Shifts team to generative AI.
If your car development team can be transferred to AI developement you weren't building much of a car.
This is referring to the team working on the self driving functionality.
Still, self driving and generative AI are very different. Just because they fall into the same big "AI" bucket doesn't mean it's the same.
Skilled developers can easily transition to another field of software engineering.
Even in 2024, there's still a lot of non-software (automotive) engineering involved in building a car -- even an electric one.
Yeah but a car is mostly made of engines and bolts and wheels and stuff like that, you know.
No one can become a skilled ML/AI dev overnight. That will still take a year or two or more of working with it daily. If you transition to a new field you basically become a junior dev all over again for a while. Domain knowledge is a big part of being a good programmer.
Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports
Except news always was that Apple was pushing pretty hard into self-driving vehicles, which would use much the same AI learning systems as you need for generative AI.
Ehh, that's a bit of a stretch. They're very different technologies with only limited overlap.
Thank fucking god. Imagine the kind of monetization that would exist inside an Apple car. You think subscription seatwarmers are bad, and they are, but I can guarantee Apple had much worse in mind, and that most companies would simply follow suit.
They would come up with a charging port that only existed in the parking lot of Apple stores
Also it would on the bottom of the car
Deserves a shoop
alt-text: actual Apple Mouse charging via its bottom port
(Interesting, this guy says it gains hours of charge in three minutes, and thinks Apple knew some would leave it plugged it at all times. Intentional sure but not exactly “brilliant”.)
Just flip it over to charge of course
Genuinely, this is the best news I've heard in a while for the reasons you listed. Apple is already fucking up the phone industry with anti-consumer policies that become industry trends. I shudder to imagine how deeply and irrepairably they would have fucked up the car market for consumers.
I was genuinely looking forward to them refusing to install airbags because it compromised the dashboard being 100% screen, and then later installing airbags in a “notch”, but calling them iBags, and advertising them as a revolutionary new feature that only Apple could think different enough to invent.
Not sure why everyone's cheering, more competition is never bad and there are already plenty of manufacturers adding subscriptions and such, I doubt Apple would even have been the worst.
At the very least, they probably would've had a slick UI in a world of crap infotainment UIs.
However they announced Carplay 2 a few years ago and I'm hoping manufacturers will go ahead with adding that as an option so you could just opt in to Apple UI all over the car and revert back at any time. This is probably the best of both worlds. There are plenty of companies that know quite well how to build a car, they just mostly still all suck at UI.
A problem with apple...Like if my friend has a Toyota, i can borrow that. If they have an icar, I probably couldn't drive it because I don't have an iPhone required to start it or apple shoes required to activate the pedals. You know they'd be dicks like that.
Warning: unauthorized, non apple certified tyres detected on your iCar. Disabling airbags due to security issue.
Setting destination to Apple Genius bar.
Competition usually isn't bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.
Apple can't compete in that space. Their schtick is producing moderately inexpensive nice looking goods for exorbitant prices that are designed to be impossible to repair by anybody with them.
Tesla has already corned the market.
Trying to block people from repairing? check, trying to block sales of used items? check. Getting rid of all the buttons for all the interfaces and making you work with a tablet in the center of the car? Check.
Apple isn't competition, Apple is a closed market, more anticompetitive than Microsoft and only undone by the degree of their control.
The fear for me was that Apple would grow quickly in the EV space due to its mainstream popularity, and then start doing the ecosystem thing so driving anything but an Apple car makes you a second-class citizen. Obviously it would only support Carplay and not Android Auto, and probably lack any sort of non-Carplay connectivity so you just can't connect your Android phone to it at all. Presumably it would also have a proprietary charger that doesn't work with other cars or vice versa.
Aww and I was looking forward to a chipped windscreen requiring the replacement of the entire cabin, unless the car had ever been in the rain, in which case fuck you buy a new one.
I really feel for the engineers and devs who don't get to see their project released into the world. Especially after so much effort.
I guess we will never see an electric car with the charging port on the bottom
As an engineer who's spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it's really not that bad. You're generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else's dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.
Maybe the i-bike is more appleish? Imagine this, it's a bike like other bikes, but you only need to pedal with one leg, and if you turn the pedal, the whole bike turns. Tilt it back to stop. Sure, you may look fucking stupid running around with only one pedal while your other leg does nothing at all. That's it. Oh, and it's white and smooth in gorme plastic-like design. You can charge your bike but you must remove the seat and turn it upside down using our special turning device since it's 700lbs.
Maybe they relized rhat they cannot trademark the itire and remotely lock it, and sell it for 20 times the price of a regular tire.
Apple was hoping to white label a Chinese ev and slap an iPad in it but the trade war is too hot now for them to deliver.
You joke but it's not terribly far off.
Their real hope was to get Hyundai Kia to build EVs for them. While letting Apple act like they were the majority stakeholder of the deal.
I think all those dongles hanging off the car would have been a problem anyway
TFA: decade-long
Spell-check: decade-long
OP: decadelong
Stop trying to make 'fetch' happen, Felicia.
This is good news for everyone else
Instead of trying to make a full electric car, I'm surprised Apple and Google aren't focusing on making a smart AI "head unit" that's compatible with third party car manufacturers. The head unit would control all aspects of the car through the CAN bus and also take camera/sensor inputs from the exterior of the vehicle, and be responsible for things like self-driving, lane assist and all those difficult AI-based features.
This way the car manufacturers could focus on what they do best (building safe reliable hardware) and outsource all the hard AI software problems to tech companies who specialise in this area.
I'll pass on having evil corps like Google put AI in my car.
Comma.ai is open source and does exactly what you are describing as that "head unit", not too mention is widely compatible with many car manufacturers.
Oh no all those developments that they introduced all going to stop, like nothing, bugger all, and zip.
They literally didn't do anything, they announced the car I think they had a concept vehicle which looked very apple, and then they did nothing at all ever again.
lol
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
