Shifts team to generative AI.
If your car development team can be transferred to AI developement you weren’t building much of a car.
This is referring to the team working on the self driving functionality.
Still, self driving and generative AI are very different. Just because they fall into the same big “AI” bucket doesn’t mean it’s the same.
The skills are similar enough to be transferable
We’ll see
Well yeah they were achieving absolutely nothing in self-driving vehicles so I suppose they can transfer those skills to achieve absolutely nothing in AI
If you’re only just now entering the AI market you’re not going anywhere
Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports
Skilled developers can easily transition to another field of software engineering.
Even in 2024, there’s still a lot of non-software (automotive) engineering involved in building a car – even an electric one.
SDA - software defined automobile
Highway infrastructure as code
Stop I’m unironically excited for this distant possibility.
I’m already impressed by how much the UI for cars have been separatedfromm mechanical systems.
Electric cars have a lot more tunability from a software view too. Clearly there is a plenty of real world between the chips and where the rubber meets the road too.
So I get a free car and the owner gets to keep the original? Like hell I wouldn’t.
Yeah but a car is mostly made of engines and bolts and wheels and stuff like that, you know.
No one can become a skilled ML/AI dev overnight. That will still take a year or two or more of working with it daily. If you transition to a new field you basically become a junior dev all over again for a while. Domain knowledge is a big part of being a good programmer.
Except news always was that Apple was pushing pretty hard into self-driving vehicles, which would use much the same AI learning systems as you need for generative AI.
Ehh, that’s a bit of a stretch. They’re very different technologies with only limited overlap.
Unless Apple had invented artificial general intelligence and not told anyone then the technology isn’t transferable.
Chances are very good the AI technologies they were working on involved developing a GAN, then the knowledge and experience of creating a GAN is fully transferable.
It’s the skills of the developers I’m talking about transferring — not the source code or neural net output.
One question for you smarty pants: is their car real, or artificial?
Well, at this point it is theoretical.
Once upon a time, stoves had a dial you set, and it was basically a resistor and some wires. Today, a stove has a computer built in it that operates the entire thing.
While the computer in a modern oven is simple - it is an illustration that more, and more of what we have is computerized. When you add in reinforcement learning algorithms to adjust factors like say, If the fridge is aware of what time you generally open the fridge it can opt to kick on the heat pump a little before that to bring the temperature down and avoid running while it is open. This could save pennies of electricity in a year. But more importantly - could lead to less duty cycles on the condesor that could cause a fridge to say instead of lasting 10 years, last 12 years.
If you are starting a car company today, what you have to be thinking about is a reality where we move to “Humans don’t drive, the cars drive you” - I mean even a manual control situation could have the AI actually being a watcher in effect we “Let” people drive, but if the AI detects an unobserved obstacle etc it immediately takes over and adjusts. Well: You need to build that - and that, is AI.
If a company isn’t thinking about AI, and makes anything but basic appliances - they are likely on a limited time window because at some point Autonomous cars WILL be good enough, and the safety consideration will make both people, and governments, along with insurance companies to eliminate human driven vehicles.
Apple isn’t looking next year, or a year after. They are looking 5 to 10 years out and they don’t see a path where they can effectively compete in the car industry and make the profits they are after. However, if they can solve the AI driving problem - they don’t NEED to make a car, they can sell the brains and system that drives the car.
Thank fucking god. Imagine the kind of monetization that would exist inside an Apple car. You think subscription seatwarmers are bad, and they are, but I can guarantee Apple had much worse in mind, and that most companies would simply follow suit.
Or blaming customers for problems, “You’re shifting it wrong.”
Not sure if you’re aware that EVs don’t “shift” or if that’s an indictment to the level of idiocy that would likely be employed by Apple.
It’s a reference to an actual response from Jobs when the iPhone 4(?) had a bad antenna design.
Damn, good memory, it was the 4: https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
Thank you. Apparently my half joke has rustled some jimmies.
I think it’s more that you missed Dan’s joke than anyone being upset.
Porsche begs to differ.
All you had to do was a basic search for what EVs have multiple gears, but you didn’t.
What I like is that a bunch of idiots seemed to take offense to my comment which was meant more as a joke. I do admit I wasn’t aware there were EVs with gears. Though this is mainly because I won’t be in the market for my next EV for hopefully years. When I was looking into it, it was largely seen as unnecessary.
Yeah I’m aware. There is mostly no reason for EVs to shift, but Toyota was trying to add a manual transmission to an EV for some reason.
But “you’re shifting it wrong” would be a scenario like the car wouldn’t shift from P to D and Apple blames the driver.
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That does seem more like their kind of style
TBF This is how luxury car manufacturers sell their options. Always have been.
Space Karen sells his false self-driving option for €7500 as a software option.
Yes, but historically the purchase of an option included the physical installation of that option and its associated hardware. Not just turning on parts of the car that are already in it, after you bought it.
To be clear, I don’t think anyone is arguing that options should not cost money. We’re arguing against A) recurring subscriptions, and B) paying more money to activate features already built into the car you already bought.
Do you feel that Tesla’s charging for self driving is unfair?
Exactly. At a certain point luxury features stopped becoming standard and that’s associated with them being cheaper to install in every car but them deciding to sell it anyway
I know the current circlejork but last time I’ve checked the self-driving required an additional processer inside the car.
For many options in cars, the sensors and electronics are already built in but disabled in software. It’s cheaper to build while optimizing profit with options.
“Base model is this, but if you want seat heaters that’s another
$8,000$10,000, if you want lane assist, that’s another$5,000$25,000 and requires a 512GB storage bump for $2,000”Ftfy to more realistic numbers
They would come up with a charging port that only existed in the parking lot of Apple stores
Also it would on the bottom of the car
Deserves a shoop
alt-text: actual Apple Mouse charging via its bottom port
(Interesting, this guy says it gains hours of charge in three minutes, and thinks Apple knew some would leave it plugged it at all times. Intentional sure but not exactly “brilliant”.)
Just flip it over to charge of course
Genuinely, this is the best news I’ve heard in a while for the reasons you listed. Apple is already fucking up the phone industry with anti-consumer policies that become industry trends. I shudder to imagine how deeply and irrepairably they would have fucked up the car market for consumers.
Poor people shouldn’t drive an Apple car /s
Up to a certain point only. In most places you cannot hope to be able to sell a car that has not a minimum set of features mandated by the law.
And Apple cannot hope to compel states to change the rules just because so they can sell their car.
I was genuinely looking forward to them refusing to install airbags because it compromised the dashboard being 100% screen, and then later installing airbags in a “notch”, but calling them iBags, and advertising them as a revolutionary new feature that only Apple could think different enough to invent.
Courage. You need to put courage to charge extra few grands somewhere to complete the apple experience.
Not sure why everyone’s cheering, more competition is never bad and there are already plenty of manufacturers adding subscriptions and such, I doubt Apple would even have been the worst.
At the very least, they probably would’ve had a slick UI in a world of crap infotainment UIs.
However they announced Carplay 2 a few years ago and I’m hoping manufacturers will go ahead with adding that as an option so you could just opt in to Apple UI all over the car and revert back at any time. This is probably the best of both worlds. There are plenty of companies that know quite well how to build a car, they just mostly still all suck at UI.
A problem with apple…Like if my friend has a Toyota, i can borrow that. If they have an icar, I probably couldn’t drive it because I don’t have an iPhone required to start it or apple shoes required to activate the pedals. You know they’d be dicks like that.
Warning: unauthorized, non apple certified tyres detected on your iCar. Disabling airbags due to security issue.
Setting destination to Apple Genius bar.
Competition usually isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.
Apple can’t compete in that space. Their schtick is producing moderately inexpensive nice looking goods for exorbitant prices that are designed to be impossible to repair by anybody with them.
Tesla has already corned the market.
Trying to block people from repairing? check, trying to block sales of used items? check. Getting rid of all the buttons for all the interfaces and making you work with a tablet in the center of the car? Check.
Apple isn’t competition, Apple is a closed market, more anticompetitive than Microsoft and only undone by the degree of their control.
Microsoft wasn’t creating a car, and Apple wasn’t the dominant car manufacturer
… And? Apple isn’t even the dominant anything manufacturer, at least worldwide.
I don’t know why people are so upset. You’ve already got your closed market, overpriced, social “mine is bigger than yours (but not really)” compensation brand in the EV market. It’s called a Tesla.
Apple is the dominant manufacturer of really bad peripherals. Even cheap Chinese knockoff brands can’t quite match the utter nafness of Apple keyboards.
…a closed market you don’t have to participate in…
You do understand whole markets are hurt by big monopolies.
If Apple had a monopoly on smartphones you’d have a point
Monopolies are not a yes or no thing. Since Apple has a large enough market share that it is able to strangle competitors just through having that kind of market share, it is having a monopolistic effect on various markets.
For example, the smartphone market, if the smartphone market was perfectly competitive, if I didn’t like Apple’s and Google’s business, I would be able to go to a third seller and get similar products. If I didn’t like them, I could go to a fourth, and so on until it becomes meaningless. Like the market for actual apples for example.
Since that is not true, Apple is distorting the smartphone market with its large market share, making it have monopolistic tendencies.
In what way is Apple “strangling competitors”? You have no clue what you’re talking about. Just say you hate Apple and be done.
Just a few cases:
I don’t hate Apple, they are behaving as a corporation does. I hate the perversion of free markets that our economies are becoming due to corruption.
Don’t worry, I don’t. … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
what’s with the dots?
Mocking through gross exaggeration.
The fear for me was that Apple would grow quickly in the EV space due to its mainstream popularity, and then start doing the ecosystem thing so driving anything but an Apple car makes you a second-class citizen. Obviously it would only support Carplay and not Android Auto, and probably lack any sort of non-Carplay connectivity so you just can’t connect your Android phone to it at all. Presumably it would also have a proprietary charger that doesn’t work with other cars or vice versa.
I bet they wanted, but in EU they couldn’t
they probably would’ve had a slick UI
Apple hasn’t had a slick UI since Apple II PC.
To clarify, I meant not just the UI itself being pretty, but also reaction speeds. IOS is still smoother than any Android distro I’ve touched and macOS, while sometimes lacking in the UI department, does nearly everything better than Windows. It doesn’t do many things better than my Gentoo install with KDE Plasma, but that’s hardly something for the common user who doesn’t need all the customization and wants a smooth system straight out of the box.
I mainly meant that each time touching anything Apple I prepare myself for something as bad as Windows and it is somehow even more problematic to use.
I was kind of hoping that Apple and Tesla would just feud with each other for control of the “economy-quality product marketed as a luxury-quality product” market share.
they announced Carplay 2 a few years ago and I’m hoping manufacturers will go ahead with adding that as an option so you could just opt in to Apple UI
Yeah but you actually have to have an iPhone in order to use it because they are the world’s biggest dicks.
Nah sod that, that we need open source UIs. The world doesn’t get better if we have more proprietary nonsense, that doesn’t help anyone.
Yeah but you actually have to have an iPhone in order to use it because they are the world’s biggest dicks.
You also need an Android phone for Android Auto.
What we need then, isn’t an open source UI, but rather a standard API that could be implemented by any mobile OS (or just an app, even).
Aww and I was looking forward to a chipped windscreen requiring the replacement of the entire cabin, unless the car had ever been in the rain, in which case fuck you buy a new one.
That’s a Rivian.
And the cybertuck
I really feel for the engineers and devs who don’t get to see their project released into the world. Especially after so much effort.
I guess we will never see an electric car with the charging port on the bottom
I know this is a joke about the stupid Apple mouse, but a car with a bottom (and normal) charging port would be pretty cool. Imagine just pulling into your garage and a giant MagSafe charger snaps to the bottom of your car. (Yes, I know this is unreasonable with current technology due to poor energy efficiency)
I haven’t looked at the bottom of my car in a while, but judging by the amount of dust, mud and ice I see everywhere else, the bottom probably isn’t very clean. During January the ice coating got so thick that I had trouble opening the back doors. Makes me wonder how the charging port would handle that.
As an engineer who’s spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it’s really not that bad. You’re generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else’s dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.
After all the layoffs in the tech sector, it’s doubtful it were even the original engineers working on the project.
It’s kinda part of the job. Several times in my career I’ve put in months of effort on projects that then get canned for various reasons. One of them was 100% complete. No real big deal, it’s still a good billet on my resume.
Maybe the i-bike is more appleish? Imagine this, it’s a bike like other bikes, but you only need to pedal with one leg, and if you turn the pedal, the whole bike turns. Tilt it back to stop. Sure, you may look fucking stupid running around with only one pedal while your other leg does nothing at all. That’s it. Oh, and it’s white and smooth in gorme plastic-like design. You can charge your bike but you must remove the seat and turn it upside down using our special turning device since it’s 700lbs.
Also you can only use it on roads built by Apple!
It’s a special magnetic stripe road that illuminates the Logo properly…can you use it on regular asphalt? Nope! Why? Oh apple has looked into it and it is very challenging but they will work with authorities to see if it can be accomplished.
Designed by Apple in Cupertino, made in China
Hey! It has a breathalyzer integrated into the…what, why do you need a butt breathalyzer? Oh…
DAE I’m too poor to afford Apple products?
Swing and a miss
Apple was hoping to white label a Chinese ev and slap an iPad in it but the trade war is too hot now for them to deliver.
You joke but it’s not terribly far off.
Their real hope was to get Hyundai Kia to build EVs for them. While letting Apple act like they were the majority stakeholder of the deal.
I think all those dongles hanging off the car would have been a problem anyway
We put the charging port underneath the car!
Lightning (in the US; USB-C in the EU)
And of course they’d save money by putting an iPhone battery in the car.
It has over 4 miles of range.
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The windscreen is made from high-tech Apple SpaceGlass, and the integrated HUD (*Pro car only) presents all non-Apple cars as green bubbles in real time
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- You need a dongle for that, sir.
- A what?
- A dongle.
Maybe they relized rhat they cannot trademark the itire and remotely lock it, and sell it for 20 times the price of a regular tire.
Did they even contribute any meaningful technology discoveries or anything in the field?
CarPlay was a’ight.
Well, they do what every company wants, charge way more for their hardware, and still getting away with their bad practices.
TFA: decade-long
Spell-check: decade-long
OP: decadelong
Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen, Felicia.
Maybe delong is a unit. So one decadelong = 10 delongs
What
I didn’t realize Star Wars had an opinion on proper writing style.
What do you think woke it up?
This is good news for everyone else
lol
That’s disappointing. I hate apple, but I’d love to see more competition in the EV market
More? 22 brands released EVs last year alone. There are a LOT of options out there, with more to come. Apple would have been like, the 4,000th entrant in this market.
And what the EV market needs is a Model T, reliable and affordable. Not all these luxury models that go 0-60 in 3 seconds.
The Chevy Bolt is an EV that sells for less than $30,000 and gets 250 miles of range on a charge. The base model is even under $20,000 after the tax subsidy.
I think they discontinued the Bolt.
Yes, after a 7-year run they are retooling the factory for electric trucks, while committing to bringing a second generation Bolt to market sometime in 2025. Who knows if they’ll pull it off, but the sub-$30k EV market is going to grow with or without Chevy/GM.
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There’s a tidal wave of “cheap and good enough” Chinese EVs starting to sweep the global market, fulfilling pretty much what you said. The new BYD Qin retails for $15,000.
If the US puts up protectionist trade barriers, the US auto market will turn into an enclave of gas guzzling SUVs, totally divorced from the rest of the world.
the US auto market will turn into an enclave of gas guzzling SUVs, totally divorced from the rest of the world
Already is lol. Ford I believe sells one car in the USA now, the Mustang. But they still sell plenty of cars overseas, including things like the Focus ST Estate that we never got here.
You are asking for a Prius Prime and/or RAV4 prime.
Which are super reliable and selling like hotcakes for a reason.
Push the ‘EV’ button and both Prius Prime and RAV4 prime will drive in electric only mode.
$40k or $51k are actually pretty expensive for a car… i mean, all new cars are insanely expensive nowadays…
Nearest Prius Prime SE 2024 to my house is $34,604.
Top-hit from Carfax.com.
I don’t think you’ll find Electric or PHEV at much lower than this in the USA. If you want a cheap daily driver, buy a Chevy Trax or something. ICE is way, way way cheaper still.
But if you care about electrification, going north of $30k is expected.
there’s a difference between caring about electric and having 30k…
a lot of people just can’t afford that
Well yeah. I don’t think EVs are for the mass consumer yet. They remain quite expensive and remain unreliable.
Hybrids, like Toyota Corolla Hybrid, get 50+ mpg and are only $24k. If you can’t afford PHEV or EV, then drop down to the next tier. Hybrids exist for a reason and will have significant emissions saving / carbon emissions reduction compared to a normal car, by simply burning a fraction of the gasoline of a normal car.
I also don’t believe that we can buy or consumer our way out of this problem. Your actual biggest way to minimize your emissions is to find a bus.
I like the Prius, but $35,000 is way too much.
But their Cars would Cost ten Times as much and still there would be someone cultists defending the price
Sure. There’s lots of competition in the EV market, but one more player wouldn’t hurt.
Instead of trying to make a full electric car, I’m surprised Apple and Google aren’t focusing on making a smart AI “head unit” that’s compatible with third party car manufacturers. The head unit would control all aspects of the car through the CAN bus and also take camera/sensor inputs from the exterior of the vehicle, and be responsible for things like self-driving, lane assist and all those difficult AI-based features.
This way the car manufacturers could focus on what they do best (building safe reliable hardware) and outsource all the hard AI software problems to tech companies who specialise in this area.
I’ll pass on having evil corps like Google put AI in my car.
Comma.ai is open source and does exactly what you are describing as that “head unit”, not too mention is widely compatible with many car manufacturers.
Couldn’t agree more, but I’m just highlighting it seems like a much more profitable and attainable commercial goal for them in the short term than trying to enter the vehicle manufacturing space as a competitor. The fact there’s an awesome open source project tackling this idea already (thanks for the link - I didn’t know this existed!) says it’s viable.
They’ve already dipped their toes in with Car Play/Android Auto and have the relationships with third party vehicle manufacturers, so this seems like a logical next step. Perhaps that’s what they’re actually doing by shifting their car team to AI.
This is pretty much the goal of CarPlay
That’s b2b business which apple and google don’t do. Or aren’t good at, at the very least.
I can see the sharks on Shark Tank telling them - “license it!”
Its sounding more and more like companies are giving up on full self driving. There’s been a lot of money poured in without FSD materializing. Maybe just another lane autopilot wasn’t game changing enough for apple to justify staying in the game.
Honestly, people getting out of that game now are the smart ones. Our roads just aren’t set up to be able to handle FSD. It’s a money pit and a lot of companies are falling for the sunk cost fallacy.
