Their success with apple maps / navigation foreshadowed this event. They couldn’t even figure that out.
Jesus christ, you realize that happened 11 years ago, right?
Yes. That would be in the past, making it foreshadowing.
It was still going on?
Yeah, it actually got some new press over the last six months because of some internal design team moves.
This is the first I’ve heard about it
Your head must be buried in the sand then.
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 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?
Have MB been for sale?
Everything is for sale.
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.
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
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.
My first guess is that it would have been overpriced and deliberately incompatible with existing chargers. No loss.
Nah they couldn’t figure out how to do it without windows.
And it slows itself down after 5 years… to save battery!
Shame. I was curious how expensive it would be. Maybe somewhere between BMW and Porsche. I guess we’ll never know.
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?
Darn. Now I’ll never be able to not buy one.
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.
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.
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.
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!
INFINITE GROWTH
A lot of these tech companies got into cars because they viewed vehicles as a new major new computing platform. Especially autonomous vehicles.
Ever expanding profit requires ever expanding scope until it doesn’t, then you can divest for profit and try again.
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!
I think the market for home computers has dried up.
Publicly traded companies need to constantly grow.
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.
Oh my god I completely forgot about that, jeez
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.
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)
