After a decade of stops and starts, Apple kills its electric car project
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
I'm trying to decide if they would have had more or fewer actual buttons for important functions.
Now we will never know.
Now we will never know.
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OrangeCream
Ars Legatus Legionis
Given how they just added another button to the iPhone, but lost a switch, I think the answer is yes.
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A $100k price tag? Was Apple planning to sell these cars to people too poor to afford a Rolls-Royce?
Rolls-Royce cars also come with robust self-driving capabilities if you provide your own chauffeur. Unfortunately, nowadays chauffeurs are only available as subscription services and cannot be purchased.
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Good riddance. The product creep is real. Apple needs to be focused.
#weneedanothersnowleopard
#weneedanothersnowleopard
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That's been one of my favorite changes. I never accidentally take my phone off silent (I never, ever want it off silent), and I got to build a nice shortcut with a lot of context-aware stuff.
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...where any good ideas will be overruled by incompetent leaders and anything involving CarPlay will be vetoed at 2 of the 3
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I already see the fallout from this on LinkedIn -- I see some automotive engineers with Apple on their employment list changing to "Looking for Work" and others trying to recruit. Hopefully they can all get jobs ASAP, but I'm guessing there will be lots of out of state relocation and pay cuts involved.
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Does this mean Gene Munster can go back to telling us all about the future Apple TV rumors (as in, a physical TV set)?
View: https://twitter.com/munster_gene/status/1740535336290455935
Cars do not have high margins, at least not ones Apple would tolerate and their fanbase (myself included) would pay for. Even if the electric ones are more like iPads on wheels than anything else.
Where I expected Apple to make their margins (and that all-important service revenue) is from the self-driving/robotaxi aspect. They could use a rideshare business model, take 30% of the fares and give the 70% back to the owner of the car. If the whole self-driving thing is bullshit (at least for now), then the business model won't work and you might as well move on.
View: https://twitter.com/munster_gene/status/1740535336290455935
Cars do not have high margins, at least not ones Apple would tolerate and their fanbase (myself included) would pay for. Even if the electric ones are more like iPads on wheels than anything else.
Where I expected Apple to make their margins (and that all-important service revenue) is from the self-driving/robotaxi aspect. They could use a rideshare business model, take 30% of the fares and give the 70% back to the owner of the car. If the whole self-driving thing is bullshit (at least for now), then the business model won't work and you might as well move on.
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Important lessons in life:
Never start a car company
Never start an airline
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
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Glad to see one major company stop gaslighting it being "right around the corner" and drop the dead weight that is AI driving.
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Apple continues to move sideways.
It took them 10 years to realize the long term margins on vehicles are not 30%+?
It took them 10 years to realize the long term margins on vehicles are not 30%+?
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Yes, all of apple's very public proclamations and prognostications in the vehicle manufacturing and autonomous driving industries can stop now.
Oh wait they never started?
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Might be some Apple employees looking for a new gig though...
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Unless you're a professor at Penn State, I think you're taking the wrong interpretation of the first part.
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They initially wanted a fully autonomous car with zero user controls. But a remote control center could take direct command if needed.
All around terrible idea.
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AmanoJyaku
Ars Praefectus
If the goal was to sell $100K+ luxury vehicles, this may have been possible. Apple's brand name alone commands a premium, and people buying cars that expensive aren't exactly price sensitive. I'm guessing the real issue was the need for billions in investment, to enter a rather small market. Assuming the Apple car would have been on par with a Mercedez S-class, that's something like 70,000-80,000 units per year. Recouping investment would take something like 10 years, at a minimum.
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I still doubt the real intention was to produce an actual car end product. I think they were looking strictly at autonomous driving systems and maybe other EV focused electronics and software, with the intention of becoming an OEM to existing car companies. It's all just too suspicious.
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Frankly, I always had a hard time seeing how this would work. It was such a dramatic departure from Apple's typical product lines and core competencies.
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You can assign the switch to do other things, like turn off autorotation.
Edit: Nevermind — looks like they removed that feature from the phone at some point from what I can Google. My old iPad with an older OS version still has it. Not sure about new iPads. You can still see mention of it here:
Use the Home, side, and other buttons on your iPad - Apple Support
Learn about the buttons and switches on your iPad.
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well thats no surprise.. the upfront costs of making a car/assembly line are massive. Tesla had enough trouble brining this to reality. With all of the required testing, ridiculous repair costs for consumers, and potential for failure (recalls, hacking potential) that can be devastating to the apple brand, it's no wonder they called it quits. Probably saw the crap tesla needed to deal said "nah"
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Electric cars and computers have a lot in common. They run on batteries, they are built using modules from various suppliers, they are electronic. The self-driving space also aligns with AI and mapping efforts. It’s still a big leap tho.
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This is only one project that we know about. It wasn't exactly skunkworks but trying and failing is still educational. The big question I have is did Apple learn anything that they will leverage into, for example, machine learning or CarPlay? If they didn't, then that's a true shame.
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I always thought the talk of an Apple car was an April's Fool joke. I could never see how it would fit in with the rest of their product line.
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If they were smart they just would have made a automotive grade iPad and sold it to the OEMs to use as their infotainment system.
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Now what will Gurman create rumors about?
Come on, Apple was never going to become an auto manufacturer.
Come on, Apple was never going to become an auto manufacturer.
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I mean what do I know, but this is exactly what I think.
It never made sense for Apple to actually deliver vehicles to customers - that's almost the craziest fucking thing I can think of them trying to do, and they are definitely not crazy. What you said makes far more sense.
Edit - I thought this had come up some time in the past so found a comment I made 5 years ago about this. Fascinating. https://arstechnica.com/civis/posts/37216825/
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If all they are going to sell is luxury cars:
70k units at 30K profit (assuming 30% lol) is 2 Billion per year profit....its a fart in the wind for a 3 trillion dollar company.
70K units at 10k profit (assuming 10% profit margin which is Mercedes level) is 700 Million profit...Tim would be run out of town
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I see why the Apple brass thought they could pivot their engineering and software expertise into a luxury EV.
I don't see how anyone who's paid even a little bit of attention to the auto industry would think that would be an easy or profit-rich pivot without a few decades of runway.
Now I wonder if Apple will try to ink some deals for CarPlay+ to be the OS of future EVs made by OEMs who can't build software for shit.
I don't see how anyone who's paid even a little bit of attention to the auto industry would think that would be an easy or profit-rich pivot without a few decades of runway.
Now I wonder if Apple will try to ink some deals for CarPlay+ to be the OS of future EVs made by OEMs who can't build software for shit.
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