Hacker News Reader

Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

Kinda still wish they’d have made it, or at least shown some pre-production work, just to see what a radical product re-think could look like in this space. Cars of 2024, even in the premium segment, are nearly uniformly garish and tasteless, with tons of half baked features of marginal utility accreted over the years and never perfected. Apple’s take on the category could have been a master class in product design and attention to detail, if nothing else.

View on HN

Maybe cars are inherently garish and tasteless.

Yep. Apple dodged a very uncool bullet here. Now make an e-bike, Tim Apple.

What if, hear me out, the wheels were on the sides and not front and back. It uses gyroscopes to keep itself balanced. Instead of twisting the handle or pushing a button like a savage you lean in the direction you want to go! This is a totally new idea and not a product that was released over 20 years ago and since discontinued.

For a second there I thought you were talking about the IT bike from South Park.

https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/IT

When you make an argument like that, the suggested changes need to be improvements.

A 12 mile per hour limit is really bad for a transportation device.

This. Ebike with non disableable airtag built into the frame as the killer feature.

This already exists: https://mfi.apple.com/

The bike pictured is a VanMoof S3 which was discontinued when VanMoof went bust.

Ebike market is very fragmented in terms of use cases. They’d have to release like 10 models.

just 3: good, better, best

Bike, Bike Pro, Bike Ultra

Slight addition: eBike, eBike Pro, eBike Ultra. Ok, good job folks. I think we got it.

Bike, Bike Pro, and Bike Ultra

USB-C?

Instructions misunderstood, released Bike S Air Pro

But which one is a cargo bike? A mountain bike? A street bike? A commuter bike?

Thats what the accessories are for!

"These are not 4 separate devices"

I'm pointing out, as others have, that the bike market is highly fragmented, lots of variety for good reason. It would be hard to come put with "a" , or even "a line" of bikes. You really need a dozen

Your parent wasn’t disagreeing. "These are not 4 separate devices" is a reference to the iPhone launch announcement.

Which one is the kids bike? Which one is the bakfiets?

It’s like a bicycle for your body

Thanks. For reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8

My long-standing hobbyhorse is that Apple should buy Brompton.

Miniaturisation? Check. Lightweight metals? Check. Battery technology? Check. Premium design-centric product? Check. Product small enough to be sold through worldwide network of Apple Stores? Check.

Then add in what Apple could do with UX around bike navigation and you have a perfect fit.

There was a gyroscope based motorcycle which I thought was more the Apple Style. I was imagining single person cars just like they make all their devices single user. Get one auto-driving bike for each member of the family and you would ride laying on your back so you could take a nap if you wanted.

Just a button, would be better.

Like an AirTag but it does some home automation thing.

They are! All modern cars look like Transformers toys. With their stupid mean-face grills. Design is awful.

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).

> mean-face grills

I think by 2030 trucks will be about 6 feet of grill and a 6-inch eyeslit to see out of.

I don't really participate in twitter anymore, but back in the day, I had AI design a truck of the future: https://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/1661577114129416194/...

Refining my plans a bit more

https://www.threads.net/@davidnwelton/post/C34NEOpLMZ5

Ford & GM & Dodge will just release a consumer version of the M1 Abrams so the fantasy lived by these consumes can be fully and finally fulfilled.

Doubt it. I think good ones can be made, it’s just that nobody gives a shit, including most of the buyers.

“Good” is subjective. My idea of a good car is something that can get me from A-B, can hold dogs and be cleaned up easily, can tow a few thousand pounds in a pinch, doesn’t get stuck in the steep and muddy hills around my house, doesn’t break the bank, and it would be nice if it didn’t spy on me and have a giant shiny console in my field of view.

2010 Subaru Forester or equivalent.

What you’re describing is lower end “Car SE” that’d be available in a few years.

That's iCar SE.

One of my hottest takes: cars look dumb. Even the fancy muscle/sports cars. Watch the suspension kick in as a car drives over a speed bump and remember it’s just a box on wheels.

I think cars only look good relative to other cars. But as an object themselves, they don’t add to the landscape.

Look at all the concept renderings of future apartments or idyllic European countryside’s. There’s always only a few cars or one car. Together, they are an an invasive organism.

Yeah, when you’re broke. The average American is struggling to pay for food, an electric car is the last thing on their minds.

The average American is not struggling to pay for food.

The median American may be, however

So strange to see this Reddit meme make its way to HN. The median American absolutely isn't struggling for food, lmfao.

Coincidence, I'm afraid; I am not familiar with such a meme. Merely observing that the median American has a household income only about 75% that of the average American, and therefore spends proportionally more of the household budget on groceries, thus feeling the 25% increase in grocery prices over the last four years rather more keenly. Whether that constitutes "struggle" seems like it must be a personal judgement.

Noticing a price increase isn't "struggling." The median American could double their food budget and would be just fine.

Your analysis is all wonky. The % of average income and % increase in food price is completely irrelevant - food is a fixed cost and the median American has many times the cost of food left over in disposable income.

Good point. Above-average earners are also struggling at this point.

Imho Teslas feel very much like a car that Apple could have designed. Lots of aspects of the whole experience are fundamentally different than other cars. Maybe I'm not thinking radically enough, but then Jony Ive is pursuing other career options, too.

Teslas are the Alienware of automobiles. Flashy, ostentatious, and aimed at enthusiasts with more money than taste.

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.

Tesla is the opposite of "flashy and ostentatious," their car designs are boring as are their interiors.

I don't know where you could possibly be getting that impression when they make the most milquetoast sedans on the market.

With the notable exception of Cybertruck I like to think of them as “conservative AF, but with fewer buttons and knobs”. Sort of like the iPhone. The visual similarity of the onboard computer to iOS design only reinforces the impression.

Yeah it’s much closer to if Jony Ive worked at Suzuki or something.

Apple would have made a car without keys that you open with your phone and that has a big touchscreen with UI that doesn't have multi second latencies and hardware from 8 years ago in a brand new vehicle?

Flashy? What teslas are you referring to. and have you seen the inside??

Flashy? Ostentatious? I mean, regular people with no particular interest in speed or flashy interior/exterios also buy Tesla's. The Tesla 3 is pretty plain and just very functional - works great. I don't have one but I know several people with Teslas, they seem super happy with their vehicles.

I always thought Tesla cars have very bland and boring designs (except the truck which, it is still bad, but at least not boring).

This is a reasonable analogy.

+1 good analogy

It's very easy to ship concepts, Detroit does this yearly

Aren't Apple products also uniformly garish and tasteless with tons of half baked features too? Glad we don't have to see what dumb ideas Apple had in store for us in the automotive realm. The m1/m2 are good chips, but macos is stagnant, iPhones have... memojis as their new feature? Apple has good industrial design for devices that fit in the palm of your hand. I truthfully cannot fathom how that could extend to a car, simply makes no sense. Where would they make them?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.

The "touch bar" was garish. So were the G3 iMacs if you remember back that far.

They're just a company. They have good designers but they make mistakes like anyone else.

Behold, the Blue Dalmatian and Flower Power iMacs!

https://www.cultofmac.com/468313/flower-power-blue-dalmatian...

Well .. you should see the quadrillions of grey sharp cornered boxes those beautific gumdrops put to shame!

They only have like 2% of the PC/laptop market, so not many people think they're that attractive. I like my M1 MacBook itself, but hate the aluminum chassis. I find it brutally garish, sharp and uncomfortable (hurts to type on, hurts my wrists where they rest on a sharp edge, so it's basically a desktop with an attached keyboard and mouse)

It's fine that you don't like it, but it's not garish. That's just not what the word means. MacBooks are literally the opposite of that:

adjective

gar· ish | \ ˈger-ish \

Definition

1 : clothed in vivid colors

//a garish clown

2 a : excessively or disturbingly vivid

//garish colors

//garish imagery

b : offensively or distressingly bright : GLARING

3 : tastelessly showy : FLASHY

//garish neon signs

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/garish

Apologies then, I understood it to mean tasteless, not necesarrily bright or colorful.

Admitting when you’re wrong is tough. Here’s an upvote.

so not many people think they're that attractive

Do most people buy a laptop based mainly on appearance? I always thought that most people buy a Windows laptop because that's what they need for work/school (or what they are most familiar with from work/school).

Many of my friends think most windows laptops look garish

Windows 11 is pretty terrible. So much bad design, I wonder how they do it.

> I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.

Not that I disagree in general, but the Apple Watch Edition is arguably in that zone.

Most recently, he was seen wearing a solid 18k yellow gold Apple Watch on a special gold bracelet that was never made available to the public (the same one that Beyoncé and other celebrities were also rocking). The best part though? He appears to have never actually set the thing up, instead going Andy Warhol–style, wearing it purely as a piece of jewelry.

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/karl-lagerfeld-audemars-pi...

I wouldn’t consider something that was never made available to the public a product, nor what looks like a simple gold bracelet particularly garish.

Memoji are, what, 6 years old now?

My point exactly. It is such a locked down platform, that I cannot for the life of me understand why people fawn over iphones. They were first to market, but market mover advantage is gone, Apple has not made a good iphone value proposition in years. Especially if you hold it wrong.

“Hold it wrong” was an antenna issue on the iPhone 4, released in 2010 and discontinued more than 10 years ago in 2013. Might be time to move on from that one…

It’s also interesting to point that specific one out because it’s a somewhat widely held opinion that outside of that specific flaw that the iPhone 4 was one of the best industrial designs of the time. Everything else about the design was very iconic, long lasting, and influential to future generations of devices both inside and outside of Apple

Maybe the design was iconic but the all-glass design made it fragile as hell. I replaced six screens/backs in the year I had my 4 and I was really happy when they switched to aluminum backs in the 5.

Apple was first to which market? There used to be a time when it was the Apple fanboys that claimed Apple was first to market.

First to the "everyday smartphone" market. Kinda. It didn't do anything very well at launch, not even copy/paste, but it was still awesome at the time

Apple deserve a lot (LOT) of credit for that one, but always with the caveat that it was incomplete in its own way - features were lacking while the experience was smooth and user friendly. Through the early 2010s (when I was also risking my cell phone store job by being on TV praising the introduction of a competitor...) it was always a toss up between the better functionality of Android and CE6 vs an interface that wasn't dropping every 10th frame even on flagship hardware.

Maybe the first bubble-shaped iMacs were? I always felt the translucency didn't pair well with saturated colors, and the plastic discolored in a gross way just like the 1980's putty-colored boxes of PC clones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com