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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

One of the leading indicators of not being able to do the "hard" thing anymore is that Apple gave up on building an EV after spending a decade and billions in R&D. Meanwhile, Huawei and Xiaomi were both able to produce good EVs. Xiaomi in particular is doing what Apple wanted to do which is to integrate and control their ecosystem from phone to car.

Xiaomi is literally trying to make everything from phones, cars, electronic tooth brushes, air fryers, soap dispensers, etc. It's astonishing.

I've had a few Xiaomi electronics including a dust mite vacuum and an air purifier. Both well designed and worked well for the price.

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Not at all why Apple gave up on the EV, it was profitability. They even gave up on building AI cloud infra because it was cheaper to rent. Finance can veto Tim Cook there.

Part of doing the hard thing is to become profitable.

The profitability in the auto market space isn’t there for Apple.

Someone shared a screenshot of their app that controls all of their electronic devices, and its ridiculous how widely they've spread their reach.

My impression was Apple gave up on building EVs because they wouldn't be as profitable as phones and tablets.

Phones weren't that profitable too before the iPhone. They did it anyway.

Because they found a new approach (smartphones). There's nothing new with cars.

Self driving cars? Apple taxis service? Apple family self driving vans? Owning the entire experience of taking people from one place to another?

They simply thought it was too hard and went back to what was already working.

> Apple taxis service? Apple family self driving vans?

Taxis and buses are pretty old tech at this point. (Not just from an Uber/Lyft perspective either; taxis and coaches predate cars themselves, because the ideas/"tech" worked just fine with actual horse power.)

As for self-driving cars, so much of the efforts today remind me of that old Ford quote to the tune of "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse". It doesn't feel like an innovative step change in transportation, it feels like a slightly better car (when it works). It doesn't fix any of the current big problems of cars and over-relying on cars as our primary transportation form factor.

So how would you solve moving person from A to B?

Personally, right now I'd invest in high speed trains. It's not "disruptive new tech", it's proven tech, so not exciting to a lot of the HN crowd hoping for AI miracles for self-driving. But it could be quite disruptive to car infrastructure and airlines given the right funding and development plan.

Do you think Apple is the one who can invest in high speed trains?

No, for many of the same reasons I don't think it made sense for them to invest in cars.

But also, yes, for the same reasons I appreciate that Walt Disney invested in trains and monorails. While Disney's train-oriented Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow vision never got properly built, it was still such a cool disruptive vision to explore. Also, not just the Epcot theme park that borrows the name but not the concept/ideals, all of the Disney Parks owe their existence to Disney's interests in trains. (The first theme park ride Walt Disney was involved with was building a rideable model train in his own backyard.) I don't expect Apple to build theme parks either, but if investments in train technology and vision pay off with similar secondary effects that maybe the trains don't get built but other cool things do, Disney offers the precedent that an interest in trains by a company that isn't supposed to be in the train business can produce interesting results.

So basically, you don't believe cars are the future - therefore Apple should not invest in cars?

RIM would disagree. It plenty profitable before the iPhone came out. And Apple already knew building computers was profitable. They cracked how to build a computer the size of a phone.

There aren't any RIM-like companies in the car industry right now. And cars aren't really very useful as computers. Or at least not more useful than phones and tablets and laptops.

It's still hard for me to grasp that companies will turn down hugely profitable new ventures because they aren't as profitable their current products.

I'm not saying it applies here but isn't that the central thesis of The Innovator's Dilemma? Companies ignore new threats to their business model because changing would make them less profitable in the short term. The implication is reduced profitability, even in the short-term, even to pivot the business to better future opportunities, is painful to management so they avoid it.

In Apple's case cars are far afield from their normal expertise, which is computing. Cars are already a low-margin product for most of the industry. Apple's management may have decided they could be better off not participating at all. Or buying a non-controlling stake in some other EV or car company instead of distracting management with a completely alien business and product line.

But that's the thing, it just wasn't a financially good idea. People forget that financial engineering (not the cynical connotation) matters a lot, i.e. what your numbers need to look like to have a solid business that grows and attracts capital. The corporation itself is a "product" of the business.

Jeff Bezos had good product/leadership sense but above that, had genius financial engineering sense. He knew exactly what the company needed to look like on paper every step of the way for it to become the behemoth that it became.

Current market situation shows it's unlikely profitable, rather than hugely profitable

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