core part of my thesis and I was curious. She told her dining partner she was moved to the Vision Pro team to build the inside-out tracking.

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.

There was a recent YC podcast about Vision Pro where SLAM and the overlap with autonomous vehicles was explained.

Link? I didn’t know YC had a podcast and Google didn't help.

https://www.youtube.com/@ycombinator/videos

Most recent episode?

Tangentially, it's funny to me that people link to YouTube for podcasts these days.

It was at the time of the comment the most recent video on the YouTube channel - "Apple Vision Pro: Startup Platform of the future?"

Ohhh. I thought the commenter was using some sort of slang about the quality of their work.

For others out of loop:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_localization_an...

Yes, I also don’t work I computer vision but played with it just a tiny bit—I think somebody saying they worked in SLAM and are moving to a Vision Pro project is not a huge leak or anything. It is like a chemist saying they work in lithium ion batteries and are making the same move. A very broad and fundamental concept.

Maybe the fact that they were moved away from the car project would have been a leak though, depending on what else they said.

I am incredibly jealous of you guys living in a place where you just bump into random people at coffeeshops that happen to work on incredibly interesting things. The density of talent must be amazing.

And I am so happy I live in a place where this doesn't happen.

Interesting, but I can't understand why that makes you happy. What benefit does it bring you?

Some people like talking about things not related to their job when they aren’t working. The culture out in SV is very much still “work is life”.

The benefit of being a part of the actual human world, where real people live. Where not essentially everyone is obsessed with their careers and/or comparative wealth. That sort of thing.

It can be alienating to move through the world in spaces where your work is everywhere you go. It's a thing I appreciated moving from San Francisco back to the midwest. Every once in awhile, I bump into someone with a Github sticker or whatever, and it's a happy surprise, but for the most part the world I inhabit has nothing to do with my work. Everyone has different things to talk about.

I love not having to think or talk about work when I go outside.

If some one asks what I do they'll say "that's neat, must be nice to work from home!" and that's the end of the conversation, we can talk about hobbies or something else instead.

Please elaborate

The Bay Area is pretty special that way

These people are everywhere. Most are not stupid enough to yell about it in public.

Why is it stupid to talk about non-confidential aspects of your job in public?

The Apple Car R&D project is (or, I suppose, was) absolutely confidential. I am sure Apple has reprimanded or fired people for less.

Fired people for less than what?

What part of it is confidential? Its existence? Obviously not. The fact that it uses SLAM? Not confidential, of course it does. That a person was transferred from that to the Vision Pro? Probably also on their linkedin page.

Nothing that OP described this person as saying sounds "stupid" or confidential. Sure, maybe they also said something that was confidential in addition to what was described. Maybe they also insulted your mother. We don't know.

Apple employees most certainly cannot talk publicly about unreleased products. Including loudly discussing their roles in restaurants.

Is that an official, Apple-specific policy written down somewhere? That doesn't seem right, and doesn't match other similar companies.

I've known people at Facebook and Microsoft who were working on upcoming not-yet-released products and were free to talk about the products and their roles on them. These people, much like the person we're discussing, worked on upcoming projects which had already been publicly announced.

Of course publicly discussing a confidential project that no one knows about could get someone fired, but that's not the scenario we're talking about.

Apple never announced a project to build a car. Nor did they announce the cancellation of a project to build a car.

Reporters reported on internal communications and noteworthy patterns in who was hired.

Apple does not pre-announce products by more than 6-9 months, and only that in cases where developer support is needed at launch.

More generally, Apple is notorious for having policies around new product secrecy that are vastly more elaborate than other tech companies. Using Microsoft and Meta as comps seems like a bad idea.

Yeah, it is surprising. Apple is like fight club.

I'd argue this is true of a lot of cities where you're likely to bump into anyone, depending on how narrow your scope is of what one considers interesting. Also true of probably most universities if they're doing anything right.

The problem with some particularly uptight places is that people aren't always open to chatting (or maybe under strict NDA), and you want to find a place on that nice area of the venn diagram where you actually do bump into and communicate with new and stimulating people.

Everybody is interesting if you get talking to them. You just think the guy who collects your trash is uninteresting and never talk to him (or do you?). Sure not everyone has the same background, and so they are interesting in different ways, but they are all interesting.

Interests must align. People must know common jargon which convey high density information faster. I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

You must be fun at parties.

I usually cringe when people make this quip but it might be the first time I've seen it used effectively.

> I would like to have positive ROI on the conversations that I have.

Seems pretty hollow and transactional to me.

> Interests must align.

That's part of the dice roll. Sometimes interests do align, sometimes they don't, but someone looking for ROI is easily spotted and ran away from. Chemistry and common ground are a matter of luck.

How tiresome

Having a conversation with someone who provides a perspective or experience I do not have is automatically a positive ROI in my book.

some of my best conversations - that I still remember many many years from them - are from people who have nothing in common to me.

some of them made me question my reality that changed my life, something you may want to try. Even keeping a conversation going that you think is not going well,can be a really good skill to have

This is exactly what I meant, but even beyond relatively common jobs, if you're likely enough to bump into open people, there's a good chance some of them will be doing more niche interesting things too

I’m in Philly and about 20 years ago I sat next to an old man at a dinner for something. Neither of us wanted to be there. We talked, found out we both did tech things. I asked him what he worked on and he said “well back in the day I helped build ENIAC.” I was blown away. Had a great talk.

These are the moments in life to cherish. As Ferris Bueller once said "Life moves fast, if you don't stop to look around once in a while, you might miss it".

Incidentally, one of the scariest things about the volatility in the housing market and in my (lack of) career, is that I may at some point be forced to abandon the neighborhood and city in which I've adopted as my home and in which I've befriended many of these random delightful people of all ages, and they might have to too. They're my community, I see them at the gym, the coffee shop, walking down the street, or at the park. A 1 bedroom condo starts at around $650k CAD, and most of the people here who haven't already owned something for a while depend on renting basements.

It is amazing, and happens exactly this way.

I'm a "regular person", engineer, and since moving here over 10nyrars I've met a lot of famous tech people, witnessed lot of amazing things, all mostly by happenstance just because there is so much of it, so many people like me, here.

Interesting things happen in many places, not just Silicon Valley. You simply need to keep your ears open and listen.

You have to step over the poop and the needles to get into the coffee shop though, and while you're inside your car is being burglarized.

South Bay is just like a giant company town, it’s actually pretty boring - 60% of people work at the same handful of giant companies, the other 30% work at a startup, and the last 10% serve the first group fair trade coffee.

The weather and climate are amazing, but socially its suffocating when everybody you meet is a variation on a tired theme.

People who work for startups can’t afford coffee?

They have to make their own, and it’s not fair trade.

This was funny and I meant to update it but instead down voted it and now can't find how to undo that. Sorry!

You can click the ‘undown’ button next to the username and timestamp of the comment.

there's a undown button to the right of the username if the timer hasn't expired

haha this, its great to try it, but like NYC, dont stay too long...

Yeah, its *super interesting* at first, but once the novelty fades you aren’t left with much.

That said, nowhere on earth had better driving directions on apps since people will notice the bugs on the drive into work and fix them. ;-)

What are you talking about, NYC is great! You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.

>You could live your whole life there and never run out of things to do.

Look, I know I'm being pedantic here, but as a rural nerd, I just gotta say that this is true of literally any habitable location on the planet if you decide to no-life the right hobby or hobbies.

I’m very fond of both New York City, and spending time in nature for the same reason: you just don’t know what you’re gonna see when you walk out your door.

Am I going to hear a violin performance on the subway platform that is utterly sublime from a world class performer?

Am I gonna see the rarest bird in North America perched branch in front of me?

For me, the worst is the middle ground between crazy urban and pure nature where there is low probability of seeing anything exciting.

Yeah, but you don't have to "no-life the right hobbies" to be satisfied in NYC because there's SO MUCH to do. You can just be a normal person who isn't hyper obsessed with one particular hobby.

You mean besides drinking and dining and spending outrageous amounts of money on 13$ beer and overpriced bland food? As a european I dont like the city at all. The only thing going for it is the vibe and the energy of the people. If it werent for the high salaries, people wouldnt be moving here.

It needs serious clean up, from the mentally-sick homeless domesticating the subway, to the stench and the rats, from the grime, to the zero outdoor culture besides the monotonous central park which after dark gets swarmed with rats which my dog loves to chase. They need to narrow the avenues and start building outdoor areas the same way Barcelona is doing. In the winter you put heating mushrooms and you are good to go. NYC has a long way to start looking like a decent city that europeans would like to move to. Americans find it great because its the only thing resembling a city and not an airport where you dont need a car to move around.

NYC is way better than Barcelona, sorry. Let me know when y'all can figure out how to make sidewalks that you can walk straight along to your destination, rather than having to go diagonally along a big asphalt parking lot at every single intersection.

> never run out of things to do.

Unless the thing is "afford housing"

Well that's why we do these high-paying tech jobs.

> It's weird. They always travel in groups of five. These programmers, there's always a tall skinny white guy, a short skinny Asian guy, fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group.

And they all drive Teslas with vanity license plates.

Different strokes I guess. How long have you been…working? The vast vast vast majority of people want a little more variety in lives as opposed to more more more of the stuff they spend 40+ hours a week doing as it is. The exceptions to this rule are almost always unhealthy workaholics / people that’ll learn about the benefits of work / life balance the hard way. It doesn’t make them some higher tier of world-class engineer like some (often including themselves) expect.

People also do that to get insider info to trade on or for industrial espionage/competitor spying. They'll hang out in the lobby of a building, coffee shops nearby, appearing to work while eavesdropping and taking notes.

At my last bigco job, I was advised not to discuss company matters outside of the office.

I know a guy whose job it is to eavesdrop for industrial espionage purposes. Coffee shops and the like are haunts of his, as well as taking commuter flights in and out of SV.

There's always going to be the debate between entrepreneurship vs "intrapreneurship". Whether large companies can successfully develop what amounts of startups in-house with separate R&D labs vs buying startups.

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.

Large companies often are significant investors in small R&D moonshots. Because they own a large part of the startup they can choose to buy it if the product turns out profitable, or they can sell. And since it is a separate investment when things go south they can stop investing and thus save money without appearing to let anyone go.

> unix being a thrown out the car window by AT&T at speed

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.

When Ma Bell existed, Wall Street wasn't as myopic and short-termist. The stock market tolerated private-sector R&D because it mostly consisted of investors rather than speculators. These days, if something doesn't bear immediate fruit, the Masters of the Universe want no part of it.

And when it does bear fruit, many big tech companies come to copy or purchase it only to have it wither in some corner of their company.

company that can just do R&D for the sake of doing it (as can Google and a lesser degree MS)

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..

Yeah, I absolutely believe that Apple can bring something to car industry - I remember Elon once said that Teslas hidden strength that no other car manufacturer caught on to was treating the car as technology akin to an iPhone with incremental updates and improvements pushed over the air. I've owned a Model X for a few years and I see that approach but don't think Tesla has perfected it. Apple has the potential to innovate there. Cars, even ones that look like "traditional" cars, have been computers on wheels for a long time - for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes. I have no idea what that would look like, and as someone who thought the iPhone was a worse version of an iPod and that the iPad filled a non-existant need I don't think I can speculate. But it just feels like an area that lags behind in terms of UX, which Apple often excels at.

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.

That seems wrong. My brakes work with both batteries disconnected, though I have to push very hard. Audi made in 2014.

With power brakes, there's a brake booster (usually vacuum powered) which applies most of the force. When the engine is off (or if you have a broken brake booster) braking is entirely on you.

Indeed. The brake boost works one or two times right after engine power down, it's kinda funny - I like to push the brake before getting out just to feel it harden.

Small nitpick but almost every car today still has brakes that work via direct force vs by wire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire

>>for example, when you press the brakes there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes

I'm sorry but you're getting it completely wrong. Brake by wire isn't legal anywhere in any market of the world and consequently there are zero cars implemented this way - every car currently on sale everywhere has to have a physical connection between the brake pedal and the actual brakes.

Throttle by wire on the other hand - sure. Nearly all new cars only have an electronic throttle.

Steer by wire is making progress, with Lexus making the first road legal car that has a steering wheel that's fully disconnected from the steering rack, with only electronic control.

Thank you, yes that was probably literally the worst example I could have given.

But isn't there famously brake by wire in toyota EVs? And that physical connection is required as a fallback?

Yes, they always have a physical fallback :-) and don't worry the systems like that do exist just not with brakes - it's an easy mistake to make.

Lexus has a backup mechanical link it engages when a fault is detected. The Tesla Cybertruck is the first vehicle on the road with no such backup. They rely on redundancy of motors, power, and compute instead

Does it have a backup link? According to this video:

https://youtu.be/agMrewRJTow?si=DrjfGsrKp5_ZazB-

There isn't a mechanical connection of any kind - the car just relies on triple(!) Backup for every component, including three fully independent power sources.

Lots of cars brake by wire -- but not through the brake pedal.

> there isn't and hasn't been for a long time a direct connection to the physical brakes.

I don't think this is true for most vehicles. Skoda Octavia 2020 for example still has hydraulic brakes. I was going to suggest that no mass-production vehicles use a brake-by-wire system but I would have been wrong, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake-by-wire

I wish more comments were like this. Misjudging the iPhone etc probably just comes down to a lack of information about broader needs. Its not always a bad take.

I think Apple can provide an emphasis on modularity for the car manufacturers. What if you literally had a place to slip in an iPad as your display? What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets - if not for the drivers, then the passengers. What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements). Another car company could make the shell and the power train. Apple would handle the "experience" and integrate it into its other offerings. Cloud Cars.

This is just CarPlay or Android Auto though.

> What if cars legitimately came with VisionPro type headsets

Or what if the people who wanted that just bought their headset of choice?

> What if apple encourages people fr.shifting away by car ownership by making it easier to jump into a car and have it show all your customizations (lighting, adjustments, heads up display arrangements).

Question: when you get into someone else's car, is the first thing you notice the lighting, or is it how clean it is?

The accelerator likely would have been a better example. I'm not sure that any car currently shipping has a direct connection between the accelerator and a throttle.

It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good. Bell Labs was part of the public good - and why they employed multiple physicists and materials scientists whose employment involved basically researching whatever they wanted as long as it had some link back. Shannon was hired after his master thesis (which basically created the field of information theory) and, among other things, had a side project involving the application of computers to chess. They constructed the New Jersey lab specifically to encourage watercooler conversations and deliberately had greenhorns to work with the most senior researchers like Shannon. Bell Labs solved engineering problems needed by AT&T and Westinghouse, but they had the financial security to spend money on incredibly theoretical projects like transistors, operating systems (unix), and programming (C). Those pie in the sky projects would both benefit AT&T through automation, and covered the public good requirements of their monopoly.

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.

> It's an interesting parallel because part of the unspoken agreement between AT&T and the feds was that they had their monopoly, but had to use the funds for some kind of public good.

It wasn't an unspoken agreement. It was an explict one, the Kingsbury Commitment.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

> I wonder if in 20 years something from apples car project changes the industry in a way we never expected. Time will only tell.

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.

The problem is that the companies that can do that are rarely also the company's that are willing to do the hard work of productionizing those moonshots. Lots of people have nice salaries and jobs that depend on pumping out ideas and PoCs, but few have a clear dependence on getting it to market.

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).

you're (mostly not) wrong.

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?

It even sells goods at Xerox prices!

If jobs was still around I’d be as curious as you. Under cook I have no faith

> Time will only tell.

Tim will only tell.

...I'll walk myself out now.

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