Conspicuous nonconsumption of fossil fuels... Hmmmm.

I doubt Apple is lunging to do this tbh.

Bottom line: impressive optics, zero impact for this technology on global warming, it's a distraction.

My observation is that prople interested in luxury stuff are usually those that have the least interest on their carbon footprint.

It's rather more interesting to them if luxury stuff is made out of the rarest and most undangered species possible. Also diamonds mined by kids are more popular and expensive than fabricated ones.

luxury goods are shipped by air

I can recall an 'artisinal' chocolate brand in Brooklyn doing this about fifteen years ago, taking cocoa from the Dominican Republic to Brooklyn via sailboat.

https://ediblebrooklyn.com/2011/the-mast-brothers-live-up-to...

What would be the point? Ships are complex machines and the ocean is an incredibly harsh and unforgiving environment. You would need crew to simply maintain the ship while underway and fix things that break (which pretty much always happens).

Next, these ships can be downright dangerous for other, smaller ships. It has happened before that large cargo ships have killed people on sailboats when they didn't keep an adequate lookout. I wouldn't trust an autonomous system to have enough accuracy to avoid running over other boats.

I read about the US Navy's work on autonomous ships. One big challenge is the lack maintenance. Sailors can perform periodic and break-fix maintenance throughout the journey, and if something unpredictable happens, they can handle it.

The autonomous vessels need far higher robustness, not only to function without maintenance for months at a time, but reliably enough that few of them end up lost or stranded at sea.

A "normal" ocean-going Ro Ro ship would be over 200m long and quite a bit higher. Typically only the lowest deck can carry trucks and heavy loads and the upper decks carry cars. Their solution of only having the heavy load deck is sensible since they need a low center of gravity to counteract the sails and any added deck height hurts the sailing characteristics. With all that said, there is not much to scale it up. They could make it a bit longer but probably mostly easily: risk in bad weather, structural integrity demands from the added sails and all that may quickly add up.

I did some searching around for this (not a subject matter expert).

Basically the sail area grows with length squared, but ship mass and resistance grows roughly with length cubed. So propulsion gets weaker with size.

To move a full sized freighter, you would need a mast the size of a skyscraper and we don’t currently have materials that can support that.

If we did have a material that supported sails that large, it would still be a problem because you are functionally making the ship top heavy (when wind is applied) increasing how likely it is that the freighter rolls over.

It scales horribly. Essentially, as the ship gets larger, the sail area has to be even larger (proportionally) to maintain the same speed. Further, the larger the sail, the more susceptible to damage and the harder it is to control.

1 of their 2 sails broke. They completed the trip on one sail and their back up engine.

Especially in a prototype, proving something can go wrong and you can still complete the mission is valuable data.

You wouldn't prototype something like this at full scale.