Apple Cancels Work on Electric Car, Ending Decade long Effort
The most recent approach discussed internally was delaying a car release until 2028 and reducing self-driving specifications from Level 4 to Level 2+ technology.
Many employees on the car team — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division
It's a classic case of Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma". Also, it's REALLY HARD to make a breakout automobile. (Tesla almost did, but screwed the pooch with bad quality control, poor ergonomics, and toxic company culture.) And even if you do, Ford/GM/Toyota/VW will catch up within a decade and eat your lunch. It's why most auto startups seem to be hypercars with a 7-digit price tag—there's a ridiculous profit margin—but production volume is too tiny for Apple to touch.
@cstross I can't say I'm surprised. All the Apple Car rumors made me wonder "where's the value for Apple here and why should they bother?" and I could never figure out an answer that seemed worth the hassle.
Apparently that's true of people inside Apple too.
@wordshaper They did have a break out in the watch industry, of all places (Apple Watch went from zero to the world's bestselling luxury watch brand in 12 months flat, knocking Rolex off the top spot) ... but the Watch is a "hobby" project in Apple product terms: I'm still not sure why they went there.
@cstross True! Though when you think about it, the only real "watch" thing about an Apple Watch is you wear it on your wrist. The largest part of its value is in things that aren't really watch-like. (In a lot of ways it's as much a wristwatch as an iPhone is a pocketwatch, to stress this metaphor a bit too much)
@wordshaper@cstross That's a good point. It's a watch the way the iphone is a phone: it has that shape and occupies that physical space, but the watch/phone aspect is minimal.
@orionkidder@wordshaper@cstross I would say I use my Apple Watch more as a watch than I use my iPhone as a phone. That said, I find a lot of utility from having a notification device and remote control for my phone strapped to my wrist. Also the health end of things (pulse, etc) works well from a wrist mounted device. I think it's been successful because it was very quickly quite useful.
@Chigaze@wordshaper@cstross Fair! My wife has one and wears it all the time. The ability beep her phone to find it is pretty sweet, plus receiving texts. She loves it. I can't imagine strapping that much money in such a breakable for to my wrist.
@orionkidder I will say that the Apple Watches are extremely sturdy. I've been wearing one since the v1 days and the worst I've ever had is a little scratch or two on the face. I will grant I've gotten the mid-range one with the stronger crystal on purpose, but it's done what it claims on the tin and has been extremely sturdy. (Which makes sense -- whacking your wrist on something hard enough to damage a watch hurts and generally you'll just Not Do That)
@cstross@wordshaper
I always assumed it was a halo lubricant. I think it works reasonably well for that. The revenues may be incremental, but they firm up commitment.
@FeralRobots@wordshaper Per Statista (not the best site) Apple has sold about 54 million watches from 2015 through 2022. So maybe 60 million by now, at an average price of say $500 (assuming most folks buy the cheap model), that'd be $30Bn, or maybe $4-5Bn/year.
@FeralRobots@wordshaper ... And MacWorld estimate that Apple Watch passed the 100 million mark in December 2020; every third iPhone purchaser in the US also buys an Apple Watch, Watch is in fourth place in sales behind iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
@cstross@FeralRobots ...it's entirely possible the Apple Watch exists because Tim Cook runs and was annoyed by how bad fitness trackers were. A petty reason but maybe the case. (And if so I'm good with it, I rather like mine as a fitness gadget)
Possibly they're also taking a long view and just waiting for some new health sensors -- if it ever gets blood pressure or glucose monitoring those sales numbers will get a nice boost.
@wordshaper@FeralRobots Wrist-mounted blood pressure is a non-starter: wrist cuff monitors exist, the accuracy is piss-poor (they depend on height relative to your heart). Non-invasive glucose monitoring would be the killer app, but the FDA just had to post a warning that no such devices exist yet and are licensed ...
@cstross@FeralRobots Oh, yeah, I know they don't exist now. I'm not sure wrist-mounted BP will ever exist, though non-invasive glucose monitoring might one of these days. (Maybe if they get very clever with lasers and such. Maybe)
@wordshaper@FeralRobots I want non-invasive glucose monitoring. As about 10% of us will end up with type ii diabetes eventually, that really is a killer app for smartwatches—although the flood of GLP-1 agonists hitting the market since Semaglutide (Wegovy/Ozempic/Rybelsus/etc) may render it less necessary.
@wordshaper@cstross@FeralRobots
The technology for wrist mounted BP is available, it’s just going to take someone to put the development and manufacturing money into it. The idea is to use near infrared light which penetrates the skin to measure blood flow changes during the pulse and estimate pressure from that. The research on this dates back at least 45 years, I remember reading about it when I worked in a physiology lab in the 70s.
@SpeakerToManagers@cstross@FeralRobots right, the tech for wrist mounted BP exists. Unfortunately the tech for accurate standalone wrist mounted BP tech doesn’t exist. Aside from a number of issues with calibration and skin tone, the existing tech is… not great. It needs to be externally calibrated regularly, has a significant set of error bars, and doesn’t work for lots of folks.
Samsung, for example, tried this. The results were unfortunately awful.
@wordshaper@cstross@FeralRobots
Machine learning may be a solution for the calibration problem. I’m not optimistic any of the tech companies will be motivated to solve the skin tone problem, as they still haven’t built a bathroom towel dispenser or a sink faucet control that works right for non-white people.
@SpeakerToManagers@cstross@FeralRobots it depends on the reasons for the inaccuracy. I suspect it’s not a calibration or tuning issue but rather that trying to measure blood pressure entirely optically is just inherently inaccurate.
If you have reliable measurements then machine learning algorithms can translate them into meaningful numbers, but if the underlying measurements have large error bars then no amount of statistical cleverness is going to help.
@heavyboots Apple's AI strategy predates the current fad by some years: it runs on the Apple Neural Engine coprocessors embedded in M-series and A-series CPUs, doing stuff like realtime OCR and face recognition on your phone. Some of the LLM work will be rolled into improving Siri, which they first rolled out in 2011.
Hopefully they're not buying into the OpenAI/NVidia driven GPT fad …
It made good sense for Apple to explore the self-driving aspect. That problem turned out to be as hard as most people thought it was. If it were doable, I think they'd potentially be very good at it.
Take that away, and the EV market is basically a battery market, which is not Apple's thing.
Anyway the space is invaded by hucksters at the moment (not just Elon) so I'd suppose that makes it even less appetizing.
@cstross This makes me wonder if it's just the first of many to back away. Either they have to admit it's not going to work—going from 4 to 2+tech is admitting defeat—or they already made their real money through investors and tax breaks, so they're getting out while they can, or both, in which case MANY people who believed the hype will be left holding the bag: investors and taxpayers. Not to mention, the murder machines on our streets. The people died for NOTHING.
@orionkidder AIUI Project Titan cars never drove on the public streets in self-driving mode. I'm not sure they ever got as far as building a vehicle. (You're thinking of some other companies …)
@mjausson They ARE batteries on wheels, but the computer side ... ugh. Mind you, if Apple got serious about ICE and partnered with an existing major manufacturer who were willing to let them, they could maybe force the industry to shift gear on UX design. But it'd still be a stupidly unprofitable side-quest for them.
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