My first guess is that it would have been overpriced and deliberately incompatible with existing chargers. No loss.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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And it slows itself down after 5 years… to save battery!
Nah they couldn't figure out how to do it without windows.
It was still going on?
Yeah, it actually got some new press over the last six months because of some internal design team moves.
Darn. Now I'll never be able to not buy one.
I would LOVE to know what, if any IP, patents, or tech came out of this whole thing. I'm guessing "not much".
They definitely applied for a shitload of patents:
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/25/apple-car-patent-applications/
https://www.patentlyapple.com/autonomous-vehicle-technology/
Seems the patents were the goal all along. Money by litigation and licensing.
All signs show that they were trying to build and ship something. Apple was in pretty close talks with vehicle manufacturers a few years ago. They were trying to find a manufacturing partner to pump out the cars. Apple was looking to have companies like Hyundai operate as their Foxconn for cars.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35411762/apple-hyundai-kia-deal-car/
Just because lots of patents exist, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t intent to ship. All of their shipping product lines have tons of used and unused patents that came from their r&d.
There are cheaper ways to make patent money than by spinning up an R&D auto division with thousands of people.
I swear, this project has been declared dead like 5 times already by the media. Is it actually dead this time?
And I seem to recall Apple themselves have declared it abandoned at least once before, haven't they?
Why do companies feel like that have to try and do everything?
Why can't you just 'stay in your lane' and be good at what you're good at.
Publicly traded companies need to constantly grow.
Apple started out with desktop computers. So by 'staying in their lane', they'd never made ipods, iphones, Apple silicon, earpods and airpods, the watch, etc. I think they had quite the success by diversing themselves.
I'm my head, I was thinking of all those consumer products (phones, pods, pads, earbuds, etc). That is a good reminder they started with business computers.
Ever expanding profit requires ever expanding scope until it doesn't, then you can divest for profit and try again.
They are trying to insure their company survival. Imagine if they didn't put money into R&D for a car and something happened where, for example, Google produced one or EVs really took off in a big way. Or self-driving cars became a reality.
They'd be sol.
So you'll see companies like apple, meta, etc try a lot of different things as they attempt to read the tea leaves. They are one big tech breakthrough away from being irrelevant.
I've been predicting for a while though that siri will be turned into an AI that runs locally using the metal cores.
I'm genuinely surprised they haven't dropped that on us and are focused on VR.
I've been predicting for a while though that siri will be turned into an AI that runs locally using the metal cores.
Especially after seeing the Rabbit R1, Google putting Tensor cores in the pixels, and hearing Apple preach about privacy.
That is a very astute observation stranger!
It has all the familiar symptoms of a big apple release in the works. Theyve been putting ML cores in chips for ages, all of their stuff now has them. They've been letting Siri languish for years. It's become a running joke about how bad it's been.
Remember when everyone was upset that they were letting the MacBook line languish and weren't "putting effort into it anymore/don't care about professionals"? Then they dropped the m series chip laptops, the Mac studio etc. and its balls fast with specialized Asics for video processing etc.
It feels like that pattern to me. Like that team is heads down and apples working on it. So they say very little about it in any of their briefings but the hardware is there ( which they also, weirdly haven't been advertising as much). Seriously those ML cores outperform an old 1080ti I have in a server by orders of magnitude.
it seems like it'd go right along with their "privacy" focused branding too. And now that these other companies are doing the very public beta testing apple can tune it.
Oh and they have all of these hooks available to iOS and Mac users(Mac specifically) with their apple script stuff. Imagine Siri being able to automate a task you do by just asking her?
Anyway, could be wrong but I'd be excited to see it happen.
Of course, this is a very accurate and a good point.
When we look at companies who are trying to actually innovate something new/cool and not just produce a product that serves a known or well defined problem, it does seem that they'll do a lot of hit and miss.
It's interesting to contrast that to a company like Microsoft, where they also need to meet their Invester focused/bottom line oriented mandatory growth requirements ( which I don't like the American corporate shift in this way), their way of doing so in the computing world was to buy up everything/one and take steps a lot of people considered anti-trust/monopoly moves.
I think the market for home computers has dried up.
A lot of these tech companies got into cars because they viewed vehicles as a major new computing platform. Especially autonomous vehicles.
INFINITE GROWTH
With that strategy, there would have been no iPod and therefore no iPhone.
Hell, there would probably not even been a computer mouse since Rank Xerox would have been focusing on how to make copies of paper.
Well with that mentality Nintendo would be a trading card company and we wouldn't have Super Mario Galaxy, and my 3rd grader past self has suffered enough without having their favorite Wii game taken away on top of everything else!
😀 haven't we all. I'd change my thought to: maybe for apple cars were a 'bridge too far' 😉
The main advantages of Apple Car® is that it runs on Apple Road® and Apple Fuel®. It was made of commonly available standardised components such as nuts and bolts but with special Apple Thread Pitch® that require Apple Spanner® to use them. There are no instruction manuals to repair Apple Car®, only Apple Dealership® is permitted. The outcome of the marketing effort causes the users to eventually become delusional about the product, believing that they own the best product and refusing to entertain any evidence to the contrary, much like religious beliefs.
This is the first I've heard about it
Your head must be buried in the sand then.
I always saw this as just a way to compete with Google.
Maybe it was, but I think it was because analysts argued that full self driving will be a multi trillion dollar business. And Apple wanted a piece of that pie.
Now I guess they figure the pie might be less attractive compared to just working on AI without the car.
I don’t get why Apple just didn’t buy a car maker. Like they could just buy the Mercedes Benz group. Why start from scratch?
Rivian feels like it would be right up apples alley, that said, I'm glad they didn't, I'd like to purchase a Rivian some day, and I don't want it to be part of the apple ecosystem
Because Apple is not a car maker. Making their own electric car was already pretty weird - buying an auto maker and having to run it would have been a huge distraction.
It would have made more sense for them to partner with another company on the car (maybe they even did?) than start buying and running a whole car company.
It looks like they basically wanted to operate like they’ve been operating for years. Apple engineers and designs, then they farm out manufacturing to a 3rd party. But no car companies wanted to be the Foxconn of cars.
Have MB been for sale?
Everything is for sale.
My opinion: Because Apple didin't want to be a car manufacturer. It's a lowish margin and capital intensive business (especially compared to what Apple does). And just becoming one of many wouldn't actually move the needle on apples scale.
Most articles I've read focus on the electric car part, but imo that nowadays is essentially a solved problem. And even when they started I think it should have been clear that electric cars will actually have less complexity than cars with combustion engines. And the hardest part is the battery chemistry, which will in the end also be a commodity.
The general software they are already providing with Apple carplay and as seen this doesn't really require them to build cars.
The real technology problem to solve is autonomous driving. And it seems like Apple wasn't really able to solve it or at least make faster progress than others. Similar to Tesla which hasnt been able to deliver on that front either and is the only car manufacturer priced as a technology company. Which would have been Apple's goal.
people think they should buy Disney and Nintendo and others, but Apples culture is its obsession, and they never buy giant companies only tiny ones.
Their success with apple maps / navigation foreshadowed this event. They couldn't even figure that out.
It feels like this comment is supposed to be negative/sarcastic, but Apple Maps is actually good, so I am not sure where you’re going with this.
Jesus christ, you realize that happened 11 years ago, right?
Yes. That would be in the past, making it foreshadowing.
Shame. I was curious how expensive it would be. Maybe somewhere between BMW and Porsche. I guess we'll never know.
Oh my god I completely forgot about that, jeez
they're supposedly moving them over to AI?
they could always return to a car, in the future, i guess. Right now people want AI (apparently)