This is starting to make increasingly more sense even though Apple making a car seemed laughable a few years ago.
Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience. Apple Card was perhaps a dipping of the toes moment.
In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is because the tech behind it is increasingly getting commoditized (though they work hard to stay slightly ahead). But people love Tesla and it's the first choice EV because they've really thought through the UX of a semi-self driving car EV thoroughly.
Apple is just about the only company with a similar ethos and enough money and patience to be a viable competitor and have a competitive brand known for quality.
Despite becoming more similar in recent years, the cell phone supply chain is still very different than the automotive supply chain. The number of parts/unit differs by an order of magnitude and so does the size and weight, not to mention manufacturing techniques and materials. These are capabilities, not so much skills, and they aren't as transferable as you may think.
For instance, logistically things are very different in the automotive space. Many, many more people are required to ship a single unit. You also have many more variables that can hold up a production line anywhere in the hierarchy because you rely on more 3rd parties for parts. While these things are also true of consumer electronics, you may rely on a dozen suppliers for an iPhone, car companies often rely on hundreds.
Materials are also very different in the automotive space. You have to build with materials that will last 100k miles driving a 80mph in all weather, day/night, freezing/scorching etc etc. It is a very long tail to cover. Apple can do it, but it will take years and many, many partners to get it done.
I've worked with ex Apple supply chain people, and they were very used to operating at massive scale and the leverage that came with it. This led to some some unhappy suppliers some of which walked because they felt we were being too demanding. I don't want to overgeneralize, some of the issue was likely the culture of this particular team, but I could definitely see growing pains as they move into a new vertical with suppliers they can't push around as much. There's a lot more to it than "Apple is good GSM"
Same here. I have vivid memories of the supply chain guy yelling into the phone, and this gem of a quote. "What's my target price? It's zero, now what can you do for me?!"
Company I used to work at was approached by Tesla years ago. They tried very, very hard to convince our CEO that selling Tesla parts at cost (or preferably less) was a great money making decision. Just think of the scale!
What’s funny is everyone (including Microsoft) was saying all this same stuff about Apple in 2006 and early 2007 when it became clear they were going to move into phones.
We need smart electric appliances from Apple at home - lights, washer/dryer, refrigerator, etc.,. We'll be controlled by Apple wherever we go :) Apple eyewear could even track how many times we flip our eyelids.
The point is that they don’t need to. They are not selling advertising, they are selling privacy as a service. E.g. Apple maps breaks apart your journey on their side so they can’t reconstruct your journey from a to b.
No no no, stop it, it's Apple and this word is the synonym to "privacy", you are not buying a device, it's like second mother, caring about you and protecting your privacy with angel wings.
Most governments require safe cars. The easiest way to show they are safe is to show how all aspects of the car adhere to IEC 61508, a widely accepted international standard. Within that there are various safety ratings that are expected. ASIL D is expected of life threatening aspects like brake controllers. Less critical parts don't need such a high rating.
You're talking about the Apple Watch, right? That's peanuts of regulatory compliance stuff compared to the amount of regulations related to building a car in the US market. The FDA requires this big fat disclaimer:
> The ECG app is intended for over-the-counter (OTC)use. The ECG data displayed by the ECG app is intended for informational use only. The user is not intended to interpret or take clinical action based on the device output without consultation of a qualified healthcare professional. The ECG waveform is meant to supplement rhythm classification for the purposes of discriminating AFib from normal sinus rhythm and not intended to replace traditional methods of diagnosis or treatment.
That's not a disclaimer. That's (part of) the indications for use, which is a term of art. These are inherently narrowing statements, and they are in place to constrain what the company can market a device as, and gives the FDA a stick to beat you with if you aren't careful about this.
If you follow the submission you'll also see they were granted approval to market as a de-novo filing as a class II device, so it's not as much work as a PMA but the regulatory work is not peanuts. Since then they have self-predicated for a 510(k) on a newer version.
Even for a smallish software only project like this, it means they had to set up all the basic infrastructure and have it audited. They also wrote a ton of formal engineering process documentation, a full design history file, etc. These skills at least are pretty transferable.
>Even for a smallish software only project like this, it means they had to set up all the basic infrastructure and have it audited. They also wrote a ton of formal engineering process documentation, a full design history file, etc. These skills at least are pretty transferable.
That's like saying English is a transferable skill. Domain knowledge is what counts here. It's the same reason medical device makers don't try their luck in the automotive market and vice-versa.
It doesn't mean you easily set up shop in the other domain, sure. But the two processes are much closer than never having worked in a regulated environment. Especially at a corporate level, you have a much better idea of what is involved if you have been successful in one domain.
You'd have to hire a bunch of people with domain knowledge, but you are better off than starting from scratch.
If I am hiring engineers for aerospace, I'd rather bring someone in from medical devices than no regulatory experience, all else equal. Same in the other direction. Principle extends reasonably.
I guess there are lots of reasons I'd think it would be a big jump for apple, but "they won't get their head around the regulatory requirements" isn't really one of them.
I'm am engineer working in both spaces for 20 years. They do carry over. The principles are the same - much of it came out of the aerospace programs of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
English is a transferable skill, learning new languages is a skill also, being a successful bi or tri lingual person is a skill.
There are many many engineering and manufacturing companies who specialize in being suppliers for regulated industries. Like machine shops that specialize in aerospace, medical and automotive parts. Electronics manufacturers that do the same. At that level its more about process control and running a smooth operation and not the specifics of the application.
You could also count finance. Apple Card and Apply Pay. Apple was able to execute through partnerships. It is possible they use a similar strategy here. I think it is important to remember that as painful as these regulatory and compliance hurdles might be, it pales in comparison to the research, design and deployment of technology enabled products that Apple delivers.
>Despite becoming more similar in recent years, the cell phone supply chain is still very different than the automotive supply chain.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
(Palm CEO Ed Colligan, regarding Apple’s prospects in the mobile phone market)
I don't think so. Apple had ditched Motorola for cpus for 2 years by the time the iPhone came out.
Motorola had no clue about Apple making a phone, and Apple wasn't getting phone-making knowledge from them.
If you mean about before, their single phone collaboration with Motorola was just a 100% Motorola phone design running an Apple-provided music player part.
Motorola didn't collaborate with Apple on the design of that phone or anything, Apple didn't get any IP or copied any elements, and nor was the iPhone anything like it.
If Apple can get most of their parts made by direct competitor, same can be true for car components supply chains. Most if not all, top components suppliers, can become part of apple supply chain. Apple just need to become designer company. There is plenty of tech outside Tesla, and when investment become distributed much larger capital can be employed.
If you're asking this question seriously, I have to ask a clarification question: what are we actually talking about? Are we comparing just certain aspects of production of the whole thing? If you think about this from an engineering perspective for even 30 seconds there are so many differences that come to mind.
- Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone
- Must operate in a much wider variety of conditions than a phone
- iPhones don't need to drive themselves
- iPhones don't need to pass crash tests
- Brakes don't exist on iPhones
- Suspension does not exist on iPhones
- iPhones don't propel themselves at 100 mph
- iPhones weight orders of magnitude less than a car
- Regulatory requirements are way less stringent for phones
- Lights
- ...
I'm sort of dumbfounded by the level of conversation here given this is HN and the reputation is one of very thoughtful discourse on current events relating to technology and engineering.
EDIT: line breaks, looks like I'm further contributing to the downward spiral here.
> Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone
I don't think this is true. Most electric cars are re-charged once a day, which is about the same as a phone.
> Must operate in a much wider variety of conditions than a phone
Also, not really true if you look at the range of temperature and conditions an iPhone is rated for. (Including water resistance. Mine went through a washing machine cycle and came out fine.)
> iPhones don't need to pass crash tests
iPhones protected highly delicate components against hard impact on concrete. That requires similar engineering delicacy as protecting human meat in car crashes.
> Brakes... suspension
The complexity of the accelerometers and camera systems deal with similar engineering challenges of the same quality.
> iPhones weight orders of magnitude less than a car
Does weighing less make something harder to engineer? If anything making complex machines that are feather-weight seems more challenging. Certainly you'd acknowledge that smartphones are harder to build than mainframes, even though the latter is an order of magnitude heavier.
> Regulatory requirements are way less stringent for phones
This is true. But given Apple's unrelenting engineering excellence, there's very little chance they'll design a substandard or unsafe product. Therefore regulatory compliance is merely an issue of hiring enough lawyers. Apple has plenty of cash to hire lawyers. Certainly much more than GM.
Each of these comparisons makes sense at only the most superficial level. The automotive industry may have more in common with personal electronics than it did thirty years ago, but forced comparisons belie the unique and complex challenges in shipping a road-legal car.
And yet, that massive gulf is the whole point here.
Apple is treading in 95% unfamiliar waters, but the company has proven time and again this is its secret power. They'd never made portable music players before; they'd never made phones before; they'd never made watches before. A car is simply the ultimate expression of this, bringing to bear all of Apple's experience in entering a market where they have no experience.
I read about this a few years ago. I really had no memory of their attemps.. but what I wonder is how deep they tried to market these attempts at telephony and other devices. in the 90s. Was it more a little side game or did they claim to 'reinvent the phone' back then ? The only similar event I can remember is the newton.
Technically correct! Still, I’m not entirely sure a prototype desk phone that never shipped and a couple of promotional Think Different-branded quartz watches offered much in the way of relevant experience for getting into the smartphone and wearable markets.
Are you seriously comparing smash test on a phone with regulatory crash test on a car? Have you thought about this at all?
Do iPhones have crumple zones designed in? Do they asses performance of the chassis after 30 years of corrosion? Do they operate in 50 degree Dubai or -30 Siberia?
Do they travel at 100 m/h? How many Gs does an SSD (~100) survive as opposed to a human brain (~10)?
I am sorry for namecalling, but this post comes across as very arrogant.
I could just as easily ask you whether cars have to engineer at the scale of 5 nanometers. Or whether cars have to support thousands of third party engineers adding arbitrary add-on components. Or whether automakers worry about hardening their security against nation state actors.
I'm sorry, but do you honestly believe that automobiles are more complex from an engineering standpoint than microelectronics? How could you possibly explain why the microchip was invented 100 years after the automobile?
Every domain has its own engineering challenges. Apples has consistently shown execution excellence across a wide range of disparate areas though. And more importantly an ability to quickly and effectively spin up expertise in new areas. From silicon to machine learning to acoustics to compilers to optics. Read this HBS case study[1] to be amazed at its ability to leverage cross-functional expertise across disparate domains. No large org in the world operates like it. There's a reason AAPL has a 50 times the market cap as GM. There's zero doubt in my mind that if Apple pursues autos, within a decade they'll acquire 5%+ global marketshare.
'whether cars have to engineer at the scale of 5 nanometers'
Thats done by TSMC, but you are right, I have much higher confidence in them producing a car than I do in Apple.
> do you honestly believe that automobiles are more complex from an engineering standpoint than microelectronics?
By two orders of magnitudes, at least! Modern car encompasses microelectronics, safety critical software and hardware design, passenger safety, repairability, corrosion, and thousands of other issues phones and laptops never face. You can't just push an OTA and fix a flawed engine. You can't tell you users 'they are holding it wrong'
> How could you possibly explain why the microchip was invented 100 years after the automobile?
How do you explain that Segway was invented after the microchip?
Tesla designs its own chips, they don't use 5 nanometers but they are working on 7 nanometers. You need to have very good microelectronics to build a modern car.
Yes, car makers have to worry about hardening against nation states. Probably don't do it as well yet however.
However I agree that Apple could go into that direction.
Let me help you. I offered "Lights" as a design requirement unique to vehicles with respect to phones. Without any explanation it leaves the door open to a surface level counter point "Phones also have lights" that requires a functioning brain and the most basic level of reasoning. Lights on modern vehicles (high beams, low beams, DRLs, blinkers, brake lights) are certainly not simple components, especially those on vehicles sold in the EU where the regulatory body has taken up new technology much faster than in the US. This wasn't a dumb point, cell phone lighting requirements are child's play compared with the requirements of a vehicle lighting. It is 100% valid, but was also placed as bait as explained above. Make sense?
Lights are highly regulated but they're very straightforward regulations to follow. If you're not even going to bother to write out a sentence then it's not worth responding to it seriously, because it's hardly a reasonable objection in the first place; any random engineer could handle it solo.
I keep coming back to this in my head, thinking about how superficial this counterpoint is. Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements. In reality, table stakes are LED DRLs, high beams and lowbeams. Matrix LEDs or laser lights that can mask out other vehicles using onboard IR sensors are becoming more common. Additionally there are styling requirements, such as computationally driven welcome and farewell patterns for lock/unlock, and trends to follow like light bars, super thin OLED strips etc.
A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.
> Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements.
Yes they are. You don't get to point to random fancy things and call them "requirements".
> A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.
You're taking "phones have lights" too seriously. It was a deliberately vague and useless rebuttal to a deliberately vague and useless point. The real answer is what I already said. Replicating the functionality of a bulb/socket/housing is not hard to such an extent that the only reason to bring up lights is for jokes. So the joke got a joke back.
>> Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone
>I don't think this is true. Most electric cars are re-charged once a day, which is about the same as a phone.
A car has a much longer service life than a phone, at least 3-4x longer. The battery pack, being the most expensive components of the EV, pretty much has to last the life of the car.
> But given Apple's unrelenting engineering excellence, there's very little chance they'll design a substandard or unsafe product. Therefore regulatory compliance is merely an issue of hiring enough lawyers
Wat.
Phone safety compared to car safety is like comparing bottle rocket to Saturn V. If bottle rocket/phone goes south, you generally don't expect loss of life.
Fuck, Tesla can't seem to wrap their head around this. They used standard phone like quality components in car. Which caused stuff to stop working in regular car conditions e.g. noon left in car.
> iPhones definitely have lights.
This has about as much relevance as nothern lights do.
I simply asked a question you know, I'm neither a proponent nor an adversary of anything here.
I get you have a lot of knowledge on the matter.. but you're biased and quite emotional it seems.
You're shifting topic a bit.
You were talking about part count, not part complexity. My iPhone battery doesn't have a cooling system and my car doesn't need to fit in my pocket (<= absurd arguments for the sake or arguing outside of the original question)
How many windows are on an iPhone? Window motors? Window motor switches? Door panels to hold the window motor switches? Mechanical guides for the windows? The little weather striping to keep rain out from inside the doors?
How many doors are there on an iPhone? Door latches? Door locks? Door handles? Door close sensors? Weather stripping to keep the rain out from inside the cabin? The little sticker inside the door listing the OEM specs of tire pressure?
How many wheels are there on an iPhone? How many tires? Wheel lugs? TPMS sensors? TPMS readers? Hubs? Brake rotors? Brake calipers? Brake pads?
You do realize there are several SoC's in modern cars right? There's the ABS and stability systems, torque vectoring systems, lane keeping/driving automation, the infotainment system, and more. Sure they're not made to the 5nm level at the moment, but supply chain wise a 15nm part is about the same as a 5nm part when it comes to making the silicon. This is especially true when you're needing them to be more resilient temperature-wise and have other restrictions needed in the automotive space.
I drive a 2017 Santa Fe. Its a pretty basic car tech-wise compared to many others on the market these days. There's still the computerized ABS and traction control system taking samples thousands of times a second and making split second decisions on how to handle the car. There are radar sensors tracking the distance to vehicles around me, that data is being fed to computer systems for automatic cruise control and alert aids. The car features lane keeping features which is based off computer vision systems to track the lines on the road. The transmission system is computerized, being more like a computer controlled manual transmission rather than a traditional automatic. The infotainment system is obviously driven by some kind of computer and contains WiFi, LTE, Bluetooth, GNSS, satellite, AM, FM, and digital FM radio systems along with cameras and radar sensors.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some additional computerized systems on this list. So honestly there are several iPhones worth of computer systems on this list, all with more extreme hardening requirements to expect a longer deployed lifetime than an iPhone and all of which need to reliably talk to each other in some kind of fashion.
Car infotainment systems run ARM SoCs, much like an iPhone.
To compare the complexity of a car and a phone (any modern phone - they're all fundamentally similar inside) belies immense ignorance of both.
Phones are functionally complex, but physically quite simple. The complexity is dealt with by the chip fab and software. Electronic manufacturing processes are basically the same for every device, and so are very well understood and optimised.
A phone is a model of system abstraction. The incredible complexity of the processor and digital logic is abstracted into little black boxes which are then soldered to a PCB. The assembly is then a straightforward sandwich of all the bits.
I don't think anyone's arguing that phones are not complex, but that cars have an order of magnitude more bits to assemble, and that means manufacturing complexity that the existing manufacturers obtained through decades of iteration.
Tesla's a great example - they completely underestimated the complexity of manufacturing (building the machine to make the machine), spent billions of dollars on it and are still struggling with poor fit and finish.
Of course, any company can put the processes in place to build a modern car - it will just take time. To argue that a phone requires as many assembly processes as a car is simply ludicrous.
I can assure you that only in the instrument cluster and the central console area you have the same amount of complexity as in a smartphone. Now add the rest of the car.
I meant critical component, not seat buttons. People are getting too involved in this.
Nobody gives a damn about the infotainment or door knobs.. it's delegated to one supplier just like a phone charger or any secondary part.
The car mechanics, engine, battery and control units are what I was mostly thinking about.
If Musk keeps on going their EVs car body will be two cast parts, so in terms of supply chain management the complexity is gone into the manufacturing process.
A Tesla has 40+ Electronic Control Units. Even if you just look at that, it's way more complex than a phone. Sure, the powertrain has fewer parts in an EV, but everything else is still the same as a regular car, and all of that stuff is a lot of stuff.
> I can assure you that only in the instrument cluster and the central console area you have the same amount of complexity as in a smartphone. Now add the rest of the car.
Not only that but the regulatory standards of EV in US/EU/Asia varies so widely that I don't see how they can get a product to Market in less than 5-10 years unless they're just making EV clones of what is already out here or partner with a Manufacturer. And burned factories in India are not going to cut it on the logistics and supply chain so they'd need to work that out, too.
I can honestly see them partnering up with Nissan-Mitsubishi Motors who are in dire financial straits and want get out of their alliance with Renault-French Government after all the Ghosn corruption and are taking their entire lineup to EV and want to improve on the in-cabin AR side of things, all of which Apple could help build and have the finance to support it.
Having worked at Nissan I think its focus is on tech and still makes cars to prove and refine it's technology, they had an Aerospace division in Mountain View, and used the supposed 'auto pilot' features Tesla has on some of its Infiniti chassis (lidar based cruise control and lane staying signals) in the early 2000s.
I hope it happens, to be honest I dislike anything Apple makes and I despise their business practices for obvious reasons (Foxxcon) but I'm forced into their ecosystem as of now. I'd like to be open to their products if they it did happen.
This is such a clueless comment. Tesla, a start-up with zero experience in cars managed to make cars without any issue at all and become one of the most popular luxury car makers in the world.
So Apple, the world's most valuable company, isn't going to be able to make their own car? You're dreaming.
I doubt anyone here would say Apple couldn't make their own car, but the idea of Apple mass manufacturing a brand new car in four years is a bit crazy. In your example, Tesla took nearly a decade of focus and half a billion in capital to begin small production of the Model S.
> without any issue at all and become one of the most popular luxury car makers in the world.
I've followed Tesla since the Roadster days, and I lost count how many times they've almost gone Bankrupt. The only one here that is clueless is you if you think it was without 'issue.' Hell, I worked for Kimbal who is on the Board at Tesla and he openly talks about how many times Tesla almost went under in the few interviews/podcasts he's been on. What echo chamber do you live in to think there was no issue?
> This is such a clueless comment.
I've been in Motorsports with close ties to manufactures since I was 17, and then went on to work for Volkswagen Audi Group (the largest manufacture of cars by scale) and then to BMW and then back to VW because of Diesel-gate, then Nissan in various capacities from technician to supply chain. Then I tried my hand at Tesla during Model 3 ramp up and saw FIRST HAND why/how the delay in ramp was occurring in 2017 with 2 trips to the Fremont Factory before deciding to decline and focus on SpaceX instead.
What experience do you have in that Industry to call it clueless?
I know Apple cultists are as rabid as Elon worshipers, but the two combined are completely toxic.
> I doubt anyone here would say Apple couldn't make their own car, but the idea of Apple mass manufacturing a brand new car in four years is a bit crazy. In your example, Tesla took nearly a decade of focus and half a billion in capital to begin small production of the Model S.
In 3 years? A prototype to build hype and take pre-orders that still needs all the regulatory compliance to be on the road ahead of it, sure; a refined 49-1 street legal product that's mass produced with scaled production line, distribution channels and supply chain to accommodate domestic, let alone international, deliveries: HELL NO!
Money alone won't buy you that, especially if COVID is still shutting/delaying down so many factories, International supply lines and look at the distribution system Tesla had to INVENT because it refused to play by the dealership system.
You FAANG guys live in an unrealistic bubble and think because it works for mobile/computers, and I laugh when I say 'works' because look at India, it should work for several ton vehicles with way more complexity and red tape than you can possibly imagine.
You're comparing vastly different Industries that have little to nothing in common.
Nissan just announced that it will be making its EVs in Japan [0] instead of Sunderland, so unless Apple decides to detract from its business model built on slave labour in Asia, chances are it will not happen.
The engine of my electric car has one moving part. One. Made in house from raw materials. Rolls of steel, copper, and aluminum. It’s also considered a single part for manufacturing and servicing purposes. So not simply one moving part. One part, period.
>The number of parts/unit differs by an order of magnitude
>car companies often rely on hundreds of suppliers
See above. You must be thinking of ICE cars.
>aren’t as transferable as you may think
Other than pulling a few things off the shelf like tires, windshields, and wheels (and more; those are just a few examples) the manufacturer of my car stated from scratch. Prodigiously hard for sure but Apple is good at hard.
>will last 100k miles
Try one million.
>will take years
Again Apple excels at this.
The real problem for Apple is having Tesla as a competitor. They are used to competing with Google, but it’s easy to compete with lame. Tesla is not lame, by a long stretch.
I was waiting for the Muskians to swoop in and spread their nonsense.
Guess what? I drive a white model 3 long range AWD and I love it. I'm still 1: an engineer with 10 years of hardware experience and 2: skeptical of every ounce of BS Elon Musk has ever spread.
You know how many parts are under the car? Have you taken one apart? They're complicated machines with, again, orders of magnitude more parts than a phone. Forget ICE vehicles, we're just talking about EVs and iPhones. You don't think Tesla relies on thousands of suppliers? Who do you think makes the screens, wiring hardness, cameras, brakes, glass, acoustic devices, steering, battery temp management, motorized seats, etc etc. And who do you think supplies their parts? And theirs? And so on and so forth. Its a complicated web of suppliers and manufacturers, much more so than what goes into a single iPhone (which is still very complicated). This is why a Tesla costs 35k+ and an iPhone costs ~1k. There are more parts that are more complicated and manufacturing them takes more time, effort, and people. Elon may have a magic car printer in his wet dreams but that won't happen in reality for four, five, or six decades.
Also, nobody, I repeat, absolutely nobody is holding their breath for you to hit 1m miles in your Tesla. Currently they don't even have a story for repair and so many parts are fused that if something breaks you can't replace it. The car is totaled. I recommend you watch all of the early Rich Rebuilds on YouTube if you really want to understand some of the nitty gritty details of these vehicles. Yes they are simpler than a normal ICE. By an order of magnitude? Certainly not. Progress is made at the margins, in increments of 1% then 5% then 10% then 15%. Not 1000% in one swoop.
The Tesla Model S is not an ideal example here. It’s a great car, but also Tesla’s first mass produced model. It’s over-engineered in many ways and has way more parts and complexity than if Tesla were designing the same car today!
Comparing the Model S to the Model 3, and now the Model Y, we see with each generation simpler designs, reduced part counts, and easier assembly which all translates into improved reliability and, often, repairability.
Sandy Munro’s Tesla tear downs are a great reference for this stuff.
Agreed 100%. Though even Sandy's conclusions are that they're saving at the margins here. It is revolutionary in the sense that they're design and manufacturing techniques are unique, but they don't lead to orders of magnitude reduction in complexity/cost.
Yeah, the complexity comparison of a DOT-legal EV to smartphone is idiotic.
There has been some improvement over ICEs though, at least in the precision-machined parts and assemblies department.
But a smartphone is analogous to the infotainment display in a modern car. There's still a lot of car attached to that. I think many people commenting on this don't have the slightest clue what the average automobile is composed of beyond the engine, interior, exterior, and wheels.
> Guess what? I drive a white model 3 long range AWD and I love it. I'm still 1: an engineer with 10 years of hardware experience and 2: skeptical of every ounce of BS Elon Musk has ever spread.
0) Blue P3D AWD + Blue 3 AWD 1) 30 2) Right there with you, but that is a red herring.
It would have been sufficient to clarify that you held the opinion even about electric
cars, without the histronics and name calling. You may be right, because cars certainly are complex.
Hm... but a phone is orders of magnitude harder to build than a car (minus the computer). Keep in mind, Tesla didn’t design or build the computers.
Cars use many more off the shelf parts, they have far easier supply chains to tap into.
Designing and building the CPU, GPU, camera systems, neural chip/software, touchscreen, FaceID, etc. All of these components require way more competence to build than any single part of an electric car using an off the shelf computer.
Cars have more parts, but they are dramatically bigger, less intensely complex, less intensely integrated. Just the CPU alone of a phone puts an entire electric engine to shame in terms of difficulty of engineering.
So it’s an interesting comparison. But I’d put money on Apple making a great car before Tesla made a great computer.
Ok, name something more complex than a CPU to manufacture on a car?
Making the leap from "Apple makes many complex hardware parts" to they can make a car is a smaller leap than the opposite - Tesla literally didn't exist and made a car, so to assert Apple somehow couldn't is... weird.
Things Apple builds already that are in cars: custom glass, speakers, lights, complex aluminum frames, computers, cameras, knobs/dials, batteries, screens, wheels, fans, materials from leather to rubber to plastic, memory foam...
The above poster was talking about the entire car not just the motor. Sure, the motor is far simpler than an ICE. But there's still a cooling system, with pumps and hoses and heat exchangers. Those are all parts. There's still seats, with sensors and motors and mounting rails. There are steering assemblies, with linkages and actuators for power steering. There's the whole infotainment system, which contains just as many parts if not more as an iPhone would have. So when comparing the idea of a car having an order of magnitude more parts and complicated supply chains its still true even with an electric car.
> The engine of my electric car has one moving part. One.
Your electric car has doors. The doors have hinges, latches, interior handles, exterior handles, locks, lock switches, power window motors, power window switches, power mirror motors, power mirror switches, etc. Those are all moving parts. Those are all just in the doors.
There's a lot more to a car than just the engine. Power transmission, brakes, power steering, heating/cooling, etc. All of those have moving parts. There are likely hundreds of parts suppliers just for those subsystems. Yeah, the engine of an ICE car is more complicated than an electric car[0], but there is a lot more that has to be supplied an integrated.
I'm not sure I see that. Clearly they are good at making computer like things, but it's not like they're God's gift to supply chain management. There's been quite a few mistakes over the years. Hard to see them doing better than car companies that have been building cars for decades.
I'm also not sure what Apple's edge here is. At this point all I really want out of an entertainment center is a screen for my phone to plug into. Everything else is better done as knobs and buttons.
Past performance is not indicative of future results etc, but you’re right, this is basically exactly what Palm CEO Ed Colligan said about the rumored iPhone a few months before it was revealed[1]:
> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
The first couple of generations of the iPod kinda sucked too. It's really hard to get everything perfect in the first generation, probably impossible. Having the agility to iterate on the design quickly so you can capitalize on the initial hype is what Apple does so well.
Not that much about the iPod changed between 2001 and 2005. A simple to use interface, large storage made it great from the start, but windows support it what made it successful.
They physical wheel was fragile and the internal HDDs weren't quite big enough for a good music library. They were also a little too big and heavy, and they used Firewire as the interface which wasn't well supported at the time (or ever) on PCs.
I don't think that's true. For example, less than a year after its release, the iPhone accounted for 28% of smartphones sold in the U.S. (and presumably for a greater percentage of smartphone-sale revenue): see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/02/iphone-owns-28-perce....
That's a difficult statement to support. It set the stage for everything that came after, and it knocked the industry back on its heels. I'm not sure of the margin or unit numbers but for lots of values of "commercial success", that alone is hard to ignore.
Sure, but Apple had a revolutionary new product. They weren't that great at the nuts and bolts of making a phone, but it didn't matter because the concept of the iPhone was so much better than any phone out there. What is Apple going to bring to the car to match that?
I think every Apple derivative product built since the iPhone is proof they don’t need to reinvent the initial market conditions of the iphone to yield high ROI. Half of Apples success is just understanding their own customer base and building a car for them. If you are in this group you already know it (i am). You could say at least 10% of existing US car owners would already own one if it existed. Apple just needs to show up and build a car for them and its sold. Same is true for headphones. For TVs. Etc. it is all coming.
I’ll just say that the main benefit of a Tesla, besides driving and handling really nicely is that the electronics are actually good: it’s entertainment system isn’t a hacky afterthought; also, just plugging into the supercharger and walking away makes the whole “messing with payment methods” paradigm of gas stations seem obsolete.
On the flipside, my 2012 "dumb" car with the good third-party bluetooth adapter I got last year is the end-all, be-all of car electronics for me. It can only go downhill from there.
To me, car electronics should be like a Kindle is for reading. There is a period after you launch the Kindle but before you start reading where you interact with it like a smartphone or tablet. But then once you get started, the notion that you're interacting with a digital device just disappears.
I want my car experience just like that - set up Spotify, Google Maps etc. before I go, then hands off any touchscreen until I stop. And I only use the audio driving instructions from Maps.
Come to think of it, the same applies to running - set up music, tracking app etc. on your front porch, don't touch the screen again until you're finished, that's a sign of a good run.
Yeah, that’s sort of what I like about the Tesla: the interactions I care about are almost all accessed through the controls on the steering wheel (volume up/down, next/previous track, play/pause, cruise control adjustments) or through sticks. The screen mostly is for setting up music when you first get into the car, navigation, car status info (speed, fsd visualization, speed limit, energy consumption). Also, when charging, it’s nice to have a big screen for Netflix.
That’s not my point: my point is that I mostly don’t have to interact with the screen while driving because they made good decisions about what controls to put on the steering column.
You can imagine why, for many, this is hard to believe. People have said for years legacy automakers will “catch up” to Tesla, while they continue to ramp at Plaid speed.
Culture is hard, but the core of your business. To not embrace the culture your org needs to outcompete competitors is to embrace failure.
Yeah, I think the issue is that most traditional manufacturers have leaned hard into integrating components made by a variety of manufacturers. Tesla (and Apple) differ because they are mostly into vertical integration: so, they can design all the parts for the “system as a whole” rather than having to work around the limitations of particular off-the-shelf solutions.
Yes, I believe this. I was on the fence about a Tesla for years. Something just didn't sit right with the experience inside one. I don't feel that with a BMW, so I got a 3 year lease, specifically timed for when I think the Apple car will drop.
> it’s entertainment system isn’t a hacky afterthought
It's about as hacky an afterthought as you can possibly get, though? It's a giant tablet on a stand. Effective, yes, but also definitely a hacky afterthought, too. There's no attempt of any kind to integrate it into the lines or flow of the rest of the vehicle. And they still can't be bothered to put some basic physical switchgear in the thing. There's nothing tactile about it, nothing that feels premium or well-designed.
I don’t know, the physical switches on the steering wheel do about 90% of what I need while driving.
Anyways, Tesla computer interface is so much nicer to work with than the system on my 2014 Honda Odyssey: the software there has all sorts of arbitrary limitations that makes things like “playing” music irritating. Plus, traditional car manufacturers do crazy things like treating the “navigation package” as a premium feature or whatever. Not to mention that the Tesla gets OTA updates regularly while I’m mostly stuck with whatever bugs or limitations my Honda had when it was built (unless I take it to a dealership and ask for the firmware to be updated.)
When I bought the car, I was pretty much a skeptic in multiple dimensions and intended to return it in the seven day window if I didn’t like it. It ended up being like my initial reaction to the iPhone only having a touchscreen: the car, to me at least, just feels right.
Except they were better at making a phone, and then controlling costs in making advanced phones. Nokia could NOT compete. Even Microsoft gave up (despite billions). Even now, with years of competition, their margins are FAR higher than others making smartphones. Eye wateringly higher.
You've completely missed it. Apple was manifestly incredibly great at the "nuts and bolts of making a phone". That's the entire lesson of the last 13 years and the most successful single product in world history.
You're looking back at this with rose colored glasses. Early iPhones had plenty of issues. Remember "you're holding it wrong"? It took them a few generations to get the nuts and bolts of making a phone right.
Yes, I remember that "you're holding it wrong was" a) actually several years into the product, not at the beginning, and b) was hilariously overblown and not a real issue for about 99% of users, including all users who had a case on their phone and almost all users who didn't, and c) a reliable identifier of cranks that don't really know much about the iPhone.
This is starting to get off topic, but the "holding it wrong" issue It was definitely not overblown; if anything it was understated by the media still infatuated with Apple's latest shiny new thing.
The issue affected nearly every iPhone owner I knew at the time, including a number of individuals who worked for Apple, and almost all of these people got their phones replaced by Apple under warranty as a result.
That antenna was a misstep, sure. And they had others. But for the most part over that period, they were defining the product category, and competitors were reacting to it.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Nokia's position was weaker than it might have appeared on the surface. They had good hardware and distribution channels but were totally lacking a modern mobile device OS. The Symbian platform was garbage. Nokia never made sufficient investment into a replacement.
I'm someone who enjoyed Maemo and Meego much more than Android or iOS. Nokia sabotaged their position by ditching that platform in favor of Windows Phone.
I don't think CarPlay is ahead what anyone else is doing, Android Auto works in reality much better than CarPlay, at least with my car. The UX of CarPlay makes much less sense, has less functionality and less safety features than Android Auto. And somehow CarPlay is also inverting the rolling control my car has, just like they do with the scrolling on touch pads.
Having an android and an iphone and had two vehicles with both AA and CarPlay, I can confirm that android auto is a much better experience than carplay.
Would a full-cabin CarPlay beat other luxury EV interfaces? I think that's the question. Auto manufacturers produce sub-par software interfaces. Is there a luxury EV that runs purely on android or produces a software interface as good as Apple's?
Not to be pedantic but Volvo already makes atleast one model of an EV (XC40) that runs purely on Android. The android system also allows you to run CarPlay if you connect your iPhone.
That's my point. They can improve the car experience through Carplay and the iPhone. There's no point in manufacturing the entire car.
And ultimately buttons and entertainment centers only move the needle for relatively comparable cars. Apple would first have to get as good at Toyota et al at building the rest of the car before a better UX can win.
If Apple are going for a luxury EV, then they ‘only’ have to get better than Tesla. I hear Tesla still don’t have build quality sorted, and issues can take months to get fixed.
I imagine more practically minded luxury car buyers would jump at an Apple car that met Tesla on the performance front and exceeded them on the ease of ownership.
What other market is large enough for apple to enter? That’s the real question that needs to be answered because if there is no other viable market to deploy their capital then disrupting transportation is a good pick.
When they decide to implement a hardware control, it's usually done well. But their records is hit-and-miss in my opinion.
Good: iPod click wheel, iPhone side buttons/switches, old chiclet keyboards, trackpad.
Bad: Butterfly keyboards, AppleTV remote is awful (swipes and edge-clicks for all sorts of things), their mice have always been a pain to use (wanna right click? Better lift your left finger completely away from the mouse)
But they also aggressively remove physical interfaces where possible. One-button mice, removal of home button on iPhone, removal of function keys on MacBooks, etc.
I hope they don't do that with a car. There should be a dozen knobs and buttons that have dedicated features. Not just wipers and signals either. I'm talking about volume control, seat adjustments, windows, etc.
I hadn't thought about this until your comment. While I think Apple building a car is... dubious (both the idea that they would and that they should even if they can), I'd been thinking "well, at least Apple is good at UI," but I really don't like Tesla-esque touchscreen-for-everything auto interfaces, and that would be a serious temptation for Apple.
Yes. That crown is really nice. Apple is good at tactile, when they want to be.
I just hope they agree that eyes-on-road interactions will require more of that, and less of the touchscreen-only stuff. They probably will. One way to look at it is how much they care about accessibility on iOS. If they put that much effort into those features there, then nailing those details in a car will be natural.
I think Apple is doing car exactly because we should be looking at the road. I am sure their AR technology will be incorporated into windshield head up display
I don't know that I completely buy that. Shipping/transport and resource management at the scale of automobile production is a rather different world than consumer electronics where literally everything anyone cares about fits on a plain old wooden pallet.
Apple does have smart people, and they obviously have a ton of cash. So they absolutely could make a play here. But to imagine that they'll walk in to a market that Tesla has been growing successfully in for a decade and be competitive out of the gate seems like a stretch.
As a company that is running mostly on brand status, Tesla is probably the easiest competitor for Apple to beat in this space. The real competition are the companies that have been building cars for decades.
> As a company that is running mostly on brand status
They shipped like half a million cars this year! They own like 70-80% of every EV market they compete in. This is the kind of criticism you'd read about Tesla in 2014. The companies that "have been building cars for decades" are getting stomped by Tesla in this space, 12x more Model 3's were sold than LEAF's in the US last year.
At some point the established wisdom among some people that Tesla is failing is going to change, right? The ship has sailed on that, left the harbor, and is half way across the ocean by now.
And the weirdest thing here is that it's not an attempt to attack Tesla from the perspective of established auto makers but from Apple Computer, a company with no experience at all in the market and almost nothing to bring to the table but "brand status" (and a freighter full of cash, of course).
Tesla's biggest threat isn't Apple. It's the other automakers making enough EVs that they don't need to purchase credits from Tesla anymore.
Tesla is profitable, but every single one of its quarterly profits is still the result of selling credits to other automakers, not from the sale of its cars. In that regard, Tesla joins such luminous counterparts as Fiat (1.4 million profit on accounting charge) and Hyundai ($140 million quarterly loss) as the only "major" automaker which doesn't make money selling vehicles.
That credits thing doesn't seem to add up. A quick google shows that 7% of Tesla's 2019 revenue was selling credits. While sure, that's of the same order as the profit, you can't make an argument that "all" of the profit was credits for basic fungibility reasons. "All" of the profit could be any 7% chunk of revenue.
And 7% is like half a year of profits growth in this cases for a company that is still growing rapidly and finding efficiencies.
It's spin, again. And I genuinely don't understand why so much of it continues to be deployed against this company when it keeps proving it wrong.
It's "literally all" of the profit because Tesla controls the timing and amount of credits sold each quarter, and adjusted the sales of credits so that it could make the "4 consecutive quarters" profitability threshold for making the S&P500 rather than selling them all in one quarter as they did in the past.
Profits are not fungible. Companies can, and do, determine profit and loss separately for each line of business, because it matters both for financial reporting purposes and for tax purposes. Even Tesla acknowledges that it is not profitably making and selling cars under GAAP (i.e., under industry-standard accounting); their unit margin deliberately excludes items that would normally be ratably allocated to each unit. Hell, Tesla even fired most of its marketing department and cut its marketing budget so that it could goose the financial metrics it needed to make the S&P.
In that sense, it worked. Tesla is on the S&P. The downside to being on the S&P though is greater scrutiny and more price friction. Tesla can no longer count on retail investors to goose stock prices with marketing stunts.
There isn't an upside. Theoretically it means that certain investment vehicles must buy shares of your company. But they do so from the open market; not from offerings.
Otherwise, it's just a matter of prestige: the S&P lists are just the X largest (by stock value) profitable publicly traded companies.
The difference between S&P X00 and Nasdaq: S&P is just a list of publicly traded companies; it is not a stock exchange. Nasdaq is an actual stock exchange, like the NYSE.
This sounds about right but you're arguing with a point that I'm not making. Sure, they're successful and have market dominance, my point is that this isn't based on them necessarily having a better product or being a better car manufacturing company.
I 100% agree Apple won't walk in and be competitive out the gate. But who in this chain is claiming that? Grandparent specifically listed patience as an Apple virtue, which implies they'll need staying power.
You would typically use five axes for complex parts unless there was a compelling reason not to. Interestingly, as I am buying one at the moment (our first) I had a chance to talk to different machine shops about their different brands here in China. They alleged that foreign dual use export restrictions have resulted in a situation where China's local five axis machines are now both cheaper and more accurate than the available foreign imports (source: major prototyping shop, machine count >20, machine brands 3x, 5 axis count 10+). This was supported by the second shop I visited who also said they will no longer buy imports.
You're joking but interestingly Tesla at the Battery Day presentation revealed a giant injection mould to make the aluminium chassis for one of their cars, which will simplify the manufacturing process.
So we're going into uni-body territory but with a faster, simpler process than milling/printing. If Apple is happy buying thousands of milling machines for laptops and phones, a chassis injection mould might be the process they'd need to break into the car space.
> a skill that is more and more transferable - especially for electric cars.
What does that matter?
There are Car manufacturers that have basically had infinite capitalization and funding for a decade and the legal system + technology barriers just didn't move. Supply chain was never an issue.
Apple's not going to see any different results, so I am puzzled by this optimism.
I don't think you can supply-chain-manage your way into making cars. The hard part of manufacturing automobiles isn't design, it's manufacturing. You can't just pay some third party contractor to spin up a car factory that does 90% of the work for you, like you can with electronics.
But Apple have outsourced all their manufacturing. That, as we've seen in Tesla's struggles, is a huge component of making a successful product. Agree with the vertical integration aspect + nearly unlimited capital.
Backed by Goldman Sachs, a company that destabilizes whole economies for profit. Apple isn’t exactly hiding which side of the income spectrum they prefer.
RE: User experience - best card I’ve ever used. Integrates with my watch and phone in such a way that I don’t even have to pull it out to pay. Can dispute charges with a single text. Easy to see full details of spending and billing. The cash back pays for my monthly Apple One account too.
> A more cynical person might say that one of Apple’s strengths is marketing commoditised capabilities as something special.
The Apple Card is easily the best card I've ever had. Its not just about touch-less payments (which doesn't actually require the Apple Card), it's the way you are notified, legibility of bills, convenience and immediacy of cash back, nicely integrated and payment options plus a bunch of other great features. Notably, Apple was the only card company which notified me in a conspicuous way that I had the option to skip payments during COVID.
Nothing is specifically amazing about the Apple Card, but collectively it's easily the best credit card I've had. The only time I use my other cards at all is when they have significantly better cash back programs. (Amazon card for example)
Your comment is close to the truth though. Apple's strength is in creating polished/ well integrated products. Often those products don't need bleeding edge tech, just someone integrating them better than existing players. The credit card is kind of a classic example. It's not fundamentally different, just a better experience all around.
Apple Pay has not very much to do with the Apple card. Apple Pay is a logical extension of contactless, which has been available around the world for years.
The world moved to chip&pin at least 5 years ago and moved to contactless for small money amounts (<AUD100 <GBP30) at least 3-4 years ago.
Apple & Google's changes for CC are mostly in the tokenization standard, building the backends for issuers.
The Apple Card is a US only need, because the US is stuck on chip&sign and Visa/MC have been unable to force the retailers to replace their ancient POS equipment. Plus big retailers don't like not having access to the full PAN of an account and tracking customers.
Cash back is pretty standard, if not below other rates (I'm not even sure what qualifies as 1 vs 2 vs 3%, seems random). The disputes aren't any easier or harder than I've seen through other apps for different banks.
The graph for expenses looks good, but I've had that with other accounts for years.
It's really not that different other than cash back being right there in the same app
It's the only card I've ever had which sometimes takes a couple weeks for an ACH payment to clear, and Apple/GS says that is completely normal and expected.
Otherwise it has some nice features, comparable to some of my other cards but more tightly integrated with the phone.
This comment implicitly rests on the fallacy, learned the hard way by Tesla, that making electric vehicles is just like making any other electronic thing.
When is the last time an electronic mfg had to deal with a billion dollar lawsuit because they didn't follow industry best practices for design like Toyota did after the acceleration scandal? Does Apple have experience with the NHTSB or other relevant regulatory agencies? Sure, there is a lot of gatekeeping in the auto industry, but it's for good reason. Cars can and do regularly kill people. It is not the same as making an iPhone.
Apple has been on the receiving end of literally dozens of billion dollar lawsuits from many many companies. They battle lawsuits every day for IP infringement, to trade craft, to patents - and have over 200 in-house lawyers.
Yes, and? Does that shield them from liability in situations where legal precedent is against them? Are you saying that Apple is immune from any sort of liability claim? If my Earpods explode while I'm wearing them, Apple's 200 in-house lawyers will protect them even if they intentionally ignored safe design principles?
They can make phones because they hire/hired experts who can make phones. I doubt they would use those same electrical engineers to design the brake systems. I don't think there's anything evidence to suggest that they couldn't acquire/hire the right talent.
What will Apple do when the talent they hire tells them their CPUs and software are incompatible with ISO 26262, MISRA, and industry accepted safety and reliability standards? Will Apple accept the timelines they have to adhere to in order to produce a safe vehicle? Will they try to take shortcuts and expose themselves to liability?
> What will Apple do when the talent they hire tells them their CPUs and software are incompatible with ISO 26262, MISRA, and industry accepted safety and reliability standards?
I think you have an incredible misunderstanding of the the due diligence/research that these multi trillion dollar, publicly traded, companies go through to estimate costs/risks of their endeavors.
> 2014 when it first started to design its own vehicle from scratch. At one point, Apple drew back the effort to focus on software and reassessed its goals.
Looks like that due diligence wasn't diligent enough. But hey, what do I know? I must have an incredible misunderstanding. How could it be anything else?
Personally I don't buy the rumor because I think Apple is smart enough to avoid making their own cars. I think they already learned, by trial and error, that cars are tougher than they look.
> they've really thought through the UX of a semi-self driving car
Minor side note. I'm sure a lot of the experience is well-designed but I can't help but grimace every time I see that huge touch tablet instead of physical buttons on the dashboard.
That’s Ok. A lot of people thought keyboards on phones were an absolute requirement too.
Like with phones, having touch screen control everything provides extraordinary flexibility in rolling out new software features and ultimately improving UX.
Remember this design is supposed to lead the way into an FSD future achieved through purely software updates.
Whether they succeed in automating the majority of miles driven, they designed the car with that future fully in mind.
For what it’s worth, it’s one of my favorite parts of the car, and certainly it’s my kids favorite part of the car.
A touch screen requires looking at it, buttons do not. That is a fundamental difference, and I don't want a UI I have to look at while driving.
I don't want a UI with modes on the touchscreen. More of needing to concentrate on the cursed screen instead of driving.
Lastly, every touchscreen UI is fatally attracted to icons instead of words so I have to pull over and consult the 500 page manual to see what the wretched things mean. Icons have set back communication 5000 years [1], though I doubt Susan Kare will ever apologize :-)
[1] Picture based written languages all evolved towards phonetic, alphabet based ones. There's a good reason for that.
First, it’s not like everything is done on the screen. Blinkers, wipers, volume, cruise speed, skip track, horn, gear select, can all be physically controlled.
The only thing that I’ve ever felt was a little distracting is climate control, because you’re adjusting individual degrees with a fairly small touch target. However it’s also a totally non-time critical adjustment.
Defog/defrost is a 3-state toggle control so it’s easy to tap with minimal distraction. I find it’s strictly better than the physical toggle I had in my previous car, which I also had to look at to press because it was in a field of identical buttons, and which didn’t provide the same functionality with just two taps (going from cool defog to hot defog)
I think people dramatically overstate the idea that people are adjusting climate or radio channels without looking, unless it’s being done on the steering wheel. If you have to reach the dash, most people are going to look at it.
What’s great about the responsive touch screen is that there are activities which are massively faster to accomplish (like pinch-zooming GPS maps) which are significantly slower and more arduous on other cars I’ve driven with physical controls. There’s also a lot more functionality that can be provided. And providing remote control over the same functionality becomes a lot easier when there isn’t a physical switch that could get out of sync, or where your physical switches all have to be “soft-toggles” so they can’t physically get out of sync with the current digital state.
Honestly the HCI group at Tesla has really done some very impressive work overall. The design is quite beautiful and extremely functional.
I regularly drive my ancient Bronco 2 and sometimes a newish car with the touch display. I spend less than a second glancing at any control on the Bronco. It's so bad on the touch display I sometimes have to pull over to figure out how to get the fracking defroster on. It's even impossible to tell if it is on or off, you just have to wait and stick your hand on the base of the windshield. In Seattle having a working defroster is "flight critical" as they say. It's not a joke, but the controls are a joke.
BTW, "defrost" is a verb, and pictures are for things, not verbs. So I never know which stupid icon means "defrost". Lack of verbs is why picture written languages evolve into phonetic alphabets. I predict in 20 years Apple will announce a great breakthrough in user interfaces - words!
rant, grumble, rant, grumble, harrumph
BTW, I have no idea what a defog control does that defrost doesn't.
> A touch screen requires looking at it, buttons do not.
While there are things on my car I use instinctively without looking—wipers/ lights come to mind—there are plenty of other pieces which are frustratingly difficult to find in the dark. Turning on the window defroster when the window starts to fog up at night comes to mind. Likewise many of the climate control nobs. While they do have nice physical manifestations, I don't know off the top of my head what position the nob happens to be in or which direction I need to shift it to get it into defrost versus heat versus vent.
Personally, I think there is a happy medium somewhere between Tesla's touch everything and the current state where you play button guessing games.
These problems have long been solved. Then, 20 years ago, it was all forgotten.
Behold my 1989 Bronco II:
----------[++]-----------------------------------
MAX A/C PANEL PNL/FLR FLOOR FLR/DEF DEFROST
-----------------[++]----------------------------
COOL WARM
OFF * * * HI
PUSH FOR A/C
It has two sliders with positions as labeled above, then a rotating knob with 5 detented positions for the fan, and the label PUSH FOR A/C. The COOL to WARM slider is also color coded blue fading to red.
Turning on the headlights lights the display.
No manual is needed to fully operate it. I never even had the manual for that car. The knob and sliders are trivial, tactile, and visual. There are no modes.
I think the concern stems from differing contexts. When typing on the phone, you're looking at the phone. You're usually (hopefully) not driving.
Driving, on the other hand, is demanding on the senses; on at least three of them. Touch screens pull eyes off the road. Physical knobs are much easier to grab without looking.
In my car I have the luxury of both touch and knobs for some things. I always use knobs when I can. It feels safer. (But then, I also prefer crank windows instead of automatic, so maybe I'm just a nut.)
It's like my Macbook touchbar. It stinks. The physical keys were easy to use without looking. With touch, I almost always need to look steady at it before I touch. For me, muscle memory isn't enough for touchscreens. Weird.
Yeah I still think touch UIS absolutely suck and the best example of this is the android WiFi GUI (idk if they changed it after kitkat, that was one of the main reasons I dumped it.) Everything is modal and you can never predict the mode, multiple layers of controls are constantly popping and sliding over/under eachother and there's no tactical feedback that lets you know when you're over the control you want. Screw touch crap I want my PDA keyboard back!
In a car it's extra bad because now you have to look away from the road and position your hand in a bumpy car to adjust the temperature/radio/navigation. It's so awful in my friends cars I dread the day I have to buy a new one.
Ehhhh. Self driving cars have been just around the corner for a long time now. Not saying it won’t happen, but I wouldn’t buy a Tesla today on the assumption that it’ll happen within the lifetime of that car.
A long time? I feel like they went from "eventually" to "around the corner" pretty recently. Even though there weren't any particular leaps in self-driving technology happening then.
>Apple is just about the only company with a similar ethos and enough money and patience to be a viable competitor and have a competitive brand known for quality.
Mostly agree, though I suspect a few of the major car companies like Volkswagon/Audi and Toyota/Lexus are capable of this as well.
But yes, Apple has the cash reserves to not just manufacture electric cars, but to build out the necessary infrastructure network as well:
- charging stations blanketing the country
- battery replacement stations for faster "charging" on the fly
- local maintenance stations
- etc..
Apple could centralize sales to Apple's website, and transform "dealer networks" into "maintenance networks". Sales can be handled in a centralized manner, but maintenance still requires locality.
All that requires large upfront CapEx, but Apple is one of the few that has more than enough cash reserves for that.
Isn't that how the entire stock market works? Valuations based on net present value of future projected earnings. You just need a story about future earnings that enough of the market will buy into. Both Apple and Tesla have enough track record to credibly tell such a story.
Net present value of future projected earnings, adjusted for risk.
That last part seems to be missing.
Likely because the smart money knows that retail investors + indices = momentum trading on sectors. As there's no ability for anyone to call BS in the way they used to be able to.
Or to put it another way: if I'm Toyota, I have a demonstrated ability to build cars profitably. If I'm someone who says I can build as many cars as Toyota, how many pitfalls are there between what I say I can do and actually doing it?
Admittedly, corporate conservatism and risk avoidance in leadership is absolutely a thing, but it feels like we're rewarding claims of execution over actual execution.
If you are Toyota, you've only demonstrated you could build cars profitably for the consumer market you were already in. If consumer preferences, trends, etc have changed, and no product is yet available to fulfill those new preferences, there is actually risk that what you are good at building profitably isn't what people want anymore. There is risk in that too.
Well to nitpick a little, in the case of Toyota at least, and given the success of the Prius, it seem Toyota has proven they can identify and succeed in (or even create) new consumer markets.
Thats true. Gotta give them credit. This could be a good proof point for derisking the Toyota case. However, Apple is pretty secretive and they often surprise us. There is a lot of design space deviation possible in a complex product like a car. Until we know what that product delta is, we cant really assess Toyota’s ability to pivot quickly enough. Apple wouldnt invest if the delta on what they can offer is small. So should be interesting.
too many to know about and count. Way more than the side I am highlighting. But this isn't just "a company", it is Apple. I know everyone doesn't believe in them, even if you ground yourself in their track record of execution.
I would also challenge the notion of "no competency at all". This isn't like a great chess player thinking they can use that skill to become a great football player. This is more like one of the best baseball players becoming a great football player [1]. Things are different but there exists a lot more similarities than you think. And if you are one of the greatest of all time (which is true for both Bo Jackson and Apple) there is a non-zero chance you can pull it off.
Granted! My personal guess is this turns out much like Google Fiber: a capital- and regulation-heavy endeavor that Apple (and their investors, used to tech margins) aren't culturally or financially willing to commit to for a long enough haul.
But an effort which eventually pays off by frightening existing players into cutting better partnership deals with Apple.
From a quick peek, Apple runs ~25% pre-tax margins. For reference, Ferrari has ~20%, as the highest in the industry. And ~10% or less seems standard.
So in the end, if Apple is more successful than Ferrari at selling vehicles profitably, they'll still be making less money than they're used to on the investment.
That doesn't seem like something investors are going to be willing to let Apple endlessly torch cash in pursuit of, competing against firms with decades of experience, when the alternative is returning it directly to them via dividends, buybacks, etc.
And that's not even getting into the optics of labor-relations with manufacturing that Apple would have to very publicly expose, vs their more hidden technology supply chain.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like the only viable "Apple car" is a limited-volume halo project, built on top of an existing manufacturer's platform -- which would mirror their approach to technology, in many ways.
I agree in the comparison with running communication wires from a capital intensive / regulation standpoint. I also agree that Google probably has similar chops as Apple for pulling something like this off. So the fact that Google essentially failed does speak to the point of Apple's success not being a sure thing.
A couple of things I would say to this, however:
1. Wired connection to home internet wasn't really in a period of disruption when Google entered the Fiber market. Google didn't really have an angle into the market. I think this was more typical Google arrogance driving this than strategic thinking. In this case, I would actually believe the purpose was to influence other players rather than capture meaningful market share with a unique product offering. It's quite an invisible product.
2. Apple doesn't run the business looking for revenue and margins. Apple looks for opportunities to build a substantially different product that fits Apple's values (privacy, safety, security, design, ease of use, etc). Everything about the car as a product experience, including its distribution is in massive transition right now. On a small level we see this with Tesla on the dealership vs direct to consumer model. On a larger scale we see this with ownership model altogether (ride hailing apps vs. the car in your driveway). The car is about to get rebuilt with microprocessors at the core, including machine learning, literally driving the whole experience.
Anyway, this is just a way of saying, we shouldn't take a financial snapshot of the car market today and try to fit Apple's model for success into it. The only reason they are getting into it is because everything about cars is going to change dramatically over the next 10 years.
We'll see. I'm a huge fan of the futurist motto that actual progress, as opposed to expected progress, is driven by difference-from-current. (Maybe from Kurzweil?)
E.g. (1) we don't have flying cars because they're not different enough from street cars to justify their cost, and (2) we do have incredible wireless cell phones because they're fundamentally different than landlines.
"Massive transition" etc. just doesn't ring true.
After transitioning, the car experience won't be fundamentally that different than the current car + ride share experience.
If anything, the future of automobiles seems more likely to lead to lower ownership rates, more commoditization, compressed margins, and a worse market to win.
Apple still has to answer to shareholders, and Tim Cook doesn't have Jobs-levels of trust to trade on.
>and transform "dealer networks" into "maintenance networks".
People tend to overlook just how many service centers are available for the big three (about 10K), not even counting independent garages. Tesla has..500. How many will Apple have? If the Tesla service horror stories are anything to go by, I can only imagine what it would be like for an iCar once production ramps up.
Apple's core focus is Design of consumer electronic appliances. Making complicated technology simple, intuitive, and trouble-free, and hiding the complexities behind the scenes. Technically, an Electric Car fits that description too.
The challenge is that the complexities of an EV are similar, but greater in scale than for consumer electronic devices - more parts, more complex supply chains, more extensive support network (charging stations, maintenance providers).
Whether Apple can scale up to handle those increased complexities, and whether they calculate it's financially worth it for them, I doubt anyone outside Apple can really know at this time.
"In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is because the tech behind it is increasingly getting commoditized (though they work hard to stay slightly ahead). But people love Tesla and it's the first choice EV because they've really thought through the UX of a semi-self driving car EV thoroughly".
No need to theorize at this point. Plenty have pointed out how overinflated Teslas value is at this point. It's pretty much cult of personality that is propping them up at this point. Tesla is actually very similar to Apple in that they "pioneered" a new market and that has created an identity of leadership in that market. I'm not sure Tesla is going to be able to keep up as the competition continues to grow rapidly.
Did you mean second? There actually can be a lot of advantage to being the second mover. Nissan had already sold 100000 units of the Leaf between 2010-2014, while Tesla had sold up to that point only 16k cars. Clearly, Tesla wasn't the first mass-market EV. Indeed, it seems obvious in hindsight that Tesla's success owed mainly to ignoring the mass market and selling very expensive cars at first.
People forget the smartphone market before the iPhone came out. There was actually some pretty decent smartphones that looked like they came from the future. I remember dreaming about being able to buy a Nokia N95 with a touchscreen and pen. It actually wasn't that far off from what an iPhone does. From the N95 wiki:
"The N95's main competitors during its lifetime were the LG Prada, Apple's iPhone, Sony Ericsson's W950i and K850. The N95 managed to outsell its rivals. Despite Apple's much-hyped iPhone with its multi-touch technology, thin design and advanced web capabilities, the N95 had several key features against the iPhone, such as its camera with flash, video camera, Bluetooth file sharing, 3G and 3.5G connectivity, GPS, third-party applications and several other features."
Apple saw what everyone else was doing and triangulated something differentiated on what they know Apple users want. They will do the same thing with this car. It is much better to be Apple than to be Tesla at this point if your goal is to ship 100k's of cars. Most of Apple's target market for a car is still driving german cars. Apple has learned everything it didn't already know from Tesla, and can now execute on what it does know best to win. Tesla is a Nokia N95 that has the stock price of an iPhone. Short TSLA, long AAPL.
Well i guess Tesla means a lot of things nowadays:
- Most advanced Technology in a Car at this moment both battery-wise or SW.
- People are starting cults around Tesla, specially geeks and nerds. Similar to Apple :)
- Tesla means today EV.
Everybody identifies Tesla with the most advanced EV.
You are right, they were probably not the first ones, but the ones easily identifiable as the EV and Car Technology. This is what they have as advantage compared to other EVs.
>Apple Card was perhaps a dipping of the toes moment
Was it really? Dozens of companies have credit cards. Walmart, Uber, Paypal, Venmo, Best Buy, Amazon...it didn't real strike me as big things happening when Apple announced their credit card.
Well, amex is pretty good in features and experience end to end. In comparison, the Uber card was garbage as it's just a badged Barclay Bank card with shitty apps and an awful purchase notification implementation.
But usually the rewards are all anyone cares about, and the Apple Card is decidedly mediocre and pell mell here.
2% back on all purchases made via contactless is pretty decent for someone who doesn't want to think about which card to use at the restaurant vs pharmacy vs grocery store.
I guess more what I was getting at originally myself was Apple opening a credit card didn't strike me as big news of bigger things on the horizon. Given dozens of other companies do the exact same thing, some also doing the 2% back everywhere thing.
It just seemed like a pretty typical thing large companies do these days.
There are many differentiators, but I think the most important one is that there are no fees on the Apple Card, of any kind. Including annual fees, and even including late fees. The app also actively tries to help you not pay interest, as opposed to the usual approach, which is to confuse the consumer so much that they end up paying as much interest as possible.
I still use my Amex most of the time, but Apple's app for paying your card has amazing UX. The bill is presented clearly, the amount of interest you may pay is clear, due dates are always consistent, etc. It's a bunch of small things that add up to a great experience. And there is absolutely no moat, any other bank could copy it, but they haven't yet.
>Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience.
The user experience of many Apple products is notably substandard. Maps, homepod, keyboard, list goes on. What Apple is good at is integration (both horizontal and vertical) and managing user perception through design.
Different take here. I think they should stick to the computer/operating system of a car and either take a large stake in an existing automaker or license the technology to several of them.
Actually _making_ cars is doomed to be a failure. You need a massive workforce and very large factories. It is fairly low margin compared to even computer hardware let alone software. Then they have to support these cars which means you need a massive service network. It really is a bad bad idea.
Making a car with the likes of Magna is just plain stupid. You can’t get any sort of volume to make the car cheaper and get the OS into the hands of millions of drivers.
Here is what they should focus on:
1.) Sensor suite for self driving.
2.) AI computer for self driving.
3.) Main computer and screen(s) for navigation, car controls and games/audio/video apps.
4.) Autonomous software.
Work directly with automakers from the ground up and design the vehicles jointly with them to ensure the systems feel native rather than bolted on.
While I would really like to have in other cars components made by Apple I dont think Apple is a company which sells parts to be integrated by someone else. They like and they are good at having an end to end experience with the enduser.
Also I think they and the market (investors) dont want/expect them to be a part of a supply chain.
I couldn't find anything about this after a brief Google, and the Wikipedia article for Apple Card doesn't say anything about this. Could you provide more information?
> 'In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is'
With all due respect, I would like to articulate and counter your point with some insights.
Tesla as it stands today at ~$600B is priced at monopoly status - that they have 'won' the next decade in transportation and electrification. Whether you buy into that or not, consider the following:
- Tesla is the first (and so far only) company that has successfully been able to produce electric vehicles with positive gross margins at scale. No other competitors have scaled (yet) and EVs made from traditional automakers have been sold thus far at negative gross margins (i.e. each one that leaves the lot costs thousands or more dollars at a loss). While Tesla 'just broke out' as a stock in 2020, starting with large cash-flow generation from their factory in China - they have been working at this for well over 5 years. The real challenge for everyone making EVs is scale, and depending on how you slice it, Tesla is - really, really far ahead regarding their head start. (Model 3 was ANNOUNCED in 2016 and first cars were produced and delivered in 2017. Look at this announcement today end of 2020, and car production in 2024 - not even accounting for scale. This is really hard to do.)
- Your point about commoditized parts is valid in theory. However, as someone in the {renewables} industry who has had many first hand conversations with those buying Li-ion batteries at scale - the little talked about challenge for everyone else in automotive is 'where are you getting your batteries'? Li-ion cell manufacturers are generally broken up into Tier1, Tier2, Tier3 suppliers. From my conversations even pre-pandemic with folks - Tier 1 supplies were already allocated SEVERAL years out. Tier2 supplies are hard to acquire in large volumes as well. That leaves you with 'shitty' Tier3 supplies for which most of those cells are ending up in things like scooters and Energy Storage (not cars). And while some are good, suppliers can be tier 3 either due to small volumes or unreliability (must all be tested, and even still its questionable how many cycles you'll really get). Automakers want Tier 1. Tesla's latest event, 'Battery Day' while 'disappointing' the street and non-industry folks for not announcing some 'Million mile' or other 'groundbreaking technology' is significant because the limitation to Tesla's growth, much like others for making EVs, comes down to batteries. The factories need to be built - and for most of what optimists imagine for a rapidly changing future, many of those shovels have not hit the ground yet on the forward infrastructure. And that isn't even accounting for the fact that it takes at least 1-2 years to get a single cell factory ramped up. And we aren't even talking about the mining capacity (particularly lithium and nickel) that all of these announcements imply already exists.
And back to Tesla's valuation - there is lots of focus on their current valuations assuming they have solved self-driving. There's so much going on with Tesla as a stock (look at Tesla Semi-truck, their Energy Storage businesses for example). And the winks and nods towards launching an uber-like ridesharing service. While I am very skeptical of their ability to have self-driving 'done' in their posted timeframes, I think their value is priced that , whenever it happens - they will be first. So interpret that as you may.
When factoring in the likelihood that they will be the next apple for transportation across personal & commercial transportation for the next 1-2 decades, you can end up at 600B easily. If you are interested in seeing how, just on the driving component - Ark Invest has posted their models if you want to take a deeper read to see if you agree. [1]
And 2 cents on Apple's role & competitive advantages here: They, prior to Tesla were for a while one of the larger single consumers for Li-ion batteries (Macbook, Ipods, iPhones, etc) in electronics. Add in their expertise with battery management and longevity systems (but for systems of a smaller size) combined with their existing supplier relationships & software capabilities, if I had to bet on Apple or one of the existing automotive companies - I'd probably make my bet on Apple purely from a capabilities and competencies perspective.
Tesla seems to be the most sold EV car to date, with more than 650k model 3s shipped so far. That's remarkable, but it's the same magnitude as the second on the list, Nissan Leaf, which has 500k shipped.
There's also more to electric than battery EVs. It was obvious from the start the transition to electric is real but that real scale will start out with hybrid electric for the first decade or two. Any manufacturer serious about scale would want to start in that end because in order to be good, models needs to be designed from the ground up. In comparison, Toyota has shifted 15M Priuses. That's scale.
I think you underestimate some of the existing car makers.
Making cars isn't just a question of R&D, it's a question of being able to manufacture at scale and quality.
This is something that Telsa have really struggled with - as a result the reliability of Tesla cars isn't as good as it should be. Telsa need to really crack this - but it's not as easy as it seems - that's why certain car brands succeed in petrol era, and others didn't - the ability to make them well is what, in the end, separated companies.
Electric cars are fundamentally a lot simpler than try to drive the car forward with a series of controlled explosions - but the key usability challenges are:
- charging times
- range
Progress is being made on both, but if somebody can really crack them, that's the game changer.
I tell everyone I view Tesla as a software company first and that their tech was a decade ahead of other car makers. I think it will still take another 5-8 years for a traditional automotive manfacturer to get close. Apple, they could do it.
Tesla is a Manufacturing company for energy and transportation. It just happens that doing those things well requires you to have 10x better software teams than other companies including older car or even tech companies.
All of that is true, but cars are huge in terms of complexity, the types of labour/supply chains, distribution, etc. etc..
I guess they are the company to 'try it' but really it's a monster bet.
It'd be interesting if they have an 'angle' that allows them to start small, possibly with a specific kind of public transport or closed-system solution for urban transport, with entities like Dubai (i.e. cash flush) buying in big.
> This is starting to make increasingly more sense even though Apple making a car seemed laughable a few years ago.
Which, for what it's worth, is an illustration of how our intuitions about future likelihoods aren't very good. We tend to see as implausible things that are too different from how they are today, overlooking how much things can change in a few years.
Tesla is an electric car company and an energy company, and they are leading both sectors right now. You can say that their market cap should not be greater than Toyota or Ford etc because the number of vehicles they produce is a lot smaller, but the world is going electric (really, renewable) and Tesla is tee-ed up to take large chunks of the solar panel and car markets. They have said they are going to produce a smaller version of a model 3 that costs under 25K USD, which the Europeans will buy in large numbers. They will be the first company to complete FSD also.
My opinion doesn't mean anything, but I think in 2030, Elon Musk will be the richest person in the world by an order of magnitude and Tesla will have the largest market cap in the world
But we can’t ignore Apple’s ability to sway people towards their products. Apple fans treat those products like jewellery and Tesla may not be the premium flagship car that it’s aiming to be after a few years
Apple is no better than Qt in this space - and it will only make electronics - assembly will still be on Ford/GM - Tesla's revolution is a more automated assembly.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. Musk has consistently said their main goal is to become the most advanced manufacturer in the world. Building the machine that builds the machine is what they're aiming for.
Probably because Tesla hasn't had much success in terms of advancement of automated assembly. They went down the same rabbit hole that a few other automakers already explored and discovered what others already did—that high levels of factory automation simply doesn't work. (Yet.)
At best, Tesla factories are currently comparable to the state of the art in terms of car factory automation.
You obviously don't follow Tesla very closely. Sandy Munro of Munro associates has literally called Tesla's engineering "mind blowing" and at least 5 years ahead of any other manufacturer. If you are not familiar, Sandy Munro is one of the leading automotive manufacturing experts, if not the top expert. So I'm going to take his word for it rather than yours.
YOU obviously don't follow Tesla very closely. When the great grandparent said "Tesla's revolution is a more automated assembly", they were flat wrong which is something Elon himself admitted. Tesla tried to go big on automated assembly and failed.
I have watched most all of Sandy's videos; they are orthogonal to assembly automation. The exceptionally impressive things Tesla have done in later revisions of the Model 3/Y (particularly the octovalve and the rear body castings) are related to advanced manufacturing methods which reduce part counts. Not factory automation.
Sandy is very good at styling himself as a premier industry expert—and he's quite likely one of the greatest automotive manufacturing experts on YouTube. But I don't think most serious automotive manufacturing experts are spending much time posting on YouTube...
Tesla didn't invent batteries. They didn't invent electric motors. They didn't invent pretty much anything novel.
They execute superbly, had a brilliant strategy of starting as a luxury vehicle to be the beachhead for getting an economy of scale, and were risk takers, but lets not pretend they invented the market. They didn't.
No doubt they have loads of superficial patents though, but Tesla has an open patent policy and a declaration that they won't sue, so that doesn't seem to matter much.
Apple can buy a company like Magna Int with pocket change. Recall that Magna made the "Sony" electric car, bumper to bumper (Sony put in some screens demonstrating a Sony-esque UI), because that's what Magna does -- they're the maker behind a lot of automobiles, either in part or whole. And Magna has loads of patents around the engineering of vehicles because they've been doing it for decades.
Everybody can buy Tesla cars and stock so there is the rest of the world. That's not very up to date with Musk's tweets and political stance, because of the language and cultural barriers. What they see are cool cars and spaceships, so Musk should be cool, right?
My work-issued mac doesn't turn on outdoors in winter, it overheats and shuts off in direct sunlight in summer. It's software crashes twice a week. The computer turns to garbage in 7 years through obsolesence and general wear.
It is irrepearable and components are impossible to obtain because Apple has punitive contract with suppliers.
This week assebly line workers are burning down the factory in india because of wage theft.
What in the above gives you an impression that the car they build can be trusted with the life of your family?
This fetishising of Apple has to stop, making pretty laptops doesn't mean shit when lives are at stake
While Apple surely has lots of mechanical engineers, Apple doesn’t have the greatest track record of successfully innovating moving components with high lifecycle requirements.
Would you be excited to drive a moving vehicle designed by same company that has class-action lawsuits against many of it’s mechanical innovations: butterfly keyboard, failing screen hinges, bending iPhones, etc
On second thought, maybe Apple doesn’t actually have great mechanical engineering innovation chops.
The Tesla Model 3 already embodies the minimalism, software focus, and vertical integration that have driven Apple's success in the phone market. Right down to the custom SoC and capacitive touchscreen in lieu of buttons. I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be.
Also, 2024 still seems aggressive to deploy self-driving for real.
Having recently sold my Tesla Model 3 I can say there is a lot to be desired with that car. The biggest lesson from Tesla is that cars are not cellphones. Having one display off to the side, without buttons, that does everything is an awful experience in a car. I hope that Apple learns that lesson. I think if they had gone first they might have made that mistake too, but now that it's been tried they can find interesting ways to innovate that don't break the experience.
I also don't think they will try for self-driving out of the gate. I know a good number of the experts in this field and no one thinks full autonomy is ready. The moat that Waymo has built with their particular kind of testing and iteration is diametrically opposed to how companies like Tesla, Lyft, Uber etc have tried to do self-driving. Even they are going to be restricted to the easiest of locals for years.
> Having one display off to the side, without buttons, that does everything is an awful experience in a car
I have to strongly disagree with this. The touchscreen is great for the vast majority of things it replaces. The only physical controls I ever miss are for temperature (which is a very minor complaint) and windshield wipers (though I would also accept auto wipers that actually work). I do think the UI smoothness and touch latency could be slightly improved, and Apple would do better, but Tesla is already so far ahead of every other car manufacturer there that it's not even funny.
Somewhat ironically, the physical controls for the turns signals are by far the worst part of the whole Tesla UI. I've had my Model 3 for over two years now, and I still cannot reliably cancel a turn signal, or "soft push" the signal so it only blinks 3 times. It's infuriating to inadvertently signal left, then right, then left again, as you frantically try to just cancel the turn signal. I'm broadcasting confusion and incompetence to the outside world, when inside the car I know exactly what I'm trying to do.
BMW did this, too, starting with the E90 3 series, if I remember correctly. It's awful, because in almost every car I drive, and especially in BMWs (E92 and the E70 X5 I own now), the steering wheel blocks the top of the speedometer and the turn signals entirely. The "modern" turn signal sounds are too soft to be heard over music, and the switch itself is stateless. I think BMW finally gave up on it for their newer models, but I'm not positive on this.
Both the Tesla and the X5 annoy me when I can't tell the state of the switch by feel. Which is funny, because, IMO, BMW has some of the best-feeling and best-weighted stalks in the business. It sounds silly, but I positively LOVE the way engagement on the steering wheels stalks feel on my X5, and every other BMW I've owned or driven.
You can try adjusting the height of the steering wheel? I run into the same issue in my E90 335d, but it's by choice as it's where I like the steering wheel to sit in relation to my seat position.
Very much agreed on the feeling and weight of the stalks. By far the best in the business. Especially for knowing the difference between a lane change vs. turn signal
Yeah that's exactly it. I run the wheel as low as it goes, it would have to be really high for the whole cluster to be visible. Thankfully I have the HUD which I use for speed, but it does not show turn signal indicators.
I have a Z3M where I can see all the instruments perfectly, but that's just because the steering wheel is fixed and much higher than I'd like.
I give the "worst" award to the wiper controls, but I do dislike the mushy feel of the control stalks and the way turn signal cancellation works. Last time I drove a BMW I recall it working similarly though, so maybe it's just the style now?
Perhaps it is just a defect in my hardware, but on mine it is nearly impossible to reliably "soft" press in either direction. Every motion either registers as nothing or hard press.
What kills me are the wipers. During the dry season I forget about them, and then winter hits and I dread driving my car. Why oh why could Tesla not just use an off-the-shelf IR sensor like every other premium car? FFS, trying to use cameras to detect rain is a disaster.
I agree, the turn signals suck. Though interestingly I don't have the same problem you have. What gets me is that the detent between the momentary switch and the full signal is stiff enough that I somewhat regularly inadvertently flash oncoming traffic when activating the turn signal. Because the pull resistance on that stalk is much lower than the pressure required to overcome the signal detent.
As a counterpoint, I absolutely love the turn signals in my Model 3. I always thought BMW had the best turn signals (which are functionally identical to Tesla's), and was thrilled to see that Tesla took the same approach.
Man I don’t drive with a passenger enough to care about ui animations on my car. I just want to set the fan speed and move on... preferably without looking.
Fan isn’t that bad because you can change it when it’s safe to do so. Changing the windshield wiper speed because you can barely see is my biggest issue. I always forget which way to swipe while trying focus on seeing out the window. It was worse when auto wipers feature just didn’t work and now it kinda works.
> How well does voice control handle outside noise? Torrential downpours, sleet/hail?
The Model 3 at least is remarkably quiet; hard rain and street noise and dampened a lot. To the point where we felt it was almost eerie the first time we took it home. Voice recognition has been perfect in all conditions.
I suppose it’s personal preference but the touchscreen is probably the single biggest factor why I didn’t buy a Tesla recently. I think it will be great when self driving works, but for driving it’s hard to try to touch parts of a flat screen.
Here’s an example of various controls I fiddle with while driving: temperature control through a little knob that sticks out; Heated seats through a button with sight curve around borders; Apple CarPlay through a knob.
There’s also no heads up display to present speed and nav onto the windshield.
All these things are good for me to look at the road and not have to precisely touch something with at least a few seconds of focus.
I have friends who love their Tesla and love the touch screen so it may just be my control style that doesn’t work.
You can only "activate" them to wipe a single time with the button on the stalk. Not useful in rain unless you like pressing a button every three seconds for the entire time you're driving.
> The biggest lesson from Tesla is that cars are not cellphones. Having one display off to the side, without buttons, that does everything is an awful experience in a car.
This is both the most functional and most beautiful design choice I've ever experienced. My favorite part of my Model 3. You quickly come to realize that voice control does everything and that you should never have to reach for a button or fiddle with climate controls, etc.
Tesla realized what all other car manufacturers failed to see, you don't need physical buttons because you don't need buttons of any kind. I'm never buying another antiquated car with physical buttons again.
And I view the voice command thing as a thing to be avoided in most or all cases. I simply don’t want to talk to electronics. The privacy implications alone scare me away. No thanks.
> I simply don’t want to talk to electronics. The privacy implications alone scare me away. No thanks.
I think you should consider the tradeoffs here.
Practical safety on the road today, where I don't die because I'm fiddling with buttons, trumps theoretical unmeasurable fearmongering about vague privacy concerns. The reality is that if Tesla were to record every command I ever give the car and post them online against my will, no one will not learn much about me aside how aggressive I want the windshield wipers to be and that I enjoy having a warm butt when I drive.
> The reality is that if Tesla were to record every command I ever give the car and post them online against my will
The way echo speakers are implemented is that the device only determines if you used the wake word and then sends it to the cloud service. However this wake word detection is sloppy and turns on more often than it should. It's filtered out on the cloud service side, but it creates a situation where extremely private moments are uploaded. For end users this means that you can't be certain when it's recording vs when it isn't....
IDK how it's implemented in cars, but the STT features I've seen require the explicit press of a button and IIRC it's inferenced locally on the car's hardware. Which is possible thanks to the car's high energy usage and price. But it might depend on implementation and it might send telemetry back to the manufacturer.
how well do voice commands work if there is loud music playing? what about when you are having a conversation with someone and you are the person talking? having to stop mid sentence to demist your windows or whatever sounds annoying
Yes, a car that can slow down to avoid collisions is a form of safety. Seatbelts are another form. A car that does various things to avoid driver distraction is another form of safety. Just because you can think of a more immediate safety system does not make other increases to safety in some way "not practical" or "not real increases".
There are many things, small and large, that go into practical safety of a car
Safety is engineered, it's not about throwing as many devices you can to a car hoping that something sticks and improve safety by chance.
Safety belts work even if I am unconscious, a car that slows down works even if I am unconscious, airbags work even if I am unconscious, so they are 100% safety devices, as in "they keep me safe when everything else failed and things are already out of my control".
Hands-free calls are a safety feature because they are designed to eliminate the distraction of operating a phone.
But they are a workaround, the real safety feature is "operating a phone while driving is prohibited by the law" because the simple act of talking is a distraction.
Voice commands are a workaround because the real safety feature is "touch screens are a distraction and you shouldn't use them while driving"
If we remove touch screens from cars, there is no need for voice commands.
Most of the sources of distraction in modern cars are caused by functions that do not belong to cars and are hard to operate.
I work for a large insurance company based in Europe whose primary business is car insurance (>10 million clients).
We launched a two-year program to monitor the distractions of our customers (we especially monitored the phone's activity, thinking it was a major issue) and the primary sources of distraction while driving are (in reverse order of importance)
- adjusting settings or operating car controls: less than 1%
- eating or drinking: 2-3%
- reaching for things: 2-3%
- talking: 4-5%
- multitasking: 5%
- looking at the GPS display: 10%
- texting and driving: 10%
- using a smartphone: 15%
- not looking at the road for too long: ~50%
there are subcategories for each one of the macro-categories above.
For example:
Adjusting car settings like mirrors, seats, the heater is basically risk-free, more than half of the distractions in this category are caused by adjusting the audio volume. It makes sense, muscle memory for settings helps us to not think too much when doing it. Regulating the audio volume usually follows some unexpected event that forces us to change it. Still only 1/200 distractions are caused by it.
Eating or drinking is mostly eating here, I guess in the USA it would be the opposite. Bringing hot beverages inside the car is quite common there, here is quite rare. People spill the coke on their shirts or choke on the water anyway. It is also very common to frequently stop at motorway restaurants here to eat, drink, use the toilets, rest a little bit and eventually refuel. It helps to keep this kind of distractions to a minimum.
Reaching for things is less dangerous when the driver picks up things from the driver's or the passenger's seat, opening the glove compartment is two times as dangerous, picking up something from the pedals area is the most dangerous of them all.
Talking is interesting because there's no difference between people talking with other occupants and people talking on the phone. What's less interesting and probably obvious is that 8/10 happen when people are arguing. But 2/10 are people talking normally like they would to a car to activate the wiper.
Multitasking is when people do other things unrelated to driving the car itself. For example, handling pets is more dangerous than applying makeup that is more dangerous than handling children. The good news is when people carry kids around they drive more carefully.
The GPS display is a major source of distraction, no matter what voice people chose to give them directions, the tendency to not trust other people's instructions makes people look at the screen to confirm what they heard. Also, there are times, not rare, when the instructions are not clear or haven't been updated to the actual road conditions (a roadblock for example.
Despite the technological improvements, texting and driving is still very popular, especially among younger generations. More importantly, we counted using chat apps in this category and it's not surprisingly the vast majority of the cases.
Using a smartphone is an interesting one: while the "phone" part of the smartphone has been standardized and is easy to remote nowadays, most of the time people use the "smart" part of the smartphone, which cannot be remoted. They scroll the Instagram feed, they take pictures, make videos, and, despite having the freehands at their disposal, people prefer to send voice messages. Which involves removing your hands from the wheel.
Did you notice how many times talking and/or hearing voices caused a distraction?
But the most important of them all is not looking at the road. It sounds obvious once you hear it, but it happens a lot more than people think, 100 times more than turning the volume up or down. It could be an external event like an accident, an emergency vehicle passing by, a fire, or something that attracted the driver's attention like a billboard or a beautiful person walking on the sidewalk - it happens more often than you can imagine -. These are the "good" ones, often they don't last enough to cause severe accidents and people just end up rear-ending each other at the traffic lights. The real killer is being lost in one's thoughts, zoning out, keep driving on autopilot while you are not there anymore, and don't realize you are still in a car moving at 50km/h.
That's how accidents happen most of the time.
That's why I think that cars that slow down automatically or correct your errors are a breakthrough, they already exist on the market, have no voice control but they can alert you with a warning sound if they detect that you are distracted behind the wheel.
A car that adjusts the temperature of the heather using voice commands is not equally useful, I would argue that is completely useless unless fixing the temperature in the car will become a dangerous activity in the future, but honestly, I don't see that happening very soon.
So yes, small things are important, but BIG things are even more important.
Let's fix those before thinking that cars need UI/UX designers more than safety engineers.
Before "disrupting" the car industry for the sake of changing things and adding the cool factor to something that doesn't really need it.
p.s.: My opinion is based on the experience gathered doing my job, I'm not against voice commands because I don't like them, but because they can be a source of distraction per sé.
p.p.s.: it took me time to put this together, so please if you don't like it don't downvote it without leaving a comment. Thanks.
> So yes, small things are important, but BIG things are even more important.
Totally agree.
> Let's fix those before thinking that cars need UI/UX designers more than safety engineers.
"Let's fix big things before we even think about fixing small things". Which is silly. We can try to improve multiple things at once. We can improve easy small hanging fruit before we improve harder things. This is a false dichotomy I think.
Anyway, all tesla vehicles already have automatic emergency braking, so I don't really understand why you went on such a long rant to argue for adding that instead of voice commands. The car under discussion has both, which seems better than having just one or the other.
> Which is silly. We can try to improve multiple things at once.
Which is naif.
There is a limited amount of time and resources that a company can spend on features , prioritizing big things is always the sensible choice.
In the specific case of cars, they can't be patched after reaching the market and usually a recall is issued only after something serious has already happened.
Thake the example linked below that made the front page:
A Tesla car speeds on autopilot when both seats are reclined in sleep mode.
Tesla overlooked safety to provide useless features.
If they had put big things first, the car would completely stop if the driver seat is being used as a bunk bed.
And why the autopilot can go over the limits?
They didn't think about it, because the amount of time engineers can spend debugging issues and QA finding problems is limited.
(someone in the comment wrote «Teslas often “shadow brake” when driving under overpasses or overhead signs because the radar system gets confused.»)
Just so you know, the way you talk to a tesla is via a physical button on the steering wheel.
When you press it, music pauses/dims, so loud music isn't going to get in the way of you being heard. Kids can't just yell "car, do X" because they can't hit the button on the steering wheel.
There are valid reasons to dislike voice-controls, but the ones you've picked are not issues with the specific system in question.
You realize that with the drive-by-wire systems in (most) modern cars, when you press the accelerator, you are sending an electronic message that "asks" a computer to increase the speed of the car - there's no mechanical linkage from the pedal to a carburetor and/or fuel pump, right?
Similarly in many cases with windshield wipers, headlights, windows, temperature controls, etc.
Ask yourself why Tesla didn't introduce drive by voice, but still relies on your foot to do the right thing...
Drive by wire systems are simply not completely mechanical anymore, but you don't have to ask them to do something for you, they translate a mechanical input into an electric signal and then in a mechanical output.
There is no understanding involved.
I hope you realize that.
Th gas pedal is still a moderately precise mechanical actuator that can be easily and accurately measured regardless of who uses it, you can also use a stick or a brick to accelerate, the car doesn't care as long as you move the pedal.
The fact that everything is on the center display is the biggest reason keeping me from seriously considering buying a Tesla. Distractions don't belong in a car.
> I think if they had gone first they might have made that mistake too, but now that it's been tried they can find interesting ways to innovate that don't break the experience.
I’m just hoping that they don’t relegate a lot of stuff like climate control to a Siri-only interface.
I think they should prioritise physical controls for stuff you use regularly and I'd be happy to have voice on controls for stuff I use very infrequently.
Like putting the rear window wiper on, barely use it and half the time I accidentality turn it on (or someone else using the car does) and I have no clue how to get it off again. Just saying "siri clean the rear window" or "turn the rear window wiper off" would honestly just be easier.
I disagree with your assessment of the one screen driving experience. First and foremost the use of the screen is incidental to driving. Just the normal eye travel one has when checking the mirrors is more than sufficient to pick up your speed and outside of that the glance time is insignificant.
If you really want to make this fun, you don't even need to know as you can use traffic aware cruise control, a feature many cars have, to set and forget your speed on any road.
I have two issues with the UI/Human interface that Telsa has followed. First, their automatic wiper solution is dreadful and while you can instant a wipe action by pressing the button on the end of the stalk I believe the variable rate should be available on the stalk.
The second is that I think the steering wheel would be better served with buttons dedicated to cell phone use, namely accept, ignore, mute, and hangup.
However it should be noted the cars voice controls respond very well and you can easily change the temperature should you want that way, there are a lot of settings easily changed by voice but Tesla does not alert you to them.
The best way to grade their UI though is that I can muscle memory activate many features including one level down options. Of course you can just let the car drive and play with the screen all you want, something I have done to prove a point but the simple fact is...
I rarely if ever, as in nearly never, need to access anything through the screen as its all set and forget. Now I get into other cars and think, damn this has enough buttons and screens to be an airliner.
It won't be but a generation before we look back and wonder how anyone though six gauges, forty buttons, and three or more levers, were ease of operation, Not all cars will be as simple as a Tesla but the age of forty buttons is going away.
(Seriously, count how many buttons are in your car - then try to remember how often you use them)
This sounds like something someone would write when they are young and don’t have issues with focusing near and far. Having speed off to the side is terrible. End. Stop.
You can't focus on the display but you can focus on your instrument cluster in your dashboard? They're pretty close to the same distance away in most cars. If you have trouble changing focus then what you need is a HUD, not a traditional instrument cluster.
My G37x has one button per car function, as it should be. Perfect tactile feedback, non-modal, always there. You want it to do a thing, you push the button.
> The moat that Waymo has built with their particular kind of testing and iteration is diametrically opposed to how companies like Tesla, Lyft, Uber etc have tried to do self-driving. Even they are going to be restricted to the easiest of locals for years.
Nobody has figured it out out yet, and a 'moat' for a market that is basically impossible to a big money-maker is not a 'moat' at all.
The quest for self driving is not the same as the quest for the first commercial deployment. Solving general self-driving is the real quest.
And I don't trust any experts to predict this correctly, as nobody knows yet what the solution actually is. Some experts say one thing, others say other things.
I was under the impression that Lyft wasn't building self-driving in house and was instead partnering with Waymo. It looks like they do have in house self driving:
https://self-driving.lyft.com/level5/
I also know that both Alphabet and GM have large stakes in Lyft. I bought stock in Lyft with the expectation that they will one day be acquired by one of their partners.
Apple's been reasonably good with the buttons they do make, like the crown on both the watch and their new headphones. Also, a dedicated silence switch on the phone is something not every manufacturer thinks is important.
I do like tesla, but I strongly agree about the display.
I test drove a model 3 and ... couldn't buy one because of the dash.
I think there should be - always - status in line of sight of the driver.
The model 3 dashboard in the center of the car is just a bunch of bathwater with no baby.
Some people won't care. I've had friends say they got used to it.
I can... almost... think of it like an off-road motorcycle with a handlebar and no instruments.
But personally I couldn't buy in.
Related, I think the controls on the model 3 have also been over-minimized. The scroll wheels have the feel of a $3 computer mouse, and autopilot overloaded on the gear selector is cheap, not elegant.
Still, Marco has been complaining[0] about the lack of a separate play/pause/skip button that's not integrated into the digital crown. The solution Apple chose is (a) a bit finnicky (b) makes you unintentionally change the volume while doing other actions.
I know I am not alone in this, but I absolutely cannot stand touch screens in cars, and would like for this trend to reverse. It is hard to navigate without physically looking at the screen, which is a huge safety hazard while driving.
For some things, like navigation and settings, I absolutely love a touch screen. For other things, like wiper control in the Model 3, I definitely do not like it and it is worse.
I think this might just come down to personal preference. After owning a Model 3 for a while now, I can't stand my Audi (or other cars) that aren't touch screens. There are far too many buttons and dials. It is overwhelming (and ugly to me). The non-touch UIs are clunky and confusing and often far more distracting for me as I try to figure them out.
>I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be.
There's room for more than one car company like this. If Apple brings high quality, tight fit and finish, elegant design, software focus, vertical integration (including their new M1 processor tech), logistics support (charging station network, maintenance, etc), and "next-level batteries" to the mix, then I'm sure they'll find space in the market.
If Apple can execute with electric cars as they've executed with consumer electronics, then they'll be competing not just with Tesla, but directly with Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.
The processor tech isn't going to do much for cars. They could get by with something cheaper no doubt. I don't think anyone really cares about clock speed or processor efficiency in a car because you're not really doing anything that last decades' processors couldn't handle (especially with less bloated code bases). Maybe face recognition + key fob presence to authenticate and start the car.
I don't know if Apple's quality is going to translate to cars either unless they poach a bunch of people. Safety features will compromise the quality at some point, but maybe they're good enough to work around it elegantly.
Plus people paid a premium for Apple's quality, but are they willing to do so when that premium is multiple thousands of dollars extra for a car? They could afford low/zero cost financing if they wanted to.
An EV that just works that appeals to the luxury buyer.
Tesla is still far from that. I've yet to meet a tesla owner who's car just "Works" without any issues or fiddling.
GM's & Nissan's EVs fit that bucket. But they are designed as "buget" cars and dont evoke a desire from buyers to be excited about them on a day-to-day basis.
>logistics support (charging station network, maintenance, etc)
Honestly, if Apple bought out the existing non-Tesla charging networks and dedicated even a sliver of their UX talent to improving the charging experience, they would really push things forward. This is, of course, assuming that buying the charging networks would make it past the anti-trust people.
> I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be.
In the car market, being a different brand is a differentiator. Ferrari, McLaren, Bugatti, Lamborghini, and Porsche don't offer vastly different products. But the car market is heavily driven by people wanting something different from their friends. Once Teslas become popular enough, people will want something else just to be different.
Bugatti and Porsche are about as far away as Porsche and Tata. There are more differences between cars in terms of unique tech than there are between Apple and Android phones today. I don’t agree with this at all.
Apple build quality has nothing special in the absolute. It's just that most of the phones or laptops of tons of manufacturers have cheap plastic body. But there are also plenty of less cheap but really nice products from other brands, and there are plenty of consumer electronics devices that have nice mechanical build quality. You can even easily found really cheap objects, compared to premium phones or laptops, with a nice build quality. You don't see that often for computers and phones because low cost models are low margin and the market for a nice mechanical design but otherwise low end specs is too small.
Instruct an engineer to design something that is not crap and they will do it, and it will be mass produced with tight tolerance if specified like that. On the manufacturing side... Apple does not manufacture anyway.
And that brings me to: a car is not exactly the same thing as your small household appliance. Like we saw with Tesla, it is not trivial to do with a good build quality, both on the design front and on the build front (way more difficult than small and mostly static objects) -- and it is harder to reject a car with a not stellar build quality because that's more expensive and a huge part of the value is in the mechanics. And quite related: for now Apple does not manufacture, if they start to do cars, will they? Otherwise who will?
Tolerances and build quality weren't the problem with the butterfly keyboard. It was just a fundamentally flawed design that was not durable enough for real world use.
I can't imagine that it didn't stand up to very extensive lab testing, before getting approved for mass production across Apple's laptops. It would be very interesting to hear some inside accounts about what went wrong there. I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that the mass-produced parts didn't quite measure up to the prototypes, whether because of less consistent materials, part manufacturing defects, slightly off assembly, ....
To be fair to the designers, the height budget they were working with is an extremely hard target to hit for a part that gets as much physical abuse as a keyboard. I was pretty impressed with how passable the keyboard was for typing on, given the height constraint. (However, I was not impressed with the dropped actuations, double actuations, inconsistent key feel after a few months use, broken keycap that my 1-year-old keeps removing and hiding around the house, etc. Overall it ended up being a catastrophically bad design based on poor reliability.)
The biggest problem at company scale was that they couldn't revert to something like their previous keyboard in a shorter time frame. The lesson is to avoid completely locking the whole rest of the system design around a brand new untested part for which there is no alternative. It would have been better to test the new keyboard design in a context like an external iPad keyboard where if it turned out to be a dud there would be an obvious path to an alternative, and customers wouldn't be left with a broken $2000 machine.
I think their lab testing did not include dusty home, outdoor and food crumb simulations that the real world has, probably fairly clean factories with high amounts of ventilation sucking out all the dust with robot fingers doing fatigue tests.
What was even worse was the usual Apple cycle of deny there's an issue, begrudgingly acknowledge that it "may" be an issue, and then tout a new, improved version that fixed things and resolved the problem (and then didn't - how many iterations of the butterfly are we on now?).
They got through at least 3 versions of the butterfly design, and kept using it from early 2015 through late 2019, before finally switching to a new (thinner than pre-2015, but still substantially thicker than the butterfly switch) rubber dome scissor design.
It would have been much better if they had figured out how to cut their losses and revert the keyboards in 2016 or early 2017, even though that would have taken a substantial redesign of the rest of the laptop internals.
Selling 4.5 years of laptops with keyboards that broke easily under ordinary use was a huge black eye for the company.
I was well aware of scissor keyboards. I owned a 16" MBP.
Given that Apple is still selling, or has only just stopped selling models with the latest butterfly keyboard - the issue may have solution, but hasn't gone away. Millions of laptops have faulty keyboards which, when they break, will be replaced with another faulty keyboard. That's an unresolved issue.
A big differentiator will obviously just be the apple brand. There's going to be a huge number of people who just want to be seen driving around in an apple-branded car. And a lot of those people are currently tesla fans
It's not enough to have the best hardware, software, and vertical integration. You also have to know when to apply it and when not to. A capacitive touch screen makes for a terrible driving experience. Apple doesn't simply add touch to every product it can. Note how the Airpods Max have a huge surface that looks almost like a Magic Mouse, but volume is controlled by the tactile Digital Crown instead. I expect Apple to make better choices than Tesla overall.
If fully autonomous AI driving can be done, it will be the service on top that will drive difference. Like houses, what accommodations does it have. Sort of like air travels economy, business, first etc. The hp of the car won’t matter as much anymore.
> I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be.
I bet they support CarPlay, at least :). I have CarPlay on all my cars excdept for my Tesla, and it still annoys me. I won't buy another Tesla that doesn't support it.
Utilizing the knowledge they've learned in the last 10 years, by developing their own SoC, their machine learning efforts, and integrating their product ecosystem into a vehicle could be a pretty big differentiator.
Well Apple is known for its QA, and Tesla is known for its lack of QA. In general, Tesla fans want the latest bleeding edge technology, while Apple fans generally want something that "just works".
It's funny because it's true. The door handles are among my least favorite parts of the Model 3, along with the control stalks on the steering wheel (both their mushy feel and lack of physical wiper controls combined with the crappiness of the auto wipers). Apple could certainly improve on those, although Tesla does have better handles on their other cars already including fully automatic doors on the Model X.
> I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be.
Really? Why are you not curious what the differentiator of all the car companies out there is? Why don't we just have one car company?
(Hint: There is so much demand, so many different tastes, budgets and features and regulation, that a single company will never serve all of them. Tesla is a niche product and I for one would never buy one)
The iPhone was special in the regard that there simply was NO competition. We are not talking EV vs combustion (which was Tesla's main step, and even still, everyone knew EVs would work and how they work, but nobody was ready to fully commit to them yet). We are talking horses vs. cars. Apple managed to establish themselves in a market that most companies didn't even think exist...
So no comparison here. All Tesla has done is make EVs more approachable and "cool" for the masses. However they have literally ZERO differentiator compared to established car companies. They are going to tank so hard stock wise in the next 10 years that investors will wonder what hit them.
I'm not curious about other car companies because their products are on the market already and their differentiators are well known by everyone...
> they have literally ZERO differentiator compared to established car companies. They are going to tank so hard stock wise
Their stock is insanely overvalued, no argument there. But they have one of the largest installed and fastest growing DC charging networks, software that doesn't suck, and the most capable and fastest improving driver assist system enabled by a proprietary custom ASIC. That's far from "ZERO" differentiators, especially in a world where other manufacturers keep faceplanting on their software efforts over and over again.
Also, incredibly well-integrated battery packs, a reliable source of batteries (at the volume they need), and various other ventures to amortize their EV-related costs over (e.g. Tesla Energy).
Perhaps Tesla is the Blackberry of the car industry, waiting for Apple to show people what they've actually been waiting for in personal transportation. :P
Would Apple be required to make their car parts interchangeable with the generic aftermarket brands and car service centers? IIRC there is a law specifically for car manufacturing.
I can imagine a dystopian future with custom non-standard parts, specialist repair centers, restrictions on what you can do with it, Apple being able to track everywhere we go, what we listen to, who is with us, and establishing a network of devices that work together but not with other brands. And that's just their phones, imagine their cars!
I mean, a lot of the recent right-to-repair controversy in the US has been centered around farmers, and their ongoing battles against machine producers / makers like John Deere.
The gist is that you can't do jack sh!t on a modern John Deere, because all the software involved to diagnose/modify/operate their machines are strictly proprietary, and only available to the company, or authorized dealers and repair shops.
Here's how this could work with personal cars:
Let's say you purchase a Apple Car, and after a month the low washer fluid message starts flashing. Not only does it flash, but every 10 minutes or so it interferes with your whole media system, with some voice stating that you need to fill up on washer fluid.
Turns out your washer fluid level is actually OK, seems to be some sensor error, or bug in the software.
Problem is - you can't touch the car, mechanically or the software. Any modifications will essentially brick the car.
Only way to get this error fixed, is to bring the car to some Apple repair shop, where a tech will fix the problem in 30 seconds, and bill you $1000 for the work.
Other than the bricking part, that's the kind of stuff farmers are experiencing with quite expensive machines.
The John Deere example is so bad it almost seems manufactured to push out small farmers. It seems like the opposite of a system that claims to be about markets leading to efficiency.
Easy. Most important parts are chipped and are coded to only work with each other. Without the private keys you can't make any other genuine part from another Apple car to work in your car.
Taking your car today to a factory dealer or authorized shop for repairs and servicing is akin to a walled garden. They would use factory parts and factory pricing.
There are lots of reasons why you might want to stay inside the walled garden. The higher the value of the car, the stronger they become.
Actually, most equipment in a modern BMW is keyed to that particular vehicle and cannot be replaced without a visit to the dealer. Everything from the seats, to the radio, to the headlights are all on a CAN bus and have to be coded to that specific car before they will work.
Try taking your non-Tesla EV to a Tesla DC charging station, or vice versa. They've finally announced a CCS1 adapter for the Korean market, but there's nothing for the US yet.
I mean it's an interesting point. Tesla made their own charging plug because they didn't like J1772, who's to say Apple wouldn't do the same? It's the one part of Apple's track record I don't think anyone can possibly argue against.
If the landscape is dotted with three types of chargers, two of which are mutually incompatible, what does that mean for consumers and range?
That's a polite interpretation. I assume the real reason is they wanted to create a walled garden. Seems like the EU, at least, forced their hand on that one.
Apple has been in and out of the car game for a few years now, with executives coming and going. What I'm about to say will be as meaningful as this hear-say article, but I feel that Apple management, and its shareholders, have no idea what it means to build a car. Things like this need 100% commitment from the management, Cook just doesn't seem like the guy to do it.
> but I feel that Apple management, and its shareholders, have no idea what it means to build a car
I feel like people pretend that building a car is way harder than it actually is in 2020.
All the components to build a car are readily available. A person can buy the parts on their own and put them together in their garage. It isn't like they have to go get a pick axe and start mining ore to create everything from scratch. Apple just needs to buy the components that already work, and then do what they do best and perfect that parts that haven't been perfected. In this case, the battery, the motor, the onboard computer, and the software. And based off what Apple has built in the past, these are the things that Apple would be REALLY good at.
It isn't like they have to invent tires and drive shafts.
I know I undersold the difficulty of making a car in this comment, but come one, Apple is 87 times more valuable than Ford. They have enough cash on hand to buy Ford 5 times. Money might not solve all problems, but it really really helps.
I work for a tier 1 EV supplier, I've spent 2 months in Hyundai's Namyang R&D center, several weeks at Aston Martin's facilities, and some others, you undersold it by A LOT. Ford, GM and other veterans on the industry have long lost their original spirit, just like any other company, but what they have is established processes and supply chain management, and that takes decades to do right. You can ship a 1st gen iPhone without a working camera, vehicle recalls hit you much harder.
Elon Musk, the guy responsible for sending humans to the space station, a feat that has only been matched by the largest governments, stated that building modern auto manufacturing is harder than building rockets.
Why would you think Apple is capable of building rockets? They have essentially zero aerospace expertise and that type of engineering is not at all in their DNA. Sure, they have billions of dollars to burn so it's within the realm of possibility, but it would be a very inefficient use of their cash.
Sure... but SpaceEx is a company with laser engineering focus on essentially one goal for the last two decades, and they're only recently gaining traction on their ambitions, Apple would have an extremely steep curve to ascend before they could even hope to enter the "crash a bunch of rockets for research" phase. Apple just isn't built for this type of engineering.
Yup. Apple is closer to Ford and GM than it is to Tesla. Tesla is highly vertically integrated, and probably moving more so. Apple is much less vertically integrated. They design their products, but all their manufacturing is like others -- kinda like Ford and GM.
Which one? I mean, even a Tesla has over 40 computers on the CAN bus. Cars may look simple when they just have a touchscreen interface, but they're really a small network of computers that can be driven. Engineering, and then building a car is really hard. Tesla has proven an upstart can do it, but they've been at it almost 20 years and Musk himself says it is very hard to build cars.
I'm sure Apple can do it if they put the resources in, but they're less than 1000 people deep at this point. 1000 people is a small department working on something you've never heard of at a large automaker. I don't even mean top secret stuff, I just mean day-to-day shit that most people don't think about, like drafting repair routines for each possible thing that can go wrong that someone in the field needs to fix in a timely manner. You take your car into get repaired and only 2-3 people may touch it, but that's nothing compared to the hundreds of people that worked on the information and software that those 2-3 people used to fix your car.
Not to mention the different software that is running in all of the 40+ computers in the car... or the hardware and software that's used to communicate with/diagnose problems with/update those computers.
Even after the car is engineered, it takes over a year to then engineer all of the tooling, equipment and processes that will be used to mass produce that car, put that tooling in place, configure it, test it, train people to use it, etc.
Modern cars are marvelous machines, and there's a nearly unbelievable amount of effort that goes into designing, building and repairing them.
Building one car and building millions of car is not the same thing. Car production, distribution and servicing is a totally different very localized problem.
Apple can do it if they really want do, but lets not pretend it is easy.
That's one way of interpreting it. I would venture that their public dabbling is indicative that that they do understand what it means to build a car, in the sense that car manufacturing shouldn't be underestimated.
Going all-in on something like this when you're not ready is just a waste of capital and nobody wants to be the next Fisker. Historically speaking, Apple has usually made sure all their ducks are in a row before launching something, whether it's going into processor design, audio, or launching a credit card. There's quite a bit of chess pieces that were put into position first, and a lot of that was done via hiring, acquisitions, and partnerships. That should demonstrate that Apple has gotten into other industries regardless of how much management or shareholders previously understood the problem. In other words, they seem to understand when they don't understand.
With BMW declining to be a partner all those years ago (allegedly), it makes sense to me that they would put their plans on the back burner. I'm still skeptical that they can (or want to) do this without a major manufacturing partner, but we'll see. Or, given how conservative they seem to be with their capital, maybe we never will. The AirPods Max project allegedly started 4 years ago, and those are just headphones.
I think Apple is one company I would trust with entering other verticals especially in the hardware space. While phones!=cars, I wouldn't put it beyond their team to deliver on this.
One could look to Apple's tv show catalogue as an example of them entering a new industry without much experience. They don't really have expertise in it, and it's probably suffering as a result. But then, they also have a ton of money to burn on it, so it's not without its merits. I think this will be very hard for them to do, and I think they'll look like they're making dumb mistakes for a while. But if they really want to go this way, they'll probably succeed in some form.
I don't disagree with you assessment. I feel like he could be able to forge a solid partnership with Ford as the move into the EV space. Also with Ford's(F) market cap of $34.89B Apple could vary easily just buy them outright if things go well.
It seems like such an utterly different business. It seems as if there are so many more natural extensions in consumer hardware and software tech (as well as many not yet imagined). And I agree with your basic point that this is something that they'd almost have to set up as a separate company. And then you have to ask: "Does a well-funded EV startup sound like a smart business plan?" Maybe it does but it wouldn't be my first choice.
I think most of all this shows how serious they are about the project that they keep pushing it despite potential setbacks. I don't think it says anything about the ability to build "a car" but rather, that they are still experimenting with finding the right product. Apple doesn't release a product until they think it is "right".
Just did a quick check. Apple can buy GM AND Ford with cash, and still have nearly half their reserve left over. $191.83 billion cash on hand end of October[0], GM is 59B market cap[1], and Ford is $35B market cap.
I guess there is a premium you pay when acquiring a public company, but still astounding numbers.
Do you have any reasons for this? Or thoughts on other car companies to buy. Apple does, after all, have enough cash to buy any car company besides Toyota (barely) and Tesla.
why? they have the experience manufacturing huge numbers of vehicles and apple has the experience manufacturing products with good experience and build quality. Get gm to build the drivetrain and the body to apple spec, apple builds the interior themselves.
Why does Apple want the UAW contracts that come with any of the Big 3?
Tesla showed the preferable model (from the corporate perspective). Buy the factory (NUMMI), hire some of the ex-UAW workers, and go from there. They don't need the whole hog.
Plus if Apple really wants GM drivetrains, they can just buy crates them. GM's not going to turn down sales of any kind in this climate.
They do have all the the ingredients, but they have a ton of financial baggage. Apple won't buy an automaker to manufacture cars, they'll contract it out for sure, the same way they do with the rest of their hardware.
Electric cars are really simple to make (Apple doesn't need the help). GM is a legacy business with a legacy business model selling dozens of indistinguishable cars via multiple competing dealerships. Its both terrible for customers and not compatible with Apple. The reason GM is priced so low is because its half obligations and dead weight. I would not personally want to bail out the doubtlessly billions of dollars of unfunded pension obligations of GM as an investment (ie, why should apple pay for the people who last worked at GM a decade ago?). Cleaning up that mess would take serious, distracting, decade long effort if its even possible.
Apple should poach the best employees from the industry, not the companies. They could probably straight up double everyone's salary and still pay less than SV engineers. I'd also look to buy out some manufacturers in the supply chain.
Classic Apple. They dabble in various things for years until the moment is right to strike with a version 2.0 of something that others already make. Apple rarely enters the market with something that nobody has ever seen before.
Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone, and iPod... These were not the first products in their category, but they were the first to get the category truly right. This being said, I have no idea what Apple will get right about cars that others have not. But that’s the point, isn’t it. We never know ahead of time. There will just be a launch and then everything will change.
> This being said, I have no idea what Apple will get right about cars that others have not.
To the smug 2026 posters who link this thread to laugh at us: my prediction is Apple ships a clean, simplified no-frills electric car 2.0 _subscription_.
I realize that a car subscription is sorta-kinda leasing but I really wish that that there was a proper subscription car service.
I’m in the hook for gas/charging, taking it to you for service or a swap at your request, and personal liability insurance. You’re on the hook for everything else. Standard month to month or yearly for a discount pricing.
It’s one of those situations where someone other than the driver owning the car makes the incentives line up nicely. Renters have the incentive and capital to get maximum reliability from manufacturers and competition plus scale drives prices to somewhere near depreciation plus mean maintenance which is the best you can really hope to do as a consumer looking to buy.
The problem there is nothing that is truly next generation. Better batteries are designed to cost more. How much more then 400-500 miles do you need on a car?
How much faster then 2-4 seconds to 100km/h do you need.
Better quality interiors? Better then Germans? Likely not.
I guess better software is an option, but what exactly. Tesla is working on that for years.
Self driving? Well, Apple has no solution and if anybody has one by 2024 is questionable.
The problem there is nothing that is truly next generation. Better UX navigation doesn't help you find good music. How much more than 400-500 songs do you need on an mp3 player?
How much faster will a navigation wheel help you find the music you like?
Better quality online music store? Better than Napster? Likely not.
I guess better software is an option, but what exactly. Creative Labs is working on that for years.
Internal 2GB flash drive? Well, Creative has no solution and if anybody has one by 2005 is questionable.
If I was an Apple shareholder (I guess I am, indirectly through Berkshire), this would piss me off. Apple is in a very good business. Cars are a terrible business. Just compare Apple’s margins to any car company. Also, it’s really hard to move into a business that is widely outside your core competency. It can be done, but the effort is huge, and I suspect the median track record is poor.
I'm a small time Apple shareholder and have the opposite reaction. Apple is sitting on 300 billion in cash - I expect them to do something with it. They need to move into some other market because their existing ones are tapped out. Cars are a great fit:
1. Big enough market for an investment of 10s of billions
2. Its international (quit a bit of that money is stuck overseas)
3. Making electric cars isn't too hard (see Tesla)
4. Its a consumer product and they have the best consumer brand which they can easily leverage.
5. The car market is poised to be radically disrupted in the short term - electric cars/self driving cars
I don't know, I think Tesla is a good example of how difficult it is to penetrate the car market as a new company. It took them nearly 20 years to get where they are today, and it's not like that was 20 years of smooth sailing. From what I've read they came close to going under multiple times. Aren't they the first major new US car company to start up and not go under since the early 20th century?
The situation for Apple is certainly different, given their size and the massive leaps in terms of EV tech compared to when Tesla started out, but let's not trivialise the complexity of the task and the inherent financial expenditure and risk.
Tesla's worst year (2017) had them at -3.5B$ cash flow. Apple has 200B$ in cash reserves. With that kind of money they could afford to purchase an existing car company and sustain similar losses for a few decades.
They have been. Apple has returned over half a trillion dollars to shareholders over the past 6 years or so. They have pledged to be cashflow neutral going forward. They do still have a monster cash reserve, but they are also very good to shareholders at the same time.
Edit: corrected an order of magnitude error in figures! Thanks umeshunni
I think the Goal would be Uber, but with a fleet of Apple Cars. I still dont see how selling and servicing Apple Cars would work for Apple if it is sold as an originally car. That large investment and sunk cost would be a good use for its Cash. ( And it would be part of their Services Revenue ) Apple also gets to trial and gather Data with their current Map Data Collection vehicle.
The problem is there is nothing, absolutely zero indication that we can crack Level 5 self driving within next 5 years. It is always easy to get the first 80%, the last 20%, the small and minor details will often take as long if not longer than the first 80%. We have just arrived at the 80% point, and there is always the illusion of we are close to Self Driving Goal. And we are not.
And apart from that there are no indication as to how Apple is competing with Batteries. Tesla as a car manufacture may be easy to replicate, ( only on a relative scale, it is actually difficult to make cars in mass quantities, especially with Apple that demands perfection. Unlike Tesla ) but Tesla Battery is at least 4 - 5 years ahead of everyone else from both technological and manufacturing. And no have seems to have shown a plausible plan of how Apple is going to tackle this.
Waymo has level 4 robotaxis that anyone can request after landing at the Phoenix airport, by just downloading the app. I feel like this use case is sufficient to build a business around.
> Apple is sitting on 300 billion in cash - I expect them to do something with it.
“Do something with it” doesn’t have to be reinvesting within the company. Apple has been doing a good job returning excess cash to shareholders, spending roughly $250 billion since 2015 to reduce shares outstanding from 22 billion to 17 billion.
One can say many things about Tim Cook, but not that he doesn't understand "business". So if Apple makes a car, they certainly have a plan on how to make a profit from it.
How much of that is driven by his own success vs. inertia from the success of his predecessor? I've heard many people say that they don't want to leave the ecosystem because they're already so invested into it.
The finances? Most of his own success. Even with Steve Jobs still at the helm, it was Tim Cook who managed the supply chain and operations. Tim Cook probably isn't the product manager Steve Jobs was, though Jobs sometimes went badly astray with his decisions too. But from a business point of view, Apple is doing greater than ever.
And yes, I was also someone who got unhappy with the Mac ecosystem and partially stayed because of being too much dependent on the eco system, but also because of the lack of true alternatives for my requirements. However, this has changed drastically with the switch to Apple Silicon, now it looks like a strong technical choice again.
Have they? The Apple Watch is selling well now after a few iterations. Have any other products launched that have sold well?
M1 looks good, but it's on the back of several years of lackluster laptops and things nobody wants like the touchbar. The pro video and audio community is increasingly alienated by $700 wheels and are switching to Windows or Linux. Earpods have been a success but has the Homepod? Iphones have been iterating but not really revolutionizing.
I was talking from the business side and if you look at Apples ernings, they are excellent. So excellent that Apple has become the most valuable company of the world. It is the sum of all the products launched and marketed. The Macs had a few bad years, mostly because of the keyboards and the lack of a Mac Pro. They fixed the keyboards and the 16" MB Pro is selling like hotcakes, wait times are often long. And so far their switch to Apple Silicon exceends every expectations. I don't think the pro video and audio community is switching because of those wheels, which certainly are overpriced, but because Apple waited too long for a new Mac Pro and the current machine is extremely expensive. This all might change a lot with Apple Silicon though.
Edit: after using the touchbar for a while, I love it. For a lot of tasks it is a great addition to their laptops, especially when you don't have a mouse around.
>if you look at Apples ernings, they are excellent
That's a business persons qualifier for success, it's not a product persons qualifier for success.
Steve Jobs spent his days thinking about how to make the best computer or phone.
Tim Cook spends his days thinking new ways to reduce the BOM of the product by removing things from the box or changing parts, how to carve the features into a product matrix to cause people to spend more.
Cars in the future will be different than Cars of the past. It will be a high-margin business. Exactly the same as it was with "dumb phones" to "smart phones". Esp. with semi self driving.
It's interesting that this mentions lithium iron phosphate batteries as a "breakthrough technology". That echoes what BYD in China has been saying recently.[1] Lithium-iron isn't a new technology. It was popular for industrial power tools for a while. It is safer than lithium phosphate, not being prone to thermal runaway, but has less energy density. BYD has been able to get the energy density per unit volume up, but energy density per unit weight is still lower than lithium phosphate.
The article also suggests that Apple would have a "manufacturing partner". After all, iPhones are made by Foxconn. So this may just be Apple selling BYD cars outside China. BYD sells more electric cars than anyone else, including Tesla, but has been having trouble getting into the US market. Apple can help with the marketing end.
A self driving flying consumer vehicle that is fueled by any organic material (100% clean) would be the "biggest achievement of the century".
Road/highway infrastructure would be a thing of the past. Billions (if not trillions) of dollars saved in new road construction and maintenance. Can divert federal/state/local funds to education, public health, and social programs.
Then highways can be replaced by housing infrastructure and thus slowly driving down the cost of housing in markets across the country.
At this point the charging infrastructure is the biggest differentiator for me. I don't particularly care for Elon Musk, and I don't think Tesla vehicles are made particularly well. However, is there any competitor that has even 25% of the charging network that Tesla has?
Also, Apple can't even convert my voicemails into text. They seem like 3-5 generations behind the competition in machine learning. People believe they'll have a self driving car in a little over three years? Mmmmmmkay.
> is there any competitor that has even 25% of the charging network that Tesla has?
Well, EVgo claims to be the largest DC fast charging network in the US. I don't know if that's true, and I don't know if they're excluding Tesla's proprietary network. They claim to have 800 fast charging locations, and I think Tesla is a bit over 900. Tesla has more stations per location, however, I'm pretty certain of that.
Collectively, I think there are more non-Tesla DC fast charging locations than there are superchargers, and the gap is expected to widen significantly over the coming years. Tesla had a great head start, though, so they command the mindshare. And some of the standardized DC fast charging stations have acquired a reputation for unreliability. But ... superchargers break regularly, too.
It's a strategy: let the market mature some, allowing others to make mistakes, giving you a view of what works best, and then launch a product and launch it to your existing consumer base. For example, how long ago did Apple Music come out, with how many existing competitors, and how successful was it? Apple has deep pockets, can do packaged deals for subscriptions as well as your iPhone, Apple Watch, laptop, etc.
It wouldn't surprise me if Apple didn't get into a few other markets that Elon is targeting as well, though Apple's careful to not launch too many products at once - it may put them at a disadvantage over decades; of course they can always buy companies in a market they want to be in.
Apple had a long history in music prior to Apple Music. I have no doubt that Apple could make a car. But I do doubt that they could make a self driving car. Google is still trying to figure it out after a decade of research and development.
Has Apple been poaching significant self driving talent to attempt self driving version of the electric car?
Based on their consumer electronics past, Apple would probably nail the design and get the hardware mostly right. For self driving I think Apple's best bet here to me seems like licensing Waymo tech. Waymo seems to have the lead amongst all and Apple would be more interested in the complete product unlike Waymo which seems to be just interested in the driving tech.
I don't know about anyone else, but a fair number of people that I have worked with in the past are now working on undisclosed projects with Apple, or have been hired by Apple with unlisted position details on their LinkedIn. There's something secret in the works, we'll have to wait and see what that is.
> Has Apple been poaching significant self driving talent to attempt self driving version of the electric car?
Well, the linked article mentioned Apple's rumored project is being led by Doug Fields, who was Tesla's senior VP of engineering. There are probably others.
Of course, poaching engineers in such a hotly competitive industry seems like could lead to a lot of accusations of trade secret theft. It's sure a good thing Tesla and Apple aren't both famously litigious...
The inside scoop is that Apple has been poaching CMU's RI PhDs in entire cohorts, but I might be wrong.
I know people who interviewed for a position there (2018), and it is so covert, that you couldn't guess it was an Apple building until you are literally in the interview room. The building, reception and address had zero indication that it might be Apple.
They acqui-hired Drive.ai which given their team, seems to be most of their self driving team.
I live in their area and haven't seen any Apple cars for years, just Lexus' with a ton of sensors plastered on top, which is their self driving team (part of their SPG division).
> For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
> Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
> Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
And let us not forget that this one came true. (My Mazda, for example.)
> You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
This reminds me of the classic Neal Stephenson extended essay on computer interfaces, In the beginning was the commandline, it’s too long to excerpt here, but the basic gist was if computers were cars, Windows was a station wagon that was practical but broke down a lot, Macs were expensive Euro sedans, BeOS was a batmobile for car enthusiasts who probably already owned the station wagon, and Linux was a free tank that took a lot of training to operate and wasn’t sold through dealerships, but given away by a ragtag group of volunteers in a field.
I don’t understand this question. It reads like my comment could be interpreted in some other way than I intended but I can’t figure out what that would be.
The implication is pretty overt, no?
Asking OP to explain almost seems deliberately obtuse.
You mentioned, in a decidedly technical forum, that a superior at work made a somewhat questionable tech-related decision by owning a car with dashboard software by a company whose software is commonly joked to crash frequently and be less-than-reliable.
I'm sure it was purely in lighthearted jest, but not exactly subtle given context. I'm sure your boss was/is a nice person.
I made no such implication and frankly I am astonished it would be interpreted that way, although others seem to have done the same. I'll try to avoid causing this kind of confusion in the future.
To clarify:
The context was the old jokes about putting tech in cars and how some of it is coming true. I cited an example of that happening. It happened to be my boss' car when I witnessed it.
I simply shared a personal anecdote that seemed relevant to the conversation. His car had a dashboard that crashed. He told me about it on the way to lunch. Then later when I was riding in his car it happened.
I made and make no judgement about him as a person, technologist or manager based on the kind of car he drove. Honestly that thought hadn't even crossed my mind. This is why I asked. I'm astounded I have to explain this on HN of all places but here we are.
Apple always innovates on top of a user experience change. I doubt this time will be different. Tesla made the touchscreen dominant, but Apple won't copy it. Touch screens in cars leave a lot to be desired -- they aren't particularly ergonomic and they lead to screen fatigue. They also don't make much sense in a fully autonomous era.
Apple will likely build an AR-centric user experience using the windshield and new control paradigms. There's a huge area for creativity here and I don't doubt Apple can come up with something that will make a big touch screen seem archaic. If they can make the driver optional, there's even more room to think different.
From what I understand, lithium iron is actually less power dense than the latest lithium ion, but it can handle more charge cycles and it’s less volatile nature allows manufacturers to break away from the commoditized cells paradigm. It’s not considered a good choice for eg ebikes because of the density issue.
The matter really turns on the rate of progress of Tesla technology vs. Apple (or anyone else).
Tesla's lead is large enough that the established auto companies still (as far as I've seen) don't have compelling strategies for closing the gap.
As a technology company, Apple comes at the issue from a different perspective, and arguably, one with much more overlap to Musk, et al.
Batteries are notoriously difficult to innovate. We've seen story after story for more than an decade about breakthrough battery tech that doesn't or hasn't materialized, but the lead that Tesla has built has been by making a series of more-or-less incremental improvements to their design, coupled with the pricing benefits that come with the highest volume.
Do you believe that Apple has a battery technology that Tesla either is not aware of, or, is working on but not succeeded yet, or, has taken a look at and dismissed?
As others have pointed out (and some disagreed with), Apple has capital, supply-chain expertise, patience, and a dogmatic focus on the whole experience. In a realm where technology is increasingly a driver of the experience (no pun intended), cars start to make some sense.
But the battery claim... I just can't imagine a universe where Tesla isn't aware of the same hard-science. I'd love to be surprised though.
Apple has billions of data points about batteries with iPhones, Macbooks, iPads, etc..... Obvious those are not used in the same manner car batteries are, but still.
I'd say there's a slim possibility.
But clearly it's a tough nut to crack because there hasn't really been much progress despite the necessity/urgency.
I wonder if Foxconn will have to start building the city to support this very soon.
Also I wonder if your car will look so beautiful, be so shiny, that you buy a case for it... will it come in peel off plastic (actually most cars already had this on their bonnets at least when shipping...).
Will it be machined out of a single block of aluminium?
I wrote this several years ago as a joke, but it seems more relevant now. Here's a preview of the upcoming iCar FAQ page.
iCar2 FAQs
In what colors are the iCar available?
Space gray, silver, and gold
What kind of performance can I expect from my iCar?
The iCar version 2 performs up to 30% faster than the original iCar and uses 25% less fuel.
Where can I refuel my iCar?
iCar can be refueled at any station that has Universal Pump Type C connectors.
How do I select station presets on my radio?
There is no need. iCar's built in stereo system automatically selects radio stations based on your facial expressions when you enter the car.
Does iCar need an air filter for the engine?
No. iCar does not have problems with dirty air like conventional cars do. The iCar's engine cannot get dirty.
How can I open the hood of the iCar to service the fluids or engine components?
The iCar is unibody and therefore the engine compartment cannot be accessed by the user. Send it to an authorized Apple service center for maintenance.
How do I put luggage into the trunk?
The trunk is a slot loading mechanism. Simply hold the luggage near the trunk and it will automatically be pulled in. Keep in mind that the slot loader only accepts standard size suitcases. Dufflebags or briefcases may jam the mechanism.
How can I change to wiper blades on the iCar?
The iCar contains no user serviceable parts. Please send it to an Apple authorized service center for all maintenance.
What kind of third-party accessories are available for the iCar?
Accessories also known as Accs are available at the iCar Acc store. Only Acc which have been approved by Apple to be suitable for all ages are available at the Acc Store.
I am accustomed to driving a conventional car. How do I execute a right turn with the iCar?
Easy. To make a right turn with your iCar simply press the Cruise control button (CRS) on your steering wheel while turning the wheel to the left.
Wait a minute! There is only one pedal in the iCar? Is it the brake or the accelerator? And how do I get the functionality of the other?
The single pedal in your iCar is a multipurpose pedal. Press on it with one foot for gas, and step on it with two feet for brakes.
I hope not. The Standard Oil-ification of Apple just seems like it'll lead to another weird all-encompassing behemoth that'll have to be hacked to pieces at some point.
edit: Standard Oil was the company I was thinking about but the structure of it will be more like General Electric
Is this focus on EV cars in general slightly unjustified? What's the evidence for the increased demand for EV cars post-pandemic? The way i see it, remote work will revolutionize the life of ~40% of the population , turning the car to an accessory that will be used much, much less in cities. For getaways outside cities, the autonomy of an ICE car is much appreciated. Battery trucks may be in high demand, but those don't fit with apple's (high-spender) demographic
This will be fun to watch unfold. A company with no innovative leadership since Jobs will get a bunch of Tesla rejects to build a an electric car with pie in the sky battery tech. If it doesn't need lithium they might have a shot.
Also Apple isn't known for being a machine learning company, I'm sure the car will be very pretty but they're kidding themselves if they think they are making a self driving system that to sell. MobilEye already has that covered quite well.
> Apple isn't known for being a machine learning company, I'm sure the car will be very pretty but they're kidding themselves
Remember the first versions of Apple Maps compared to the (relative) incumbent's? It felt incredibly half-baked and received user/media feedback accordingly.
I can already see this happening with cars with the same response - "Well... building a [map/car/ml system] is hard..."
I'm curious as to why they would enter it. Sure, they have Carplay, which seems to be better than other in vehicle UX systems other than Tesla, but the automotive industry is littered with companies that simply couldn't hack it even if they had a lot of money behind them at one point. Plus, the auto industry is very low margin when compared to tech.
If I was a shareholder of FAANG (I'm not), I wouldn't be very excited about them taking on very unprofitable tasks like solving humanity's urgent problems.
It’s not the same from my experience. Before, I needed to spend at least a couple hundred dollars (usually on a contract spending an hour on the phone to cancel) on one vendor, who may or may not have the content I want, and it may or may not be available at the time I want it.
Now, I can pick and choose exactly what I want, when I want it, and without advertising breaks. Obviously, if you want everything, then you have to pay for everything. All with a few clicks.
Point is that cable was stuck to a single household.
Streaming is cheaper than cable because we can use it across a few households. Amortize costs down 2x-3x, on top of the fact that added up all these subscriptions still cost 20-30% less than cable.
This is just an extra bonus on the easy to cancel aspect, and the no ads aspect.
I think longer term you’ll see the Kickstarter/Patreon model for streaming be the final evolution of the Cable to Streaming transition. Which is likely what you’re still waiting for.
> Streaming is cheaper than cable because we can use it across a few households. Amortize costs down 2x-3x, on top of the fact that added up all these subscriptions still cost 20-30% less than cable.
You're literally saying "streaming is cheaper if I cheat/pirate/break the TOS".
Cable/satellite are even cheaper if you buy a pirate smartcard too, so we're not really making a fair comparison, are we?
I will walk, bike or buy a horse before give another penny to this people. Management chops, supply-chain, massive scale. Are we so blind that allow big tech to exploit abroad, avoid taxes, buy politicians, kill any prospect of middle class, accumulate tons of user data and prepare level of automation and surveillance non existent in history? Apple car will be like iPhone, closed, with low repairability, with restricted user experience and every goddamn shady legalised practice that they can think off.
Trillion dollar companies shape a future in which you will not "own anything and be happy". What is this nightmare?
So, you want a vehicle that is required to protect your life and safety, interact with other people + cars on the road, filled with gasoline/electricity, can ram into things and cause harm, to be open source and modifiable by anyone who chooses to tinker with it however they want?
Actually I live in reality, we are talking here about eventual product from company for electronic devices. And this is not the problem. The problem is that in any of my two cars that I own, I can change anything I want my self and this is actually a standard practice today and without approval of third party vendor or service but I can assure you that this will not be the case with Apple Produced Car. We have clearly seen how Tesla thinks about third party repairs. Apple is a control freak monster, and whataboutism is not working for the actual users but only for the big company.
Future is electric, but we have to be environmentally conscious: how about a global program for engine replacements? Some folks already are doing this with classic cars. I see in transition to electric cars lots of data hoarding problems, actually if this companies will use my driving data for training of their algos I must receive compensation as data miner:)
> The car industry is among the most regulated industries in the United States.
I work in medical device manufacturing, and it's not even close. The auto industry has regulations, yes, but it's not nearly as regulated many other industries in the United States.
That said, regulations are walls that keep out cash-poor newcomers.
There's a good chance Apple will fail at this thing, but it won't be because of the regulations.
This whole move towards renewables, electric cars, green energy is great. However I am not sure it can realistically happen without some huge (not incremental) breakthrough in the battery/electronics technology.
Let's look on UK only plan for this, If they to replace all currently used cars with electric ones (assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation batteries), it would take the following:
- 207,900 tonnes of cobalt - just under twice the annual global production
- 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE) - three quarters the world's production
- at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium - nearly the entire world production of neodymium
- 2,362,500 tonnes of copper - more than half the world's production in 2018
It would be great for Tesla's mission if a company like Apple becomes a player in this space. We definitely need more manufacturers. But just based on the incremental engineering expertise Tesla has acquired over the years in manufacturing - especially now with the diecast, the data the hundreds and thousands of Tesla cars are capturing everyday, the increasingly vertical integration of their process, a decision maker like Musk, and most importantly, Apple's history with Project Titan (which I happen to know something about), I'm not too optimistic of much happening in this direction. There is still nothing out there to indicate Apple can handle it when the rubber hits the road at 80 mph. One area where I am slightly optimistic about Apple doing something potentially significant is in the battery space, in which case, it would compete with the likes of QuantumScape, and not Tesla, per se.
Regarding the topic of whether Apple can differentiate itself in the auto industry — I recently bought my first car, a 2017 Subaru Forester. The vastness of the American auto market alone, let alone the international market, left me speechless.
Every manufacturer offers models in categories from large pickup truck to family roadtripper to mid-size crossovers, each model with trims that could vary the performance and aesthetics and targeted price points that could raise the final price by tens of thousands.
The Internet is filled with car forums, not including Reddit or Facebook groups, jam-packed with users. Forums for individual models, like one for each of the Subaru Forester, Outback, Crosstrek, and Ascent. Forums for auto-detailing, rally racing, off-roading, and countless other activities.
Car financing and used-car sales provide further flexibility for people to buy their cars. The size of the auto financing industry in the U.S. is in the ballpark of ~$1.2 trillion.
YouTube has probably millions of hours of car videos — any random model from any random manufacturer has review videos from countless owners, each one with tens of thousands to millions of views, and these are refreshed every year. There are reviews for different tires, engine mods, accessories, trims, 6-months of use, 12-months of use, snow usage, and off-roading usage.
The automobile, at least, is one of the indisputable triumphs of capitalism and the modern global economy, a testament to its ability to serve every customer at every price point and nearly every use-case. Yes, there are environmental impacts of car usage, and quality of life externalities due to traffic and roads, but, for this post at least, I want to appreciate the automobile and how significant it is to our lives.
There's plenty of room for Apple, and car owners and renters across the world, I'm sure, will benefit from its entrance, whatever way, shape, or form it takes.
IMHO they should do a sprinter van with a built in sleeper - and a commercial model for last mile delivery/service/transport. Hit the high end Winnebago market, family size Uber market, AWS delivery/service market, and US Postal Service.
Don't compete with Tesla on sportscars. Be the new minivan.
I remember a story about how when competitors opened the first iPhone, they were surprised to see how the entire phone was more or less a battery with a screen attached to it.
I do wonder if Apple building a car would generate some sort of similar epiphany, related to batteries or not.
Electric vehicles are _incredibly_ simple to begin with so a decent chance.
But I also think that the electric car space is already very simple. Apple would be going head-to-head with Tesla which has already stripped away almost everything into a large dash-mounted monitor.
Unfortunately, in the US your safety in the Citroen is questionable as you might get absolutely blasted by countless 4,300 lbs. / 1950 kg. SUVs[0] around you.
That's a lovely looking design. I am on-board with that.
I was talking about the interior but I would agree that there is room to improve, especially as start thinking about what driverless cars will look like.
If this is true, it's interesting to see the difference in approach between Google/Waymo and Apple. Google is pretty clear that they don't want to build cars, but rather develop sensor suite and software for self driving that can be installed in partnership with manufactures. Producing cars, on the other hand, is a much more complex operation than producing consumer electronics, even though Apple can afford it. Battery, setting up service centers, repairs and so on are complex. But I really hope they can pull it off.
Not to mention when it comes to self driving technology Apple probably lags Waymo by a number of years.
Apple has demonstrated that they can do those things with phones. Google has no meaningful consumer facing non digital operations (and even their digital consumer experiences leave a lot to be desired, particularly when things go wrong).
There are MANY car manufacturers. Do we need another?
There are only TWO mainstream desktop operating systems/platforms. We could use another, but the barrier is now too high.
If the company has that much profits that they can dabble in the automotive industry, then maybe they didn’t need to use every tax minimization, supply chain efficiency, and globalized slave-labor manufacturing option at their disposal.
Ppl: Why can’t you invest in manufacturing stuff inside the us?
Other ppl: “You want your iPhone to cost 5-gajillion dollars?”
This seems wholly unhealthy, maybe big tech is due to be broken up.
On the one side, Apple going into heavy industry sounds odd, on the other side, they don't even seem to try to hide their autonomous driving efforts. This raises the question, what is Apple developing the technology for?
Apple always developed technology for their own products, so if they have an autonomous driving package, they would have to build the vehicle for it. Of course, it might look different from what we imagine when talking about cars, as the iPhone was quite different from what people expected an Apple phone to be.
It will be an interesting dynamic. Clearly if anyone has the chops, it’s Apple. They have just started to topple Intel’s monopoly with M1. The company is poised to dominate the personal computing.
That being said Tesla is no slouch. It’s led by a maverick founder - someone who has shot astronauts to ISS, built electric cars and drilled big holes into the earth. Ironically he seems to be taking the position of Steve Jobs
It will be a mistake to discount either. If anything it’s two likely outcomes are:
"It remains unclear who would assemble an Apple-branded car, but sources have said they expect the company to rely on a manufacturing partner to build vehicles."
Does Apple have enough money (cash, line of credit capability) to simply buy an automaker? I can see where it would make the most sense to partner but having an option to buy at a later point could bring advantages to Apple.
Apple prefers to outsource the difficult, high capex, low-margin and worker rights/fair compensation encumbered aspect of their products to third parties.
Buying a manufacturer would bring all of that in-house.
That is so true. Ethics are mere marketing talk when investor profits are on the line. And Foxconn is universally considered as the "evil guy" when they are just doing exactly what Apple wants them to do: manufacture the parts very cheap. I can't recall do they also assemble them too.
They do not have to buy an automaker.
There is for example "Magna" a canadian-austrian automotive supplier [0][1] which also produces complete cars for their customers (contract manufacturing) [2]. Magna has started producing electric vehicles recently, for example the Jaguar i-Pace.
This sounds much more like than Apple buying a manufacturer and optimizing its supply chain -- its like the ultimate form of pushing inventory costs upstream.
Even big car companies like Mercedes outsource the manufacture of some models for third parties. For example Mercedes-Benz GLC is assembled by four different companies: Daimler AG itself, HICOM, TAAP, and Valmet Automotive.
Just like they don't own companies that assemble iPhones, they don't need to own car assembly. They can dictate and control the quality without owning factories. Most parts are outsourced anyway.
I'm surprised so many people here on HN are not up to speed with Tesla enough to know that Apple could never compete with them if they don't do their own manufacturing.
Tesla is the most vertically integrated car manufacturer right now, and that's a huge competitive advantage. They plan to manufacturer their batteries directly into the vehicle frames. This saves a ton of weight and would be nearly impossible for a competing manufacturer who outsources everything. That is just one example.
if Apple is serious about a car, they need to be vertically integrated to seriously compete with Tesla
What you say is only true for battery packs and the skateboard of Tesla.
Rest of the car, assembly and painting is easily outsourced.
Tesla is below average car outside the skateboard. The quality of workmanship is not good. They would have already made millions of cars without Elons robot factory dream that failed.
No need to buy an automaker, there's companies that have a car factory to build cars on contract for auto companies.
One example is VDL in Born, Netherlands making BMWs. That contract ends in a few years iirc, so they could produce Apple cars by then perhaps.
I've read about rumors stating they could already launch their apple car in September 2021.
I wouldn't be surprised if this happens. Apple has always been very secretive and the iPhone came as a surprise to many.
If they rely on a third party for the manufacturing there are no reasons this would take that long. We have seen recently how quickly this can happen with the M1 chip.
Now this is a seriously good move for their clean energy plan. I wonder the impact they’ll have on Tesla. Elon Musk’s car firm had the first mover advantage just like iPhone back in the day.
With the Apple community already treating their products as gold, Tesla cars will no longer be perceived as the premium product in the long run.
The iCar. I remember reading jokes about vendor lock-in years ago when this rumored. Given their track record, buying this would be simply giving over another aspect of your life to yet another giga tech company.
Die hard apple fans will love it no matter what and no matter what they sell and at what price, they'll buy it.
This will be interesting because unlike the phone or computer, cars already exist and even electric cars and self driving technology too. It remains to be seen how Apple differentiates itself and if it can do it effectively enough.
You can only use iFuel energy cell with your iCar. And of course you can't use anything but iTires with it and navigate with anything but iNavigator monitored by our iAI. Have a nice day and enjoy your iRide.
Mostly price and battery range. Sure, they might make a better design and interior, but price and battery range are the biggest competitive factors with EVs
apple tends to not make the cheapest version of anything it makes (quite the opposite). I'm sure the people buying the iCar are going to be the same ones dropping $1200 every year for the latest iphone
> battery range
they seem to have a lot of experience with batteries
> price and battery range are the biggest competitive factors with EVs
and the smartphone ecosystem was full of tiny physical keyboards before apple released the iphone. Apple has a unique way of redefining "must have" features when they enter the market.
If anything, I think tesla will be the android of EVs and the iCar will be the iphone of EVs
Is this a necessity because Google threatens to own the self-driving car market? Is the car experience so important that it will drive phone sales? Or is this just a way to invest their money?
This would be great if the consumer cost is competitive. Right now you have to spend almost $40k to get over 200mi of range it seems, which is still too expensive for most people.
An interesting thought - cars are becoming an appliance and offered -aaS (as a service). Could Apple also disrupt the offering model for cars with an entrance into this market?
Apple has no experience dealing with the extensive government regulation surrounding car designs. I would expect that to be a major risk factor for Apple.
When Apple launches a new product, they tend to stick to markets where they can create a unique enough product where they can have good profit margins. For example, with the iPhone & iPad, Apple owns both the OS and the CPU. On the Watch, Apple has integration with the iPhone and the best wearable CPU.
How can Apple bring a unique enough experience to the car to get the margins they command on their other products? Perhaps they wouldn't get the 30% plus margins they get elsewhere, but I can't see Apple spending so much effort to get the slim 5-10% margins you see other automakers getting.
Personally, I'm looking forward to a car that wears out after two years, has a glass trunk, no user serviceable parts and only allows iRadio and iTunes.
Ah, yes Apple in cars is exactly what we need. Can't buy any replacement parts, overpriced service that can only be done at the apple store, and they completely stop supporting old models after five years. Cars having problems driving? Yeah well, looks like you bought it seven years ago, so we can't do anything. We can recycle it to be eco-friendly though!
I'm a simple man. I prefer my mobile device manufacturer to be different from my auto maker. Maybe that's just me.
Another aspect I think Apple will struggle with (if they really pursue a full blown car) is the very same reason it succeeds: brand affinity.
It was easy to ditch BlackBerry when the iPhone came out because the cost of buying a first gen product wasn't so high.
I love BMW and don't see any current or nascent tech changing that. I'd love for them to compete, really compete(!!) with Tesla et al. because EVs and all they represent is exciting but I'm not so hot on Tesla. Great brand and product but kinda feel I'm not their primary demographic: tech bros who wear Allbirds and live in Silicon Valley.
German carmakers have a rich history that speaks for itself when you see the badge on the bonnet. Can't say the same about Tesla, let alone Apple.
Say what you will but Nazi Sled > Tesla any day. At least for me.
The project started sometime around 2016, so going by Apple’s track record 2024 seems like a possibility. Tesla needs a competition and is slowly turning into a monopoly.
Tulips were at some point worth about 10% of the world economy.
As they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, so I'm not going to bet against Tesla. However I'd be shocked if Tesla will be a top 5 car manufacturer 10 years from now.
Much like Amazon or Google or Facebook or Apple, err. Apple's decision to enter the auto market for renewable clean energy and pledge to uphold carbon neutrality and be negative by 2030 should might as well be a welcome step here.
Apple car is a terrible idea. Apple is good at selling luxury products to ordinary people. An ordinary person can buy a good enough headphones for $40 or spend $550 for the AirPods Max mainly as status symbol. But an ordinary person won't spend $350,000 for a VW ID.3/Golf competitor.
Apple, will not make a car. They will make carOS, the UX that is built into other companies' cars.
Basically, they will build software, the steering wheel, the whole from dash, maybe even a backseat interface, and internal software (excluding hardware drivers), and standardize the UX across every automaker.
Kinda like what Android did for phones, but Apple will enforce stricter regulations for carOS.
As you say, it’s obvious I’m speculating so I don’t see why it bothers you. But don’t worry you’re not alone. Many people in my life find this same trait problematic :)
My motivation: Me stating my speculation with “such an air of authority” is just me betting my publicly logged reputation on the final result. I might be wrong, I might be right, none of us know today. This makes it more interesting for me.
Additionally, the confidence with which I write down my speculation let’s me in 5years look back at my comments and better calibrating my ability to speculate.
Do you think car makers will give up the space to Apple OS so easily? Android if anything is more conducive to using in a car setting, but I suspect that car makers would want to keep their OS/marketplace profits for themselves
When it comes to cars, TSLA is following AAPLs iPhone story and they are around 2011. Note: cars have a longer shelf life. 20 years vs 6 years for phones. And typical turnaround is more like 10 years vs 3 years. Apple and Android dominated the phone industry in a decade. TSLA and “the second OS/UX” will dominate that industry in 30 years.
Everyone now understands that Tesla will not just be another competitor in the automobile industry they have usurped the throne while everyone else was guarding the doors.
There needs to be “an Android” to counterbalance and unite the industry. Otherwise automakers that don’t partner with “the second OS/UX” will dwindle and stop existing. Eg BBM, Nokia, Palm. Meanwhile, Samsung was an early adopter and is holding strong (counter example HTC, also an early adopter but dead).
Like HTC vs Samsung vs Motorola vs Pixel, there will still be competition for best manufacturing and performance. Automakers that adopt the unified OS/UX, will need to make sure they don’t lose that game like HTC.
If the players in the auto industry don’t see this, they have already lost. Meanwhile, it might not be AAPL to make the unified OS/UX. However, they were willing to do it with Apple Card and insurance. Partner with Goldman or (whatever my iPhone loan thing is) and provide an amazing UX. They also have tons of consumer trust and it helps get their foot into the auto market, getting the benefits (Siri, iOS apps, Maps, self driving) without taking on the risks.
Apple isn’t a software company and it isn’t a hardware company. Apple is a merchant of “good will”[1]. It does this by creating then selling long term trust. In the words of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, “we build products because we love them” and “we build products we would recommend to our friends and family”.
Today Apple has the luxury to be exclusive. When they didn’t, they released iTunes and Safari on Windows. Today they are even becoming a “health company”. Don’t be surprised when Apple starts to create implants and prosthetics.
All this to say, Apple will do whatever they want as long as it has product market fit and they can be proud of having built it.
[1] good will - as it is defined by capitalism and consumerism, not in an ethical sense. Including pretending/trying to be ethical when it aligns with capitalistic “good will”.
If Apple had their foresight of yesteryear, they'd realize the electric car market is already beyond reach and move on directly to hydrogen powered jetliners. Replacing Jet-A with liquefied hydrogen is the next great market behind EVs.
I still can’t see Apple producing a car. The company has a history of releasing a product and then letting it wither on the vine of innovation. More like technology for a car, or teaming up on some connected technology, but they won’t make the car.
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Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience. Apple Card was perhaps a dipping of the toes moment.
In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is because the tech behind it is increasingly getting commoditized (though they work hard to stay slightly ahead). But people love Tesla and it's the first choice EV because they've really thought through the UX of a semi-self driving car EV thoroughly.
Apple is just about the only company with a similar ethos and enough money and patience to be a viable competitor and have a competitive brand known for quality.