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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered.

Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it.

Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

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The other thing that always got me about the car was.. I wondered if the executives at Apple had all become too rich? Apple sells premium hardware but generally sells products in the 10s or 100s of millions of volume, so pretty mass market consumer good.

The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?

At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.

I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.

Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.

The Apple Lisa was the first GUI computer Apple made. Starting price $9995 (or $35,000 in today’s dollars).

Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.

Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).

And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa and had no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).

The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were sub 100.

If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.

Apple today is just too risk adverse.

> If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate

Vision Pro sells for >3 grand. Their strategy still seems consistent with exactly what you describe.

Except the iteration on it. And people we aghast at the cost.

But one product. I don't know man, I think they became chicken of anything grand. It is not like it was a $35000 product.

If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?

They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.

They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.

Almost all their sales are $800-$4000 items. Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa? Too chickenshit these days. Good reason to be, of course. It is just not in their DNA anymore.

Apple sold more Vision Pros in the first year than it sold Lisas during its entire run.

> Except the iteration on it.

It’s only 2 years old and they’ve released version 2. I’m not sure the Vision Pro has enough market to keep making it, but it was a big new bet.

> And people we aghast at the cost.

Didn’t you say they should be releasing crazy expensive stuff?

> If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?

This isn’t really what happened with Lisa and Mac. Mac wasn’t the cheap Lisa. It was a totally different product addressing a different market and initially incompatible. The fact that Mac looked a lot like Lisa was driven by the fact that Jobs was yanked off the Lisa project by the board so he hijacked the Mac project and made it a similar looking system. This was internal politics, not a consistent strategy.

> They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.

Why? So they could be burning billions in capital on trying to break into a highly competitive, low margin market? This isn’t really Apple’s DNA.

> They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.

Again, why? What’s the market for this? This seems like a low value market segment. They don’t even make servers anymore because the market wasn’t profitable.

> Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa?

Lisa was a product of a different time. Computers cost way more in general. (The Macintosh was nearly $8k in today’s dollars.) It was also not commercially successful.

The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods.

There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.

The way Apple funded hardware purchases for their "OEM" manufacturers makes it hard to really say they were "capital-light."

If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely.

As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.

I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.

> Apple makes computers

there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.

Right, but clearly the tech & regulatory environment was such that the use of a general purpose computer beyond the infotainment screens wasn’t going to add enough value.

If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.

“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”

I feel like your original comment was phrased as "Apple wouldn't build this", when in reality I think (we might mostly agree) is that they would build it ideally, but it might be too early or it might not be a good strategic business to be in.

Outside of the premium brand/build quality, I think Tesla was actually a successful proof of concept of what they could have done or could do. Computer/software-powered, battery-charged, integrated hardware/software, principled product tradeoffs, new retail model, advances in charging technology. Big parallels to the first iPhone. You even heard the same complaints from consumers when the first iphone came out ("I want my buttons/physical controls back", "The battery/range dies too quickly"). Apple may not want to be in the car business, but I think Tesla showed that cars could just be computers now

Indeed, Tesla is probably the bull case for an “Apple Car”. IIRC there were rumors a decade ago that Apple even considered buying Tesla rather than develop “Titan” entirely in-house.

But I think Tesla shows the limits of Apple’s approach in the car market: Imagine a Model S that is maybe 50% better across design, materials, features, UX. That’s still not a “leapfrog” product the way the iPhone was years ahead of the smartphone competition when it was launched. It couldn’t justify also being 50% more expensive.

Maybe, but Hyundai would be antithesis of the Apple experience. Cars, even EVs.. and especially new products from new brands require a lot of after care.

Recalls, warranty items, maintenance, accident repairs, etc.

Hyundai still can't sort out a decent experience for their in-house luxury brand Genesis all these years later.

An Apple car would be crazy expensive to develop and not really a guaranteed sell at all. There's millions of people that are very loyal to Apple of iPhone and wearable but going to an Apple car is a HUGE jump.

Quantum leap CarPlay/Siri could be a big win but, even as an Apple fan in general, have no particular interest in an Apple Car absent things like self-driving that blow everyone else out of the water--which seems a pretty big ask.

Also, what would the margin be?

They could probably do full development from scratch for under $10 bil if they were frugal and patient, or more if they want to go fast, and farm first product out to a manufacturing house like magna. This is their MO already (they don't want to own a plant).

In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.

> In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters

You're almost certainly right, and this is a good way to show just how remarkably big the AI buildout is.

> Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

They tried. But the irony is MS is more deeply ingrained. I worked a short stint in a shop that no joke ran Windows server to manage a whole floor of Macs using Active Directory. The only other Windows PC was a machine hooked to a large format printer. I spoke to the admin (dyed in the wool Apple user) who stated that as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.

I setup an XServe for a mid-sized office, Open Directory was Apple's solution at the time. It worked but my recollection was that they did it by emulating a lot of Active Directory by layering code over OpenLDAP. When it worked it was nice, when it didn't work it was a headache to figure out where the problem might be. The management tools really couldn't compete with Active Directory, it was a mix of incomplete UI and command line tools.

> as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.

Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.

Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.

Nobody "uses" rack mount servers as artefacts, the way people use other Apple hardware products. Not in the same sense, so I don't think Apple can really bring much of the kind of value they usually do. In practice Apple data centres are Linux facilities, and that's fine. Maybe if they could come up with a really compelling reason to put Apple silicon in a data centre, but we can do that now with racked Minis or Studios.

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...

Apple's Private Cloud Compute is hundreds (probably thousands) of M3+ Ultra rack mount servers; they highlighted them in the Texas manufacturing plant video.

Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).

The Apple silicon is really good! That would be the #1 reason to put it in a data centre, if it wasn't such a pain to manage a rack full of Minis.

Making cars is just a low margin business with a huge manufacturing footprint. They'd have been competing directly with Chinese EV makers. Dodged a bullet IMO

Yeah the car always seemed (to humble me) to be so… un-Apple. As in, the iphone was a success because of its aesthetics but also it solved a real problem, while creating a whole new market. But in the case of cars, cars are the problem.

You're asking why they wouldn't pivot to making a regular EV, but I think the Apple way is to ask why they SHOULD make a regular EV.

They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.

Apple public transit?

A car is a terrible idea for Apple. Apple doesn't make mechanical things, and it's a business with high capital costs and low margins.

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