I swear, this project has been declared dead like 5 times already by the media. Is it actually dead this time?
And I seem to recall Apple themselves have declared it abandoned at least once before, haven’t they?
Darn. Now I’ll never be able to not buy one.
The main advantages of Apple Car® is that it runs on Apple Road® and Apple Fuel®. It was made of commonly available standardised components such as nuts and bolts but with special Apple Thread Pitch® that require Apple Spanner® to use them. There are no instruction manuals to repair Apple Car®, only Apple Dealership® is permitted. The outcome of the marketing effort causes the users to eventually become delusional about the product, believing that they own the best product and refusing to entertain any evidence to the contrary, much like religious beliefs.
My first guess is that it would have been overpriced and deliberately incompatible with existing chargers. No loss.
And it slows itself down after 5 years… to save battery!
Nah they couldn’t figure out how to do it without windows.
Why do companies feel like that have to try and do everything?
Why can’t you just ‘stay in your lane’ and be good at what you’re good at.
Publicly traded companies need to constantly grow.
Ever expanding profit requires ever expanding scope until it doesn’t, then you can divest for profit and try again.
A lot of these tech companies got into cars because they viewed vehicles as a major new computing platform. Especially autonomous vehicles.
INFINITE GROWTH
I would LOVE to know what, if any IP, patents, or tech came out of this whole thing. I’m guessing “not much”.
They definitely applied for a shitload of patents:
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/07/25/apple-car-patent-applications/
https://www.patentlyapple.com/autonomous-vehicle-technology/
Seems the patents were the goal all along. Money by litigation and licensing.
All signs show that they were trying to build and ship something. Apple was in pretty close talks with vehicle manufacturers a few years ago. They were trying to find a manufacturing partner to pump out the cars. Apple was looking to have companies like Hyundai operate as their Foxconn for cars.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35411762/apple-hyundai-kia-deal-car/
Just because lots of patents exist, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t intent to ship. All of their shipping product lines have tons of used and unused patents that came from their r&d.
There are cheaper ways to make patent money than by spinning up an R&D auto division with thousands of people.
It was still going on?
I always saw this as just a way to compete with Google.
they’re supposedly moving them over to AI?
they could always return to a car, in the future, i guess. Right now people want AI (apparently)
Oh my god I completely forgot about that, jeez
This is the first I’ve heard about it
Your head must be buried in the sand then.
I don’t get why Apple just didn’t buy a car maker. Like they could just buy the Mercedes Benz group. Why start from scratch?
Because Apple is not a car maker. Making their own electric car was already pretty weird - buying an auto maker and having to run it would have been a huge distraction.
It would have made more sense for them to partner with another company on the car (maybe they even did?) than start buying and running a whole car company.
Rivian feels like it would be right up apples alley, that said, I’m glad they didn’t, I’d like to purchase a Rivian some day, and I don’t want it to be part of the apple ecosystem
people think they should buy Disney and Nintendo and others, but Apples culture is its obsession, and they never buy giant companies only tiny ones.
My opinion: Because Apple didin’t want to be a car manufacturer. It’s a low margin and capital intensive business (especially compared to what Apple does). And just becoming one of many wouldn’t actually move the needle on apples scale.
Most articles I’ve read focus on the electric car part, but imo that nowadays is essentially a solved problem. And even when they started I think it should have been clear that electric cars will actually have less complexity than cars with combustion engines. And the hardest part is the battery chemistry, which will in the end also be a commodity.
The general software they are already providing with Apple carplay and as seen this doesn’t really require them to build cars.
The real technology problem to solve is autonomous driving. And it seems like Apple wasn’t really able to solve it or at least make faster progress than others. Similar to Tesla which hasnt been able to deliver on that front either and is the only car manufacturer priced as a technology company. Which would have been Apple’s goal.
Have MB been for sale?
Their success with apple maps / navigation foreshadowed this event. They couldn’t even figure that out.
Jesus christ, you realize that happened 11 years ago, right?
