Apple going into cars doesn't fit the company's pattern of success. It got away with selling computers priced far higher than DOS ones because a GUI was better. It is doing well against Windows now because OS X is better designed and Apple hardware is more reliable. The iPod filled a need for a useful music player and the iPhone filled a huge gap. When it came out, most cell phones were ill-designed junk. I know. I owned several. Success with the iPhone could be parlayed into success with tablets, since the two ran the same apps. Even the Apple Watch, a solution in search of a problem, can be justified as a way to control a market that might become useful in a few years.
Not so cars. There's an enormous variety of cars on the market and many are well-designed for their specific niche. Consumers can get almost any combination of features they want except one: dead simple to operate and fix. That's why I drive a car that's 35 years old. Nothing is computerized and very little is electrical. It is easy to fix and costs almost nothing to maintain.
Somehow I can't see Apple moving into the simple to operate and fix market. I suspect that it wants to compete in a high-end market that has had many decades to sharpen its expertise. BMW and Mercedes aren't like Microsoft. They didn't get to the top of their markets by stumbling into a near-monopoly. They earned their status.
I agree on the dealers. As to service, I don't know for sure but I bet the vast majority of service requirements vanish along with an internal combustion engine. What's left other brakes, steering and electronics? Perhaps Apple and Tesla could be talking about a joint selling model?
Perhaps, probably not. I think they'll just use the open source patents, the same way OS X is built on Unix.
Was thinking of getting a Galaxy S6 but a review on Forbes says this: "As for the performance of the phone, it slows down. Samsung has finally admitted the bug exists and is working on a fix, but in short: if you don’t restart the phone every few days it begins to crawl. Typing input is sluggish and browser scrolling stutters badly. I lay this as much at the feet of Google due to the ongoing memory leak in Android Lollipop, but both companies need to solve this" It was originally on Forbes. Right now, this is the on link I can find.
The fast charging mode also bakes and kills the accelerometer.
The problem is once they've gotten rid of all the bugs they're releasing a new bug filled version. Therein is the problem with yearly updates
Therein lies the problem, annual updates mean rushed releases. The rushed release though are due to the need to bring forth real features that users want so I understand Apple somewhat. Considering it took them until 8.3 to make iOS 8 acceptable it does indicate a rushed release schedule.
What is interesting though on the flip side is that Mac OS is suffering in the same way and frankly it has gotten less of an overhaul with each release. I take this to indicate a shortcoming with respect to Apples quality control.
To be perfectly honest with you I would put some blame on Objective C! I never liked the language and personally feel that it leaves to much up to the programmer to get right. I'm really hoping that Swift moves Apple and its developers forward with ideally higher performance software that has far fewer bugs. In many cases bugs seem to be the cause of the performance issues. One just needs to look at the serial releases of the 8.x series to see that bug fixes are also fixing performance issues.
Of course blaming everything on bugs and general bad programming isn't good either, hardware is a problem. Here the number one issue with IOS is the lack of RAM. Apple needs to move all devices to at least 2GB and preferable 4 GB on the iPads. IOS just fails terribly with a couple of tabs open in Safari, something that more RAM does address.
So maybe some kind of on-demand system is the wave of the future. You summon a self-driving car, it shows up, and takes you were you want to go. Like Lyft etc. but without drivers. And if the "car company" (e.g. Apple) has smart enough scheduling, their system could predict heavy usage areas and time periods. So there would be many self-driving ?Cars driving around Apple employees' neighborhoods during the morning rush hour and many ?Cars swarming around Apple HQ during evening rush hour. No waiting, no driving, no garage, no parking hassles, no ownership hassles.
Nailed it. Smaller companies might make higher margins, but sell far fewer cars. (E.g. Pagani Automobili S.p.A., Caterham Cars, Ruf Automobile GmbH.) And yes, electrically-driven cars are much simpler than internal combustion cars. And vastly simpler than any hybrid gas/electric. That simplicity might eventually bring costs down over time, and maybe keep margins up if selling price can be maintained.
But maybe it's also time to examine the entire automobile usage and ownership model. Most of the time, even on commute days, your car is parked and not being used. Drive to work, leave it there for hours, drive home, leave it there overnight. If you have a neighborhood BBQ over the weekend, or if your friends drive you, maybe you won't drive your own car(s) at all over the weekend. And if you go on a non-driving vacation, your car will sit there unused for the duration.
In some dense urban environments (say NYC) many people don't even own cars. Their houses and apartments don't have garages. There's no car purchase ordeal, no insurance shopping, no trips to the body shop or car dealer for fender bender repairs or regular tune-ups (which themselves may be a thing of the past with all-electric vehicles), and no yearly car registration fees. Oh, and also no need to take that driving test for that drivers' license.
So maybe some kind of on-demand system is the wave of the future. You summon a self-driving car, it shows up, and takes you were you want to go. Like Lyft etc. but without drivers. And if the "car company" (e.g. Apple) has smart enough scheduling, their system could predict heavy usage areas and time periods. So there would be many self-driving ?Cars driving around Apple employees' neighborhoods during the morning rush hour and many ?Cars swarming around Apple HQ during evening rush hour. No waiting, no driving, no garage, no parking hassles, no ownership hassles.
Sure. It's been a theme in science fiction for a long time that people, for the most part, won't own a vehicle. I don't know if it could be called a car anymore. Have your home personal assistant call for the ride, which appears.
This would be a hard change for the industry all around, and there would be resistance, at first, at least. But then, there was a lot of resistance to the automobile, at first. Every complaint we hear about electric cars now, were said about cars in general back around 1900. It's also interesting to note that one of the largest car manufacturer at the time was the Electric Car Company of New York. They didn't sell cars, they rented, or leased them. So what happened to them? Due to greed and stupidly, the owners were found to be doing major market manipulation of their stock, and the company collapsed. But if they hadn't done that, who knows? There were a lot of electric cars back then. I just bought an Ad for a Studebaker from 1907 which was electric.
The problem was that after the company collapsed, most research went into internal combustion, and electric cars were essentially forgotten for decades. Otherwise, it's possible that much of the money moving into gasoline engines would instead have gone into batteries and more efficient motors and mechanisms.
I think they could do a great job with this, no doubt. I would expect them to enter into a self-driving market though a few years down the line -- a car that does everything for you, and is more like a mobile living room than a car. I don't see them making a sports or muscle car, but en energy efficient smart car for the daily commute. Not even a steering wheel. Maybe like those cars in Minority Report. I wouldn't have thought this were possible so soon in the near future had I not seen a news story about the self driving truck that's on the roads now, that has the Teamsters up in arms.
I've never been a big union supporter but I have to say in this case the Teansters are right, an 18 wheeler is no place to introduce new tech like this. A glitch in the software would turn such a truck into a deadly machine.
Beyond all of that I'm still perplexed by people that see self driving automobiles as safer! Maybe we will get there one day but I honestly believe that is decades if not centuries away. The problem is the infinitely variable driving conditions one is exposed to in real life. Around here you are sometimes luck to be able to even see the roads after a snow storm, there would be nothing for machine vision systems to latch onto.
I just don't think it's a good idea as a stock holder, at least right now. The capital investment would likely be far more massive than everything Apple has already brought to market combined, with much lower margins. But who knows 5 years from now. Let them develop the technologies all they want. Just don't jump prematurely into a money draining proposition.
Money draining? I guess you haven't been to Detroit lately. Sure their is the ugly side but it is still obvious that auto manufacturing has brought lots of cash to Detroit and continues to do so. Not every product on a manufactures shelves needs to produce 30% margins to be considered successful.
I see this attitude amongst people that seems to indicate that auto manufacturing is a dead end low profit business. This really isn't the case. For Apple they would have to deal with the idea of completion with companies that have extremely diverse hardware lineups. That is not everyone can get buy with one form of an automobile so an iPhone approach would only get a small percentage of the market.
Mother-in-law's Toyota, now my wife's car, came with well-known brand of American tires that were worn out at 25,000 miles, harsh-riding, noisy and squirrely throughout their lifetime.
Replaced with Michelins, quiet, smooth-riding, straight-rolling, guaranteed for 80,000 miles.
The company is forever researching compounds for ride vs. wear characteristics. If fluoroelastomers are in the future, they maybe won't come out of an Apple lab.
The thing that gives me pause on the autonomous bit is that, unlike the people at Google, the Apple heads appreciate cars and the experience of driving. They own nice, fast cars. Ive goes to the Goodwood Festival of Speed a lot. I don't think they're the type to want to bring about the death of driving pleasure.
I think Apple is realistic. Autonomous driving is the future, like it or not. It's just going to happen. We're finding more cars every day now that already come with some autonomous features from a number of manufacturers. I don't agree with those who think the thing is going to pop out like Athena from Zeus's head, but we'll see features added on one at a time over the years, until, people will realise that most of their "driving" is now being done by the car. This is also because laws will needed to be changed though out the land, and in other countries, allowing full fledged autonomous driving. But adding accident avoidance features, such as Mercedes Benz has done, isn't covered by those laws, so they can be added without a problem.
not using dealers isn't holding Tesla back. we live in a time when we no longer need dealerships. whether the product is cars or home audio equipment -- the public has access to information and support services without a singular dealer per region.
What percentage of cars aren't being sold through dealerships? A very small percentage. I have nothing against doing what Tesla is doing there, but the realistic situation is that he doesn't want to give dealerships some of the money. Apple sells their products for the same amount of money directly than they do through dealers. So they make greater profits that way. Musk thinks the same way, except he feels that his very expensive cars don't need dealerships. I don't know. A lot of people want to get in a car and try it out before buying. They also want to compare one car to another. I suppose there must be some way for Tesla purchasers to do that, but it's going to be a lot more difficult if there isn't a way anywhere near where you live.
It turns out, milling laptops out of single billets of aluminum and making your own alloys is pretty hard, but they do it.
Running a CNC machine isn't hard at all, nor is programming it. I really doubt that Apple has formulated their own alloys for their laptops but even if they have it isn't a big deal. The only thing that sets CNC machined laptop housing apart from an injection molded one is cost and maybe quality.
Stamping sheet metal is pretty well understood, having been done for decades. It's so well understood that it used to be, many marques changed the tools and stampings every year, so that each model year looked different. This seems like a problem that isn't hard, it just requires plants and some money for tooling.
Yep automobile sheet metal is done in rather large presses and is change yearly in many cases, it isn't a big deal. There are plenty of companies that want to give Apple a hand here. The country doesn't lake for tool and die shops.
My problem is that I don't want to see a sheet metal offering from Apple. Corrosion is a real problem with cars and their sheet metals.
CarPlay is pretty good (albeit with some bugs particularly around switching audio sources between the apps) and I look forward to seeing whatever an intervention could produce.
Intervention is an interesting word but unfortunately does not help us determine what Apple is up to. I'd like to believe a car is in the works but there are many other possibilities.
Very well said. I'd add that all the wishes and hopes that Apple will manufacture automobiles are just that, wishes and hopes. They have no basis in any practical reality. The worst part about all these car-making rumors is that they obscure what Apple likely is doing, which is developing CarPlay into compelling technology that most of the existing manufacturers will adopt. That will be hard enough, but at least it's something Apple knows how to do, unlike the business of bending sheet metal.
One, I don't think you need a team of 1,000 people to do this. Second, if you look at resume of some of the people rumored to be working on this project it sure seems like it is about more than CarPlay. Third, I have yet to see any evidence that existing manufacturers are looking to Apple to provide them technolog to adopt. Recently one executive from Ford said they would offer CarPlay and Android Auto but they're really push their own Sync platform and claim it's a differentiator to get people to buy their cars. I see manufacturers wanting to do their own thing, not Apple's. Certainly not anything where they have to share credit with Apple. I mean how many people know that their car infotainment system is powered by Blackberry's QNX? Finally as I said in my other post, there aren't a lot of instances of Apple just being a piece of technology in other people's products. I can't see how that would be successful or very profitable for Apple.
I give Musk credit for taking a clean sheet of paper approach to the industry, and also for producing a very good product. That fact that neither have led to running the business profitably is a testament to the huge capital costs and entrenched competition any new entry faces in this industry. I don't see where Apple can readily improve on Tesla's approach. For one thing, Apple makes money on new products right out of the gate. They can't do that with cars. And they certainly are not going to bust their own model of selling Apple products mainly in Apple retail stores by deciding that dealerships are now the way to go. Dealerships are an albatross around the necks of the automotive industry. They are archaic, at the very least. More to the point, I think Musk was right to bypass that model, and I feel certain that Apple would too.
I see no reason to believe that what you are saying is correct. First of all, as I said, Tesla is building most of their cars themselves, hence the huge learning curve. As you know, Apple doesn't build its own products. Apple will have an experienced auto manufacturer built their car, should they choose to make one. The learning curve isn't going to be so arduous. There is also no reason to believe that aside from capital costs, as usual, that Apple's first cars wouldn't be profitable.
I dn' t happen to think his cars are all that good. They are known for breaking down. They don't come close to meeting the 200 mile battery life spec he has. That makes these cars crap in comparison to equally priced cars out there. So yes, it's electric, but when you're told to not use the heater in the winter, or not to use the air conditioning in the summer, and to go easy on breaking, or to be careful when passing so that you don't go more than about 55 miles per hour, on average, all because that cuts down on the battery charge, then those cars are, as far as I'm concerned, junk.
You might not like dealers, but the vast percentage of cars are sold that way. Apple sells all of its products through dealers as well as through their own website and stores. In fact, most of their sales don't go through their own properties. I do t see that changing with a car. I'm not even sure that Apple would want to set their own dealerships up, meaning sales through an Apple property. I can see them selecting dealers meeting certain specific requirements, the way the have the store withinn a store at Best Buy, and a number of places around the world, such as in China.
I've never been a big union supporter but I have to say in this case the Teansters are right, an 18 wheeler is no place to introduce new tech like this. A glitch in the software would turn such a truck into a deadly machine.
I see this attitude amongst people that seems to indicate that auto manufacturing is a dead end low profit business. This really isn't the case. For Apple they would have to deal with the idea of completion with companies that have extremely diverse hardware lineups. That is not everyone can get buy with one form of an automobile so an iPhone approach would only get a small percentage of the market.
Well a driver would be required to take over in bad weather, like a pilot who takes off and lands, but spends the majority of the time in the air on autopilot, reading the newspaper. But my point remains, I had no idea the technology had reached this level that it has become a serious issue for the unions.
Obviously the auto industry is quite profitable, otherwise they would have all gotten out of it a long time ago. But there's a lot of car companies competing for the same small slice of the profits. Apple has amassed its cash hoard and high stock price from the sizable margins it makes on its products, rather than dominating a market by volume. With cars, there's little other path to follow, sell top end luxury cars only for just the crowd who can afford to buy the $17,000 ?Watch, or sell enough volume at lower margins and compete with all the other car makers. Clearly Apple is not the only tech company that will be entering the automobile market in the future, so that's even more competition for extremely low profit margins. Add to that the enormous startup costs and infrastructure, and its not likely to make wall street, or stockholders happy.
I think you are correct, Apple would be far more likely to go with the Tesla approach but not to say there couldn't be a hands off mode one day much like the new trucks that just came out.
Tesla announced, recently, that sometime this summer, a software upgrade will allow autonomous driving. I don't know how that will work out, as it isn't allowed in most all places.
Sounds good. So I select the coffee shop wifi hot spot, which changes password every few days. Access fails. What then?
Please don't say open System Preferences > Network > Wifi > Advanced > Select wifi (remove) > Apply > Reselect > Enter password. Clearly I am doing something wrong... because the wrongness of it is almost too much to believe.
Kinda like when I use Microsoft Word and Autosave still tells me I ran out of disk space. Just like it did 15 years ago. Some things never get fixed.
Sounds good. So I select the coffee shop wifi hot spot, which changes password every few days. Access fails. What then?
Please don't say open System Preferences > Network > Wifi > Advanced > Select wifi (remove) > Apply > Reselect > Enter password. Clearly I am doing something wrong... because the wrongness of it is almost too much to believe.
Kinda like when I use Microsoft Word and Autosave still tells me I ran out of disk space. Just like it did 15 years ago. Some things never get fixed.
Exactly what are you trying to say here? Are you saying that the computer should get the password automatically every few days? If so, then what's the point of the password if any computer could just pick it up? That would result in the same thing as no password at all.
Clearly, you need to do what everyone else does. That is, if you have a right to the password, you will get it from wherever they have it. If you don't have the right to it, then you don't get it. I don't understand your complaint here. Open WiFi requires no password, and WiFi that's not open, does. Generally, in a Starbucks, you get a password because the company has a deal with a cell carrier, or a company like Apple itself. If so, your password is put in once, and remains the same.
In circumstances where the password changes, when you attempt to log on, it will simply ask for the password, since your old one no longer works. Then, you need to find out how to obtain the new one, and simply fill in the line for the password. That's how it always works. No need to get complex as you're stating.
Car makers are partnering with Apple and ultimately, they will do what consumers want.
I think CarPlay is just the beginning of the relationship with car makers.
The systems will allow for differentiation between various makes and models.
Even after market companies can join in to retrofit older cars with the new Apple systems.
Note that Fiat already uses a Beats by Dre audio system. So technically the are already partnered with Apple.
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You think CarPlay is a good experience right now? Implementation is all over the board. Some OK and some not so great. I was just with someone who bought a new 2015 Honda. Doesn't support CarPlay and if any of their vehicles do it's certainly not something they're advertising at the dealerships. I am not convinced at all that Apple can successfully just be a piece of technology in someone else's product. If you look at HealthKit, HomeKit and ResearchKit they're really all about making iOS devices, especially iPhone, more compelling and thus increasing sales and keeping people from leaving the platform. Same thing with ApplePay. But even with that we see how the experience can be poor when Apple doesn't control everything.
With cars, I just don't see auto manufacturers giving up their dashboards to Apple. Note that none of the car rumors that came out earlier this year mentioned Apple partnering with other car companies. In fact the Financial Times story quoted someone saying 3 months ago they would have assumed Apple was working on something CarPlay related but today they think it's a car (based on the people they know Apple has been hiring).
I've never been a big union supporter but I have to say in this case the Teansters are right, an 18 wheeler is no place to introduce new tech like this. A glitch in the software would turn such a truck into a deadly machine.
Beyond all of that I'm still perplexed by people that see self driving automobiles as safer! Maybe we will get there one day but I honestly believe that is decades if not centuries away. The problem is the infinitely variable driving conditions one is exposed to in real life. Around here you are sometimes luck to be able to even see the roads after a snow storm, there would be nothing for machine vision systems to latch onto.
Money draining? I guess you haven't been to Detroit lately. Sure their is the ugly side but it is still obvious that auto manufacturing has brought lots of cash to Detroit and continues to do so. Not every product on a manufactures shelves needs to produce 30% margins to be considered successful.
I see this attitude amongst people that seems to indicate that auto manufacturing is a dead end low profit business. This really isn't the case. For Apple they would have to deal with the idea of completion with companies that have extremely diverse hardware lineups. That is not everyone can get buy with one form of an automobile so an iPhone approach would only get a small percentage of the market.
To a certain extent, this is a chicken and the egg problem. Once every vehicle on the road is autonomous, this will work very well indeed. But until then, it's a good question.
But as I said before, I don't see this happening all at once. We see companies coming out with autonomous features for specific situations. With Mercedes, it's a major accident avloidence system, which appears to work very well. Also a system for drivers who fall asleep. Others have had self parking. Another has a system that takes over if the car is in a situation where it has a problem on an icy or wet road, etc. So we'll see these features being added over time until, bingo, autonomous cars.
Remember there are cars that now use radar, sonar, cameras, etc. As these are connected to the computer, the car can do what the driver either doesn't see in time, or can't react to in time. At some point, cars will talk to each other so that they will react together. Combined with the sensors, GPS and other tech, they will be a lot safer than most drivers are now.
But, yes, it will take time. I do think that by around 2020 we will be seeing most, if not all cars coming with at least some of this, and some cars with most of it. It isn't as hard as you think it is.
Comments
Apple going into cars doesn't fit the company's pattern of success. It got away with selling computers priced far higher than DOS ones because a GUI was better. It is doing well against Windows now because OS X is better designed and Apple hardware is more reliable. The iPod filled a need for a useful music player and the iPhone filled a huge gap. When it came out, most cell phones were ill-designed junk. I know. I owned several. Success with the iPhone could be parlayed into success with tablets, since the two ran the same apps. Even the Apple Watch, a solution in search of a problem, can be justified as a way to control a market that might become useful in a few years.
Not so cars. There's an enormous variety of cars on the market and many are well-designed for their specific niche. Consumers can get almost any combination of features they want except one: dead simple to operate and fix. That's why I drive a car that's 35 years old. Nothing is computerized and very little is electrical. It is easy to fix and costs almost nothing to maintain.
Somehow I can't see Apple moving into the simple to operate and fix market. I suspect that it wants to compete in a high-end market that has had many decades to sharpen its expertise. BMW and Mercedes aren't like Microsoft. They didn't get to the top of their markets by stumbling into a near-monopoly. They earned their status.
Prepare to be surprised.
Perhaps, probably not. I think they'll just use the open source patents, the same way OS X is built on Unix.
The fast charging mode also bakes and kills the accelerometer.
What is interesting though on the flip side is that Mac OS is suffering in the same way and frankly it has gotten less of an overhaul with each release. I take this to indicate a shortcoming with respect to Apples quality control.
To be perfectly honest with you I would put some blame on Objective C! I never liked the language and personally feel that it leaves to much up to the programmer to get right. I'm really hoping that Swift moves Apple and its developers forward with ideally higher performance software that has far fewer bugs. In many cases bugs seem to be the cause of the performance issues. One just needs to look at the serial releases of the 8.x series to see that bug fixes are also fixing performance issues.
Of course blaming everything on bugs and general bad programming isn't good either, hardware is a problem. Here the number one issue with IOS is the lack of RAM. Apple needs to move all devices to at least 2GB and preferable 4 GB on the iPads. IOS just fails terribly with a couple of tabs open in Safari, something that more RAM does address.
Dumbest comment in recent memory, even as a joke.
Do you think maybe Michelin has learned some interesting things about making tires in the last hundred years?
I guess you never heard of zipcar. Check out their website http://www.zipcar.com/
Yes an Apple bus/van!
^ It will have fluoro-elastomer tyres.
Sure. It's been a theme in science fiction for a long time that people, for the most part, won't own a vehicle. I don't know if it could be called a car anymore. Have your home personal assistant call for the ride, which appears.
This would be a hard change for the industry all around, and there would be resistance, at first, at least. But then, there was a lot of resistance to the automobile, at first. Every complaint we hear about electric cars now, were said about cars in general back around 1900. It's also interesting to note that one of the largest car manufacturer at the time was the Electric Car Company of New York. They didn't sell cars, they rented, or leased them. So what happened to them? Due to greed and stupidly, the owners were found to be doing major market manipulation of their stock, and the company collapsed. But if they hadn't done that, who knows? There were a lot of electric cars back then. I just bought an Ad for a Studebaker from 1907 which was electric.
The problem was that after the company collapsed, most research went into internal combustion, and electric cars were essentially forgotten for decades. Otherwise, it's possible that much of the money moving into gasoline engines would instead have gone into batteries and more efficient motors and mechanisms.
Beyond all of that I'm still perplexed by people that see self driving automobiles as safer! Maybe we will get there one day but I honestly believe that is decades if not centuries away. The problem is the infinitely variable driving conditions one is exposed to in real life. Around here you are sometimes luck to be able to even see the roads after a snow storm, there would be nothing for machine vision systems to latch onto.
Money draining? I guess you haven't been to Detroit lately. Sure their is the ugly side but it is still obvious that auto manufacturing has brought lots of cash to Detroit and continues to do so. Not every product on a manufactures shelves needs to produce 30% margins to be considered successful.
I see this attitude amongst people that seems to indicate that auto manufacturing is a dead end low profit business. This really isn't the case. For Apple they would have to deal with the idea of completion with companies that have extremely diverse hardware lineups. That is not everyone can get buy with one form of an automobile so an iPhone approach would only get a small percentage of the market.
I know you're joking, but:
Mother-in-law's Toyota, now my wife's car, came with well-known brand of American tires that were worn out at 25,000 miles, harsh-riding, noisy and squirrely throughout their lifetime.
Replaced with Michelins, quiet, smooth-riding, straight-rolling, guaranteed for 80,000 miles.
The company is forever researching compounds for ride vs. wear characteristics. If fluoroelastomers are in the future, they maybe won't come out of an Apple lab.
I think Apple is realistic. Autonomous driving is the future, like it or not. It's just going to happen. We're finding more cars every day now that already come with some autonomous features from a number of manufacturers. I don't agree with those who think the thing is going to pop out like Athena from Zeus's head, but we'll see features added on one at a time over the years, until, people will realise that most of their "driving" is now being done by the car. This is also because laws will needed to be changed though out the land, and in other countries, allowing full fledged autonomous driving. But adding accident avoidance features, such as Mercedes Benz has done, isn't covered by those laws, so they can be added without a problem.
What percentage of cars aren't being sold through dealerships? A very small percentage. I have nothing against doing what Tesla is doing there, but the realistic situation is that he doesn't want to give dealerships some of the money. Apple sells their products for the same amount of money directly than they do through dealers. So they make greater profits that way. Musk thinks the same way, except he feels that his very expensive cars don't need dealerships. I don't know. A lot of people want to get in a car and try it out before buying. They also want to compare one car to another. I suppose there must be some way for Tesla purchasers to do that, but it's going to be a lot more difficult if there isn't a way anywhere near where you live.
My problem is that I don't want to see a sheet metal offering from Apple. Corrosion is a real problem with cars and their sheet metals.
Intervention is an interesting word but unfortunately does not help us determine what Apple is up to. I'd like to believe a car is in the works but there are many other possibilities.
One, I don't think you need a team of 1,000 people to do this. Second, if you look at resume of some of the people rumored to be working on this project it sure seems like it is about more than CarPlay. Third, I have yet to see any evidence that existing manufacturers are looking to Apple to provide them technolog to adopt. Recently one executive from Ford said they would offer CarPlay and Android Auto but they're really push their own Sync platform and claim it's a differentiator to get people to buy their cars. I see manufacturers wanting to do their own thing, not Apple's. Certainly not anything where they have to share credit with Apple. I mean how many people know that their car infotainment system is powered by Blackberry's QNX? Finally as I said in my other post, there aren't a lot of instances of Apple just being a piece of technology in other people's products. I can't see how that would be successful or very profitable for Apple.
I see no reason to believe that what you are saying is correct. First of all, as I said, Tesla is building most of their cars themselves, hence the huge learning curve. As you know, Apple doesn't build its own products. Apple will have an experienced auto manufacturer built their car, should they choose to make one. The learning curve isn't going to be so arduous. There is also no reason to believe that aside from capital costs, as usual, that Apple's first cars wouldn't be profitable.
I dn' t happen to think his cars are all that good. They are known for breaking down. They don't come close to meeting the 200 mile battery life spec he has. That makes these cars crap in comparison to equally priced cars out there. So yes, it's electric, but when you're told to not use the heater in the winter, or not to use the air conditioning in the summer, and to go easy on breaking, or to be careful when passing so that you don't go more than about 55 miles per hour, on average, all because that cuts down on the battery charge, then those cars are, as far as I'm concerned, junk.
You might not like dealers, but the vast percentage of cars are sold that way. Apple sells all of its products through dealers as well as through their own website and stores. In fact, most of their sales don't go through their own properties. I do t see that changing with a car. I'm not even sure that Apple would want to set their own dealerships up, meaning sales through an Apple property. I can see them selecting dealers meeting certain specific requirements, the way the have the store withinn a store at Best Buy, and a number of places around the world, such as in China.
I've never been a big union supporter but I have to say in this case the Teansters are right, an 18 wheeler is no place to introduce new tech like this. A glitch in the software would turn such a truck into a deadly machine.
I see this attitude amongst people that seems to indicate that auto manufacturing is a dead end low profit business. This really isn't the case. For Apple they would have to deal with the idea of completion with companies that have extremely diverse hardware lineups. That is not everyone can get buy with one form of an automobile so an iPhone approach would only get a small percentage of the market.
Well a driver would be required to take over in bad weather, like a pilot who takes off and lands, but spends the majority of the time in the air on autopilot, reading the newspaper. But my point remains, I had no idea the technology had reached this level that it has become a serious issue for the unions.
Obviously the auto industry is quite profitable, otherwise they would have all gotten out of it a long time ago. But there's a lot of car companies competing for the same small slice of the profits. Apple has amassed its cash hoard and high stock price from the sizable margins it makes on its products, rather than dominating a market by volume. With cars, there's little other path to follow, sell top end luxury cars only for just the crowd who can afford to buy the $17,000 ?Watch, or sell enough volume at lower margins and compete with all the other car makers. Clearly Apple is not the only tech company that will be entering the automobile market in the future, so that's even more competition for extremely low profit margins. Add to that the enormous startup costs and infrastructure, and its not likely to make wall street, or stockholders happy.
Tesla announced, recently, that sometime this summer, a software upgrade will allow autonomous driving. I don't know how that will work out, as it isn't allowed in most all places.
Exactly what are you trying to say here? Are you saying that the computer should get the password automatically every few days? If so, then what's the point of the password if any computer could just pick it up? That would result in the same thing as no password at all.
Clearly, you need to do what everyone else does. That is, if you have a right to the password, you will get it from wherever they have it. If you don't have the right to it, then you don't get it. I don't understand your complaint here. Open WiFi requires no password, and WiFi that's not open, does. Generally, in a Starbucks, you get a password because the company has a deal with a cell carrier, or a company like Apple itself. If so, your password is put in once, and remains the same.
In circumstances where the password changes, when you attempt to log on, it will simply ask for the password, since your old one no longer works. Then, you need to find out how to obtain the new one, and simply fill in the line for the password. That's how it always works. No need to get complex as you're stating.
You think CarPlay is a good experience right now? Implementation is all over the board. Some OK and some not so great. I was just with someone who bought a new 2015 Honda. Doesn't support CarPlay and if any of their vehicles do it's certainly not something they're advertising at the dealerships. I am not convinced at all that Apple can successfully just be a piece of technology in someone else's product. If you look at HealthKit, HomeKit and ResearchKit they're really all about making iOS devices, especially iPhone, more compelling and thus increasing sales and keeping people from leaving the platform. Same thing with ApplePay. But even with that we see how the experience can be poor when Apple doesn't control everything.
With cars, I just don't see auto manufacturers giving up their dashboards to Apple. Note that none of the car rumors that came out earlier this year mentioned Apple partnering with other car companies. In fact the Financial Times story quoted someone saying 3 months ago they would have assumed Apple was working on something CarPlay related but today they think it's a car (based on the people they know Apple has been hiring).
To a certain extent, this is a chicken and the egg problem. Once every vehicle on the road is autonomous, this will work very well indeed. But until then, it's a good question.
But as I said before, I don't see this happening all at once. We see companies coming out with autonomous features for specific situations. With Mercedes, it's a major accident avloidence system, which appears to work very well. Also a system for drivers who fall asleep. Others have had self parking. Another has a system that takes over if the car is in a situation where it has a problem on an icy or wet road, etc. So we'll see these features being added over time until, bingo, autonomous cars.
Remember there are cars that now use radar, sonar, cameras, etc. As these are connected to the computer, the car can do what the driver either doesn't see in time, or can't react to in time. At some point, cars will talk to each other so that they will react together. Combined with the sensors, GPS and other tech, they will be a lot safer than most drivers are now.
But, yes, it will take time. I do think that by around 2020 we will be seeing most, if not all cars coming with at least some of this, and some cars with most of it. It isn't as hard as you think it is.