'Apple Car' Project Lead Steve Zadesky to Leave Apple

[Rogifan]

When corporations fire someone, they always say it's for personal reasons, or to pursue other opportunities. Both sides sign non-disclosure agreements and severance goes from the "fireor" to the "fireee" (I know, no such words).

But nobody has said this guy was fired. It is possible for people to leave companies voluntarily. Maybe this guy had family reasons for leaving or maybe he was just burned out and wants to do something different or just take time off and enjoy all the money he's made.

Great point. They cant.

Since the idea of a fully featured self driving Apple Car is so preposterous, Apple should simply stay out of the automotive industry altogether . They're making the same mistake they made in the late 80s, getting in to too many industries and supporting too many product lines.

They should be using those billions of dollars of R&D money and talented engineers to make their existing products (iPhone) more compelling. Adding features like AI would make it even more compelling, and would be such large breakthroughs that they could make billions just by licensing out the technology (yes by this point I do realizing that horse that I am beating on is dead). Unless they can think of an entirely new consumer technology product, this really is the only logical move. Physical devices are likely to become less and less profitable over time as more innovation occurs in the cloud, which is why Microsoft is pouring so much investment into it (albeit in an unintelligent manner)

How do we know Apple isn't working on these things? I don't know why people assume this car project is the only thing Apple is working on from an R&D standpoint. Jony Ive has said 80% of the things they work on never see the light of day so I would imagine they have lots of things going on that we never hear about. Heck Tim Cook even said Apple is working on things that haven't yet made the rumor mill.

 

[AxoNeuron]

But nobody has said this guy was fired. It is possible for people to leave companies voluntarily. Maybe this guy had family reasons for leaving or maybe he was just burned out and wants to do something different or just take time off and enjoy all the money he's made.



How do we know Apple isn't working on these things? I don't know why people assume this car project is the only thing Apple is working on from an R&D standpoint. Jony Ive has said 80% of the things they work on never see the light of day so I would imagine they have lots of things going on that we never hear about. Heck Tim Cook even said Apple is working on things that haven't yet made the rumor mill.

The AI community is quite small and extremely talkative. Believe me, if Apple were actually working on a big AI effort...we would know before Jony Ive

My main argument here is that Apple needs to kill the car project yesterday. And if they don't already have a big AI effort going, then they definitely should, because Google is about to own the tech world of tomorrow otherwise. The less realistic efforts, like carbon nanotube and quantum computing, are less likely, but even these technologies would be far more profitable and more realistic than a self driving Apple car, and would have many less headaches (a quantum computer won't kill you because of a software glitch). Apple has a lot more experience in chip design than electric engines anyways.

 

[Rogifan]

The AI community is quite small and extremely talkative. Believe me, if Apple were actually working on a big AI effort...we would know before Jony Ive

My main argument here is that Apple needs to kill the car project yesterday. And if they don't already have a big AI effort going, then they definitely should, because Google is about to own the tech world of tomorrow otherwise. The less realistic efforts, like carbon nanotube and quantum computing, are less likely, but even these technologies would be far more profitable and more realistic than a self driving Apple car, and would have many less headaches (a quantum computer won't kill you because of a software glitch). Apple has a lot more experience in chip design than electric engines anyways.

You're not the first person to say Apple should kill x and be working on y instead. Like I said Tim Cook himself said Apple is working on things that haven't been rumored about. But if Apple investigating building an autonomous electric vehicle is such a horrible idea you'd think more people would be publicly speaking out against the idea of it. There's no shortage of opinions on Apple. So where is the mass concern about Cook wasting R&D on this (outside of message boards like this)? All I'm seeing is people welcoming Apple (and Google) to this space.

 

[AxoNeuron]

You're not the first person to say Apple should kill x and be working on y instead. Like I said Tim Cook himself said Apple is working on things that haven't been rumored about. But if Apple investigating building an autonomous electric vehicle is such a horrible idea you'd think more people would be publicly speaking out against the idea of it. There's no shortage of opinions on Apple. So where is the mass concern about Cook wasting R&D on this (outside of message boards like this)? All I'm seeing is people welcoming Apple (and Google) to this space.

The 'appeal to authority' argument (or appeal to the masses argument in your case) is a well known basic logical fallacy. Even Apple makes gigantic mistakes.

So unless you can explain how Apple could even possibly address the enormous number of basic psychological and technical problems with the Apple Car AND make money while doing it, be my guest.