ioslifeApple cancels car project
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.
dan1101Or blaming customers for problems, “You’re shifting it wrong.”
Not sure if you’re aware that EVs don’t “shift” or if that’s an indictment to the level of idiocy that would likely be employed by Apple.
It’s a reference to an actual response from Jobs when the iPhone 4(?) had a bad antenna design.
Thank you. Apparently my half joke has rustled some jimmies.
I think it’s more that you missed Dan’s joke than anyone being upset.
Porsche begs to differ.
All you had to do was a basic search for what EVs have multiple gears, but you didn’t.
What I like is that a bunch of idiots seemed to take offense to my comment which was meant more as a joke. I do admit I wasn’t aware there were EVs with gears. Though this is mainly because I won’t be in the market for my next EV for hopefully years. When I was looking into it, it was largely seen as unnecessary.
Yeah I’m aware. There is no reason for EVs to shift, but Toyota was trying to add a manual transmission to an EV for some reason.
But “you’re shifting it wrong” would be a scenario like the car wouldn’t shift from P to D and Apple blames the driver.
They would come up with a charging port that only existed in the parking lot of Apple stores
Mayor PoopingtonAlso 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”.)
redcalciumPoor people shouldn’t drive an Apple car /s
Up to a certain point only. In most places you cannot hope to be able to sell a car that has not a minimum set of features mandated by the law.
And Apple cannot hope to compel states to change the rules just because so they can sell their car.
GiganThat’s disappointing. I hate apple, but I’d love to see more competition in the EV market
More? 22 brands released EVs last year alone. There are a LOT of options out there, with more to come. Apple would have been like, the 4,000th entrant in this market.
But their Cars would Cost ten Times as much and still there would be someone cultists defending the price
And what the EV market needs is a Model T, reliable and affordable. Not all these luxury models that go 0-60 in 3 seconds.
The Chevy Bolt is an EV that sells for less than $30,000 and gets 250 miles of range on a charge. The base model is even under $20,000 after the tax subsidy.
I think they discontinued the Bolt.
Yes, after a 7-year run they are retooling the factory for electric trucks, while committing to bringing a second generation Bolt to market sometime in 2025. Who knows if they’ll pull it off, but the sub-$30k EV market is going to grow with or without Chevy/GM.
There’s a tidal wave of “cheap and good enough” Chinese EVs starting to sweep the global market, fulfilling pretty much what you said. The new BYD Qin retails for $15,000.
If the US puts up protectionist trade barriers, the US auto market will turn into an enclave of gas guzzling SUVs, totally divorced from the rest of the world.
the US auto market will turn into an enclave of gas guzzling SUVs, totally divorced from the rest of the world
Already is lol. Ford I believe sells one car now, the Mustang.
Sure. There’s lots of competition in the EV market, but one more player wouldn’t hurt.
Anyone got a non-paywalled link?
RandomStickmanRelevant video
The Apple Car: An Embarrassing Disaster
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
I know this is a joke about the stupid Apple mouse, but a car with a bottom (and normal) charging port would be pretty cool. Imagine just pulling into your garage and a giant MagSafe charger snaps to the bottom of your car. (Yes, I know this is unreasonable with current technology due to poor energy efficiency)
HamartiogonicI haven’t looked at the bottom of my car in a while, but judging by the amount of dust, mud and ice I see everywhere else, the bottom probably isn’t very clean. During January the ice coating got so thick that I had trouble opening the back doors. Makes me wonder how the charging port would handle that.
After all the layoffs in the tech sector, it’s doubtful it were even the original engineers working on the project.
It’s kinda part of the job. Several times in my career I’ve put in months of effort on projects that then get canned for various reasons. One of them was 100% complete. No real big deal, it’s still a good billet on my resume.
a1studmuffinAs 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.
This is layoffs.
Did you read the article? Says they’re going to work on AI
Five people out of hundreds will yes.
This is layoffs.
Shifts team to generative AI.
If your car development team can be transferred to AI developed you weren’t building much of a car.
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.
ZagorathSDA - software defined automobile
Highway infrastructure as code
Stop I’m unironically excited for this distant possibility.
I’m already impressed by how much the UI for cars have been separatedfromm mechanical systems.
Electric cars have a lot more tunability from a software view too. Clearly there is a plenty of real world between the chips and where the rubber meets the road too.
So I get a free car and the owner gets to keep the original? Like hell I wouldn’t.
For real!
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 of working with it daily. If you transition to a new field you basically become a junior dev all over again for a while.
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.
The skills are similar enough to be transferable
Well yeah they were achieving absolutely nothing in self-driving vehicles so I suppose they can transfer those skills to do achieve absolutely nothing in AI
If you’re only just now entering the AI market you’re not going anywhere
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
One question for you smarty pants: is their car real, or artificial?
Well, at this point it is theoretical.
Once upon a time, stoves had a dial you set, and it was basically a resistor and some wires. Today, a stove has a computer built in it that operates the entire thing.
While the computer in a modern oven is simple - it is an illustration that more, and more of what we have is computerized. When you add in reinforcement learning algorithms to adjust factors like say, If the fridge is aware of what time you generally open the fridge it can opt to kick on the heat pump a little before that to bring the temperature down and avoid running while it is open. This could save pennies of electricity in a year. But more importantly - could lead to less duty cycles on the condesor that could cause a fridge to say instead of lasting 10 years, last 12 years.
If you are starting a car company today, what you have to be thinking about is a reality where we move to “Humans don’t drive, the cars drive you” - I mean even a manual control situation could have the AI actually being a watcher in effect we “Let” people drive, but if the AI detects an unobserved obstacle etc it immediately takes over and adjusts. Well: You need to build that - and that, is AI.
If a company isn’t thinking about AI, and makes anything but basic appliances - they are likely on a limited time window because at some point Autonomous cars WILL be good enough, and the safety consideration will make both people, and governments, along with insurance companies to eliminate human driven vehicles.
Apple isn’t looking next year, or a year after. They are looking 5 to 10 years out and they don’t see a path where they can effectively compete in the car industry and make the profits they are after. However, if they can solve the AI driving problem - they don’t NEED to make a car, they can sell the brains and system that drives the car.
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.
Unless Apple had invented artificial general intelligence and not told anyone then the technology isn’t transferable.
Chances are very good the AI technologies they were working on involved developing a GAN, then the knowledge and experience of creating a GAN is fully transferable.
It’s the skills of the developers I’m talking about transferring — not the source code or neural net output.