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Apple Car Hardware Engineer Leaves for Air Taxi Startup
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Apple car is a few years away at least. This should not have any impact on its development.
Please enlighten us on all you know about about how far along Apple is? You must have some insight other than just rumors about the project and reports of personnel hires and departures?
Google doesn't have some "advanced" AI technology - they have the data they can build highly accurate models from. Like humans who do not know all the facts, AI is only as smart as the quality and amount of data it can learn from. You feed it incorrect information or don't teach it enough and it would be just as moronic as most humans who prefer ignorance over effort.
Tesla's system is further along because they were able to gather data from their own cars they were selling and the millions of miles their customers were driving.
Apple has a sizable fleet of cars on the roads for their mapping efforts. Maybe they had the foresight to build sensors into cars to record driver reactions; braking, steering, eye tracking, etc. That would be extremely valuable data that could be used to train an autonomous system.
No one is "too late" into a nascent market if they have something new to bring along. Furthermore, I personally don't think Apple is building a car to sell to individuals, but rather a fleet of cars for a ride-hailing service. (There must've been a reason to invest in Didi, other than just for an investment opportunity?)
Because of Tesla, and now the larger, more established automakers getting into EVs in a big way, the actual cost and complexity of building an electric car continues to drop. Sooner or later, the car itself will be more or less a commodity with the profit margins dropping back to where they are with ICE vehicles. (OK, maybe slightly better because the cost of an electric vehicle is less than an ICE vehicle.)
However, what seems to be the next differentiating factors and value-add proposition will be design, the software (including full self-driving capabilities), comfort, convenience, and safety, the charging infrastructure, and on-going battery improvements.
I would not count Apple out yet, but they can't wait much longer to show their hand in this area.
Of course! Apple is working on an EV for the Metaverse. It seems so obvious now that you’ve pointed it out.
Sure, but Apple had Steve Jobs back then. Apple IS Steve Jobs. There has been nothing originally revolutionary at Apple since.
Wait, what about M1 I hear you say. Pfft, it's simply a beefed up A-series chip, which is all Steve, and the idea of using them in Macs was tossed up before he left. There's high quality hardware engineering in them, and the hardware team should take a bow, but nothing revolutionary that wasn't actually Steve.
And yes, the entire new MBPs are awesome, but in reality, the genius of them is merely undoing all the bad design mistakes from 2016-2020, and there's nothing in them that we all weren't begging for for all these years. It actually took Apple swallowing it's pride to finally make the changes that any one of us could have oversaw. The customers provided the wish list, Apple merely listened for once. Zero genius in it.
And yet, we are still putting up with horrendously poor software quality control. Can we please, please, simple have a macOS release that doesn't introduce any new features, but merely fixes all the stupid bugs.
If there really is a revolutionary and brilliant, game changing Apple car, then I will eat my words. But until it appears, it's all hot air and wishful thinking.
The biggest problem with Apple is that it focusses too much on profits first, product second. Thus there are a lot of big design decisions that revolve around sneakily maximising profits and sales, rather than maximising user experience first and letting the resulting profits flow. A dangerous game to play in the long term.
In the SmartPhone case, there is a factor of human-device interaction, in which any new comers could potentially make a big splash by introducing a good design. In the autonomous driving case, there is no such factor, in fact it’s the opposite, the best experience is to have ZERO human intervention, making it a pure technology topic.