How Apple Sank About $1B a Year Into a Car It Never Built | Hacker News Reader

How Apple Sank About $1B a Year Into a Car It Never Built

bloomberg.com

17 pointsmfiguiere12 comments

Gotta love the arrogance of "We're Apple, we can show up and upset industries" (which they did with the desktop computer and phones, under Jobs btw), but not having a clue what that would mean with cars. I doubt a fully self-driving van would make a significant number of car enthusiasts/users say "I need one of those!"..

Phones maybe. I don't think they disrupted the desktop computer.

They pioneered the graphical user interface: https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

Note the part where the UI drastically changed after visiting Xerox PARC, and then ask yourself who really pioneered it.

Well they definitely commercialised it. Before the Lisa, no one thought consumers would be interested in a GUI computer. Bringing it to market is an important part of disrupting industries.

The iPhone was similar where the tech just existed out there (touch screen smart phones were definitely a thing), but it was Apple’s specific implementation that helped in the disruption. After both the Lisa and the iPhone launched, you can see computers and mobile phones coalescing around Apple’s vision in the long-run.

And yet it shows, yet again, the same about companies (and management). Steve Jobs was lucky, right time, right idea, right people, massive interest in the right things in the market, right location, right hardware available, right access to market and stores, production capacity available (for reasons entirely unrelated to what Apple did) ...

Yes they worked, but they rolled a hard 6 not once, but 20 times.

In other words: what about Apple makes them able to repeat this in another market? Nothing. Not even Steve Jobs (and yes I know he's ... which is yet another reason ...)

Jobs-era Apple had its share of failures too, we just ignore them because the successes were so successful.

Yeah, no phonemaker was using the capacitive multi-touch display...

https://archive.is/22XAp

In another timeline I would have loved to see what they came up with...

Imagine they could have set some new standards for what it means to drive a car.

I think people generally like driving cars. They just hate traffic.

We're arguably almost there with a lot of modern cars having assists that help with stop-start traffic situations. Granted, these assists are priced out of reach for most drivers as they are generally only offered on the top-trim, but I expect to see them appear as standard one day.

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