Apple targets car production by 2024, eyes ‘next level’ battery tech: sources
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.
Also: insane supply-chain management chops, a skill that is more and more transferable - especially for electric cars.
"Magna currently holds contracts to produce vehicles for BMW, Daimler, Jaguar Land Rover and Toyota."
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.
Apple is quite good at knobs and buttons, and what may eventually become interior finishes.
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 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.
Apple has been doing CarPlay for years. If they do at least as well with the rest of the interior they’ll have an edge over most luxury cars today.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/20906777/volvo-xc40-suv-e...
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.
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.
I'm sure Nokia had the same confidence in 2005.
> “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.”
It tool them 4 generations to get there, and a lot of money.
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....
And half a year after that, the news was better still: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/apple-officially-sur...
So... by & large nobody had an iPhone or smartphone. They all had Razrs (or other feature-phones) instead.
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.
Would a car be like that now? Batteries are close to too expensive, but 38k model 3 says we are close...
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.
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.
Culture is hard, but the core of your business. To not embrace the culture your org needs to outcompete competitors is to embrace failure.
With tesla the over all build quality for price range isn't great (they are getting better), but the software integration and UX is really good.
Apple is really good at both those things, if it translates to cars that could be compelling.
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.
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.)
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.
But a car is hardly just a large phone.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
EDIT: clarification
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.
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.
Tesla has shipped their custom SoC in every new car since April 2019.
In particular, you assert that:
1 - phone is more complex than a car
2 - if phones is more complex than a car, then the organisation that produced it can produce a car.
You have provided nothing to back them up. I am in particular disagreeing with the second one.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Apple has negliglible experience dealing with the raft of certifications and demonstrations of compliance that car manufacturers have to go through.
> 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.
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf18/DEN180044.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
If their staff can’t figure it out, they have plenty of cash to hire the people or organizations that do.
- 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.
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.
> Lights
iPhones definitely have lights.
I am sorry, are you trolling?
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.
Seriously, you putting a bullet point with no explanation, and got an equally terse rebuttal. You didn't "win" that.
A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.
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.
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.
[1]https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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 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?
And on, and on, and on...
For a company like Apple, making a car is child's play.
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 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.
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.
So Apple, the world's most valuable company, isn't going to be able to make their own car? You're dreaming.
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.
0: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nissan-picks-japan-over-sunde...
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.
Google and Nest on the other hand...
For reference, a single car has about 30,000 parts, built by dozens of suppliers.
“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)
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.
iCar
Space gray, chamfered edges, 115 hp, 4 wheels
$100,000
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.
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.
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.
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.
"the risk that Toyota, with demonstrated volume manufacturing prowess, is unable to pivot into a new class of vehicles"
is greater than
"the risk that a new manufacturer, with no track record of volume automotive manufacturing, can create a product and manufacture it in volume"?
That was my original contention and where I feel the market is mispricing risk.
How many theories and case studies are there documenting how a company failed to execute something it's never done before, and has no competency at?
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.
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.
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.
Steve Jobs = Elon Musk in a different market.
Without someone in control who can make major decisions quickly, capital will not be enough for Apple.
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.
All of these things are outside of Apple's core focus and they are unlikely to possess an advantage over other players. Sort of like automobiles.
The world is starting to feel like 1999 all over again. People's visions are getting further and further removed from reality.
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.
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.
Car = game console = phone = laptop
Just another platform to own, so that one might control and tax users there-on.
It doesn't make design/manufacture/distribute cars - a massively complex thing - any easier.
It's very hard to enter markets against big incumbents, there needs to be some kind of approach.
Apple can expect to lose a lot of money for a very long time unless they are doing something tangential.
At best, Tesla factories are currently comparable to the state of the art in terms of car factory automation.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/984882630947753984
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...
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
Otherwise it has some nice features, comparable to some of my other cards but more tightly integrated with the phone.
That’s contactless payment. Entirely possible without any Apple anything.
A more cynical person might say that one of Apple’s strengths is marketing commoditised capabilities as something special.
Yes, I understand this, but if you are already part of the Apple ecosystem it's an excellent integration.
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.
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.
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.
I prefer hardware to software and I’d hate to control my Jeeps with a touchscreen but my Jeeps aren’t driving themselves.
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.
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.
Behold my 1989 Bronco II:
----------[++]-----------------------------------
MAX A/C PANEL PNL/FLR FLOOR FLR/DEF DEFROST
-----------------[++]----------------------------
COOL WARM
OFF * * * HI
PUSH FOR A/C
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.
It's near perfection in user interface design.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple has had multiple credit cards in the past.
Edit: found this after more Googling: https://www.cultofmac.com/614988/apple-credit-card-histor/
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.
From my experience, Tesla's tech (I drive a VW) is ahead of their competition pretty handily.
The new Ford Mustang Mach looks competitive, but even that is still at least 9 months away.
The VW id4 EV is sold out, and they are taking pre-orders for the next batch.
Tesla has first mover advantage when it comes to mass market EV's. It's not just cult of personality.
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.
Which you can consider Nissan to be as well.
- 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.
"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.
Elon is rapidly turning into a toxic personality for (a bit more than) half the country.
The people who think Elon and his jokes are as bad as JK Rowling are kidding themselves and likely have a few skeletons in their closets themselves.
The worst thing he has said recently was a super cryptic meme about people thinking they are better than everyone for having pronouns in their bio.
Ouch! That really hurt... /s
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/ARKInvest/ARK-Invest-Tesla-Valuation-Mode...
What numbers are we talking about here?
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.
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.
But usually the rewards are all anyone cares about, and the Apple Card is decidedly mediocre and pell mell here.
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.
The customer service is also over the top.
Every other manufacturer will be licensing Tesla’s IP, IMHO.
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.
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
Disclaimer - long TSLA and drive a model 3
Building car companies from scratch is really, really hard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Also I think they and the market (investors) dont want/expect them to be a part of a supply chain.
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.
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.
Electric vehicles aren't new, as a child my milk was delivered from an electric vehicle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
Also, 2024 still seems aggressive to deploy self-driving for real.
Extremely good build quality? Accessories notwithstanding, most of their products look and feel like they were built extremely well.
Even their failures like the butterfly keyboard looked and felt like they were built to extremely tight tolerances.
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 could believe that their test rig didn't adequately simulate the motions/stresses of finger keypresses.
Uh, the butterfly isn't used in Apple keyboards anymore. They reverted to the old scissor switch design some time ago.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Would I have to flip my iCar over and plug into the bottom center?
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.
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.
My interactions with Tesla service since acquiring my Model 3 in December 2018:
(1) Install rear spoiler (out of stock when car originally ordered - free service)
(2) Upgrade self-driving computer to version 3 (free service given the car had the FSD option)
(3) Rotate tires
All three were performed at my home, at my convenience, by a tech who just showed up and did his business without needing my attention.
Car and experience have been great - so good that my wife leased a Model 3 in 2019 and will be replacing it with a Model Y when the lease expires.
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.
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.
If the windows start to fog during one of those situations, taking your attention off the road to look and swipe is very dangerous.
Edit to add: Is the voice processing being handled on board? If not, then if your signal fails....
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.
You do need to speak loudly, and there's an unfamiliar concentration aspect to using a voice command rather than a switch.
I prefer everything else about the 3.
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.
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
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.
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.
I suspect Apple would get this stuff better.
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 wouldn't have minded a HUD that I could turn on and off though.
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.
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.
Talking to electronics does not increase practical safety.
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 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.
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 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.»)
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.
I shouldn't say to my car what I want the car to do, I should do it.
Also, I listen to loud music when I drive.
Imagine you are driving and the kids start activating car functions because it's fun.
Thanks but no thanks.
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.
Similarly in many cases with windshield wipers, headlights, windows, temperature controls, etc.
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.
You can also be a mute and use it.
big difference uh?
But they also have an extensive partnership with Waymo: https://self-driving.lyft.com/riders/
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.
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)
(Photo of someone else's dash: https://cars.usnews.com/static/images/Auto/izmo/323783/2010_... )
It also totally sounds like something Apple would do.
[0] ATP 409 https://atp.fm/409
But they have to be used appropriately.
A touchscreen for wiper control, or to turn on defrost, or to flash your headlights at another car is NOT appropriate.
A touchscreen for a nav display, or to set infrequently used preferences is very appropriate.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
It'll only work with an iPhone.
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.
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.
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!
We shouldn't accept it anywhere. We need strong laws to prevent anyone from doing this.
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.
They started doing that with iPhones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Simple compared to what? They're way more complex than anything Apple makes now.
I guess there is a premium you pay when acquiring a public company, but still astounding numbers.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/29/apple-q4-cash-hoard-heres-ho...
Or beyond their hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to hire a team needed to deliver on this.
They spent about 3/4 the market cap of Mazda to buy Beats.
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.
From my long time reading on HN, 99.99% of HN have absolutely zero visibility and knowledge on anything with Supply Chain.
I mean even the Web Industry and Programmers all jumped on to Cloud computing they dont have have the concept of "lead time" anymore.
As in: efficient, large volume manufacturing and supply chain management. But that's obviously a very different kind of challenge.
He said the same thing about the new SpaceX rocket, Starship, which is supposed to be produced in large volumes.
Neither did Jeff Bezos.
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.
Apple can do it if they really want do, but lets not pretend it is easy.
As Gruber quipped - “This car is as smart as Siri” sounds like a threat, not a selling point.
Then how can Elon Musk pull it off with only 50%?
Also, I'm just a guy on the internet, I really hope Cook sees this and decides to spite me and build an awesome car, I'm also a dreamer.
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.
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.
As in, “yes it technically can place and receive calls but that is the most boring thing that it does.”
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’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.
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.
Apple is likely not gone compete on price.
So not sure what the angle is here.
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.
Apple is likely not gone compete on price.
So not sure what the angle is here.
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.
“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.
Why can't they just pay it out to shareholders and let them figure out how to invest it?
Edit: corrected an order of magnitude error in figures! Thanks umeshunni
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.
He understands business perfectly, but does he understand product?
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'd say his record is pretty spotty.
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.
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.
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.
Apple's not going to go into cars unless it's confident of being able to make equivalent margins.
That's the entire point.
The auto industry has historically been a low margin, low volume, high capital investment industry with significant government subsidies.
Buying 40% of Tesla would have been a drop in the bucket for Apple, and it would have already payed off big time.
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.
> So this may just be Apple selling BYD cars outside China.
In this case BYD would not just be a "manufacturing partner". Apple would simply be selling an OEM product.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Automobiles/Foxconn-aims-fo...
Tesla and others are already using LFP as well btw.
Being successful at building another electric car would be certainly interesting.
Being successful at building a self-driving car would be one of 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
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.
Now Apple has bitten the ...? I expect MS to follow suit soon.
https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/crash.htm
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+self+driving+car&o...
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.
Battery life: changes depending on if we have a new model
Color: Rose gold or black
In comparison Tesla S carries huge amount of dead weight in 18650 casings, redundant conductors, electrodes, and battery module casings.
BYD Han has very big cells, and single simple module body, and actually beats Tesla on whole battery energy density.
Try to do it with cobalt base cathodes, they will shred themselves with internal expansion after a few charge cycles.
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.
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.
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?
(More clichés welcome)
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.
edit: Standard Oil was the company I was thinking about but the structure of it will be more like General Electric
Newborn Californians won't ever be able to purchase an ICE car, because they'll be banned entirely in 2035.
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.
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..."
When companies with the resources of a FAANG enter industries like that, they're able to make it price competitive quickly.
For example, what Netflix did to the cable industry.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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.
Definitely not the same.
I don't pay for Disney+ or Hulu, but I use my friend's (sorry "family's") account.
Additionally, canceling any of these services is trivial, and I can stagger them month by month if I wanted.
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.
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?
Come join us in reality when you're ready, man.
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:)
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.
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
source: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/june/we-need-more-m...
And this is just UK.
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.
Don't compete with Tesla on sportscars. Be the new minivan.
I do wonder if Apple building a car would generate some sort of similar epiphany, related to batteries or not.
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.
I think there’s space for innovation there. The new Citroen Ami, for example, is a bolder design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric) ), but I think one can do better.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Highlander#/media/File:...
Not to mention when it comes to self driving technology Apple probably lags Waymo by a number of years.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Multipla#/media/File:Fiat...
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:
- America will maintain leadership in innovation
- Consumers will benefit
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.
I would say so.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/29/apple-q4-cash-hoard-heres-ho...
I think the answer is Yes regardless of the industry (or small country).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_International
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.
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
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.
Buying a manufacturer would bring all of that in-house.
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.
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.
Die hard apple fans will love it no matter what and no matter what they sell and at what price, they'll buy it.
I think Apple will outsource it, although the article did say talks with Magna fell through.
Dyson seems like it has the know how to do production in-house, but their car project failed.
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
Samsung is in that game now since they purchased harman kardon
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.
Apple can’t even make a simple stupid phone that doesn’t break.
They can’t even make a simple stupid cable that’s functional, and can last 10,000s of usage, and is not just for show.
And plus, they’ll sell you the car, and make you buy the cable, and claim they’re doing it for environmental reasons.
They’re going to have a reality check when it comes to cars.
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.
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.
The reality distortion Apple has pulled on its most euphoric apologists is insane.
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.
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.
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.
They are the opposite of Microsoft which is a software company that makes hardware to showcase their software.
I can’t even run the later safari on a non apple product.
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”.