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I’m still not certain why Apple keeps resetting this project. Is it really going to bring in that much revenue? Maybe they should focus on AI instead and work on this on a smaller scale.
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The Apple Watch has the ability to be one of their most transformative products and if the rumors are true about what their new services are going to offer, it’s going to rattle the industry.

The days of shiny new objects are gone for the foreseeable future. AR and VR tech isn’t anywhere near good enough yet for Apple to get involved with.

What are they doing with services? Which rattles out brain?
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There is no money in autonomous vehicles. Hope they bail completely.
Sure, a handful of companies with figure it out, but then it's just a matter of "who can get me to the airport the cheapest". A race to the bottom. Get out now.

Haha, You seem not really visionary. They whole industry will get transformed with autonomous, the whole society. Everything will be constantly moving!

Getting to the airport will be the least in this vision!
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I'm actually curious if Field left Apple for Tesla with the agreement he would return to Apple to lead their car project. It's amazingly suspicious to me.

They took him back to evaluate their effort, and killing it, if Tesla is far superior. Which they seem to be.

Cook should jump over his ego and take in one visionary (like me) who can establish the reality distortion field and push the boundaries. He might have tried anyways but failed, who knows.

Maybe he’s just an angry old man, abusing apple for his ego # most here agree that apple has deserved better!
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Any delivery figures for e-tron and taycan? How many i3s and i8s were delivered in 2018? So far they produce a magnitude less vehicles than Tesla. Future promises often turns into new promises rather than deliveries, the E-tron was introduced 2009 and has been promised so many times in between but it is first now we start to see small scale. And range and effiency is much worse for the E-tron than for the larger Model X:
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Tesla made like $3B i FCF in the last two quarters. This is not small by any means. The reason their profit is not higher is because they pay back loans and invest new production capability.

Once competitors... If competitors wanted they could. At some point companies like Jaguar, Volvo, BMW who are seeing their market cap and profits becoming much smaller than Tesla might want to actually do it. But why not do it already if they can?

EVs are rapidly getting close to having a lower TCO in many places around the world. That is why we are seeing figures for sales explode in China, Norway, Californa etc and we will soon see figures explode in many more places.

You are right.
German car will jump in 2022 until then they will still abuse IcE and market power. Tesla will have its 3 gigafactory up by then and an output of about 2 million cars a year.
And Tesla will have the most advanced autonomous driving, which means full self driving.

Apple will eventually have 5g and a foldable
 
This company has more money than anyone else - and they have invented pretty much nothing interesting since Steve-o left us. Cooke is good at operations - but their product development sucks now. I literally had to ask Siri how to turn off the new iphone. Get rid of the new Balmer and put in a true visionary to lead this thing.
becoming Microsoft of the 90s
 
Tesla is not as far ahead as you think, in my opinion.

Tesla is a poor car manufacturer with an old Toyota facility and a limited market, for a car relying a lot on expiring subsidies. They struggle to make cars with consistent quality and fit and finish.

The company is burning cash and loses more as they produce more cars. I realize they have made a small profit the last 2 quarters, but they have vaporized billions overall and still lost over $1B in 2018.

Once competition cares enough about EVs to make them, you’ll see the lead evaporate quickly because there are highly competent competitors with much stronger brands and far better production ability. Watch a BMW being assembled.

BMW shipped over 100,000 cars with some electric component and something like 50,000 all electric vehicles. You think they are just going to die when the electric car gets big? And BMW is a stronger brand.

Electric vehicles are still a ways off and have many drawbacks to gas powered cars as of today, mainly cost, range, electric stations, needs for special home equipment, and ease of fill up.
We've been hearing each quarter how bad Tesla is doing, how much money they are burning, how they are in the red. But yet, they are making a profit these days. Quite how anyone thought you could go from building <1000 cars a year to 10,000 cars a week without spending huge amounts of money, I'll never know.

I bet if you asked GM or Ford to start from fresh and build 10,000 electric cars a week, their finance sheets would look a lot worse than Tesla's! You mention BMW being a stronger brand, they have been selling millions of cars for the last 70 years or something. If they weren't a strong brand, there would be questions asked. But even the might of BMW can't come up with a car that has the range and performance of a 7 year old Tesla Model S!

Whether you like Musk or not doesn't matter. Tesla have advanced electric cars more than all the big players have combined. They still give the best range and best performance. When the Roadster 2 comes out it will re-write the rule book on what we thought was possible with cars.
 
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I've said this before a bunch of times, and been mainly dismissed but more and more is showing it's probably true:

I bet Apple wasn't planning for this project to be bring in revenue. Instead Apple wanted a seat at the table of any autonomous car industry if/when it materialized so they could make sure their other products and services integrate well. There is no better way to guarantee yourself a seat at the table than by investing early in R&D to develop lots of valuable IP. I think that is what Apple did (and might still be doing). If they get a modest patent portfolio out of this research, and maybe develop a few innovative algorithms or technologies, it will have been worth it.

This probably took up a small percentage of their R&D budget, so it probably didn't cost much relatively speaking. It just got a ton of media coverage because anything related to Apple is news and anything related to autonomous driving is news, put the two together and it's always guaranteed to draw lots of eyeballs and clicks. But don't confuse media attention to importance within Apple - it probably wasn't considered very important.

Titan got a small amount, haha ... it was way the biggest ever budget and they sank it!
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Tesla is not as far ahead as you think, in my opinion.

Tesla is a poor car manufacturer with an old Toyota facility and a limited market, for a car relying a lot on expiring subsidies. They struggle to make cars with consistent quality and fit and finish.

The company is burning cash and loses more as they produce more cars. I realize they have made a small profit the last 2 quarters, but they have vaporized billions overall and still lost over $1B in 2018.

Once competition cares enough about EVs to make them, you’ll see the lead evaporate quickly because there are highly competent competitors with much stronger brands and far better production ability. Watch a BMW being assembled.

BMW shipped over 100,000 cars with some electric component and something like 50,000 all electric vehicles. You think they are just going to die when the electric car gets big? And BMW is a stronger brand.

Electric vehicles are still a ways off and have many drawbacks to gas powered cars as of today, mainly cost, range, electric stations, needs for special home equipment, and ease of fill up.

Why always mention the OLD factory ... they have brand new German technology in there, which they flew in with airplanes, are You doing this on purpose?
 
Affected employees include 38 engineering program managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers, and 22 software engineers, with the layoff set to happen on April 16.

Awesome. One manager per 2.5 people who were doing the actual work. That's corporate BS at its best right there. No wonder this thing failed.
 
Awesome. One manager per 2.5 people who were doing the actual work. That's corporate BS at its best right there. No wonder this thing failed.

Was waiting for that comment. How do You want to ramp up something new if You only have workers and not a huge amount of people structuring, envision and coordinating the effort?
 
Why always mention the OLD factory ... they have brand new German technology in there, which they flew in with airplanes, are You doing this on purpose?

He probably has his own agenda badmouthing Tesla. The simple reality is that once you drove in a Tesla (preferably a model S) - and you don't even have to sit behind the steering wheel to make that experience - you don't want any other car anymore. If you can afford a Tesla, it's the only car worth buying -- yes, the Tesla experience is THAT good.
 
You would have thought that Apple would be moving them all over rather than laying them off.
Yes, I agree.

Though I suspect some skills and know how is quite specific to car manufacturing…

Anyway, I hope they get employed soon. I guess having Apple on the resume would help. Though they might be prevented from being employed in a similar industry (as sometimes get stipulated in contracts.)
 
Doug Field is back at Apple to oversee an Apple Car running Apple Car OS. He is restructuring his team. All the dire takes are unfounded.
 
As this winter is proving, self driving cars have a very long way to go to be a reliable year around technology. The car can't follow a road line if it's buried in snow, or know who is drifting into whose lane if the center lines aren't readily visible. And if you put out a self driving car that doesn't work for 2-5 months of the year you probably won't get a lot of takers.

The problems go a lot deeper. This is both an infrastructure problem, where road marking devices could be placed on roads so that being covered doesn't make the marker useless like painted lane lines are now, and privacy. No one wants to pay to do whatever technology needs to be added so that cars know where they are within a few inches on the road. And if the car knows where you are, and WHO you are, this means that someone can track where you go every time you drive. Someone may be a company, an individual, or a government. It probably will be a mixture of all of those.
 
38 engineering program managers, out of how many? This seems like a lot to me, but I don't know. Could be that they are working on small experiments/tests to see where they can add value.
 
They have to cover Timmy's inflated salary and bonuses some how and why not on the backs of their employees.
 
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it was way the biggest ever budget

upload_2019-2-28_9-51-7.jpeg
 
We've been hearing each quarter how bad Tesla is doing, how much money they are burning, how they are in the red. But yet, they are making a profit these days. Quite how anyone thought you could go from building <1000 cars a year to 10,000 cars a week without spending huge amounts of money, I'll never know.

I bet if you asked GM or Ford to start from fresh and build 10,000 electric cars a week, their finance sheets would look a lot worse than Tesla's! You mention BMW being a stronger brand, they have been selling millions of cars for the last 70 years or something. If they weren't a strong brand, there would be questions asked. But even the might of BMW can't come up with a car that has the range and performance of a 7 year old Tesla Model S!

Whether you like Musk or not doesn't matter. Tesla have advanced electric cars more than all the big players have combined. They still give the best range and best performance. When the Roadster 2 comes out it will re-write the rule book on what we thought was possible with cars.
They lost $1B in 2018 and made half as much profit Q/Q. They are hardly "making profit these days."

I like Elon Musk, but his company is financially crap.
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Any delivery figures for e-tron and taycan? How many i3s and i8s were delivered in 2018? So far they produce a magnitude less vehicles than Tesla. Future promises often turns into new promises rather than deliveries, the E-tron was introduced 2009 and has been promised so many times in between but it is first now we start to see small scale. And range and effiency is much worse for the E-tron than for the larger Model X:
View attachment 823821
[doublepost=1551335498][/doublepost]

Tesla made like $3B i FCF in the last two quarters. This is not small by any means. The reason their profit is not higher is because they pay back loans and invest new production capability.

Once competitors... If competitors wanted they could. At some point companies like Jaguar, Volvo, BMW who are seeing their market cap and profits becoming much smaller than Tesla might want to actually do it. But why not do it already if they can?

EVs are rapidly getting close to having a lower TCO in many places around the world. That is why we are seeing figures for sales explode in China, Norway, Californa etc and we will soon see figures explode in many more places.
Net, Tesla lost $1B in 2018. I'm not saying they are a dead company. I'm saying eventually they are going to have to get their costs under control and make real EPS. The road to do that is not easy and the stock is way ahead of reality.
 
Autonomous cars are AI applications.

And the car tackles a show host of issues that can be applied to other Apple product. Like learning how to create models that learn from their errors. Imagine a phone that learns you always misspelled certain words while texting. Or a system that knows when you are driving a car, and not just a passenger. That could automatically send calls to voicemail, text - sorry I am driving, etc....
All of those things have been out, in some cases for years. Heck, the very first iPhone in 2007 had adaptive auto-correct.



Mike
 
Why don't they figure out how to make CarPlay work correctly and then work their way up?

Anybody have any idea how to turn off the "Recently Added" screen? Never used it, never will.
 
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