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Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

Not really the point. Apple succeeded because they applied their strengths, product and user interface design, to what is essentially a small computer.

Apple have always developed core products that are essentially a computer.

Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.

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> Even though cars increasingly look like laptops on wheels, the actual computer bit is relatively minor and the user interface is mostly the wheel and pedals, not so much the screen.

Ha, it seems like that to you because you are obviously a car person! For someone like me ideal Apple car would be something without any kind of wheels or pedals. Instead, I should be able to crawl drunk into it, mumble "Siri, take me home" and pass out snoring loudly on the back seat. I guess several years ago when it seemed that (true) self-driving cars are just around the corner Apple had something similar in mind.

I agree that a car is on a different scale, but I think it's only in hindsight that a phone is obviously just a computer and that the user interface is important part.

Do you really not see how a car is a much greater departure from their core expertise than the iphone? They were already making handheld electronic devices well before the iPhone. And they were making computers pretty much for the whole history of the company. Ipod touch was a natural evolution of the ipod and the iphone was basically just an incremental improvement on the ipod touch.

The closest thing they've made to a car is those wheels for the mac pro.

The Mac Pro comment is an unfair comparison. It's closer to a car on cinder blocks since the wheels cost extra.

iPhone predates iPod touch, though.

Wait, you're right. I could've sworn I remember the ipod touch being first.

Now I'm wondering why it existed it all.

Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.

iPods were just mid-tier consumer-electronics expensive; which, back in ~2005, was nowhere near entry-level smartphone expensive, let alone flagship smartphone expensive.

Then, after the iPhone started getting rev after rev, Apple's "lean manufacturing" cost-optimizations gradually led to "an iPod" just becoming a particular assemblage of reused old iPhone parts, optimized for manufacturing cost and battery life. All the other iPods died out, leaving only the iPod Touch, there to consume old iPhone parts off the line.

Around six years after that, "a commodity Android phone" became as cheap as an iPod Touch. At that point, the Touch continued to exist mostly due to brand value, and its ability to run iOS games (still a specific / "better" market than Android games, back then), without having to pay for an iPhone to do that.

It's only in the last five years that it began to make economic sense to just get your 6yo who wanted to play iOS games an old iPhone rather than a "new" iPod Touch. It was at the exact moment that happened, that Apple finally killed the iPod Touch.

Interesting, thanks for the history lesson. /g

> Because parents didn't want to buy an entire flagship smartphone just for their 6yo to listen to music on the schoolbus. But they were okay with buying them an iPod.

Yep. Well said. The cost of a full phone + expensive plan is a lot.

Plus kids wanted the apps (really games) the iPhone had. Apple wanted to sell them games.

And besides that parents were far more hesitant to give young kids phones than (for better or worse) than today.

The final reason I’ve heard is the number of hand-me-down phones given to kids now that smartphones are ubiquitous means sales slowly fell to ver little compared to when introduced.

And further, buying your kid an iPod Touch at the time served the same purpose (for Apple) as buying your kid an iPad today. It gets them into Apple's products space, develops brand affinity and trust, and gets them familiar with iOS so that they are more likely to buy an iPhone.

It would be surprising if we had stats on iPad versus non-iPad kids and what percentage of them ended up being iPhone users, and those stats didn't show a strong correlation.

> wheels for the mac pro

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-w...

700 bucks, now just imagine what one would have to pay for the wheels on your shiny new applecar

Turn your thinking around. The only reason we still call it a phone is because that's what the original function was. They are pocket computers in everything but name. A significant percentage of the population doesn't even use them for voice calls anymore.

And yet we're fine having the draconic business model of phone carriers from the 90s and early aughts carried into the modern day, just wielded by Apple instead of AT&T.

Computers run software the user asks for, phones run the software the phone manufacturer allows it to.

I think that’s why they were a bit more interested when the original idea was to skip all that and do all automatic driving.

But as soon as it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option I don’t understand why they didn’t just give up and instead seemed to try to shift towards a more normal car.

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