Steve Wozniak suggests Tesla, not Apple, will create the next successful tech moonshot
Apple may not be the source of the next major technological moonshot, according to Steve Wozniak, with the Apple co-founder suggesting electric car producer Tesla is in the "best direction" to come up with the next big thing in tech, with Apple's potential in doing the same potentially hampered by its large size.
When asked in an interview with Bloomberg about who could make the next moonshot happen, Wozniak was hesitant about giving a definitive response before identifying Tesla as the company with the best potential. "They've put a lot of effort into very risky things," including electric cars, self-driving cars, and efficient transportation systems.
"They started with a car, the Tesla Model S, that made little sense in engineering terms in how much you have to build for what price, and what the market will be," advised Wozniak on the company's success. As for why it worked, Woz noted "It fit one person's ideal of this will be the most beautiful, elegant, and simple device to use."
"It was really built for Elon's own life. What car would he like, and when things come from yourself, knowing what you would like very much and being in control of it, that's when you get the best products."
Tesla and Apple have a considerable rivalry that has led to the two companies trying to lure employees from the other, such as MacBook Air designer Matt Casebolt moving from Apple to Tesla in January. Last year, Apple recruited Tesla's former VP of Vehicle Engineering, Chris Porritt, to work on "special projects."
Where Tesla has self-driving capabilities within its cars, Apple has also been rumored to be working in that direction as well. Known as "Project Titan," the secret project was earlier rumored to cover the construction of an Apple-designed car, but the rumors have scaled down the size of the project to in-car systems, with Apple recently found to be testing its own self-driving technology on public roads.
Aside from Tesla, CEO Elon Musk has also backed other transportation projects, including the high-speed Hyperloop transit system. More recently, he started up the Boring Company, a firm that aims to drill tunnels under cities to give an alternative transport network for commuters.
Later in the interview, Woz suggested the chances of major firms like Apple coming up with the next major breakthrough were slim, due to the risks involved. "Look at the companies like Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft that changed the world - and Tesla included. They usually came from young people, they didn't spring out of big businesses."
"They really came from new people who didn't know that what they were doing was so risky, and big companies don't want to take the risk."
When asked in an interview with Bloomberg about who could make the next moonshot happen, Wozniak was hesitant about giving a definitive response before identifying Tesla as the company with the best potential. "They've put a lot of effort into very risky things," including electric cars, self-driving cars, and efficient transportation systems.
"They started with a car, the Tesla Model S, that made little sense in engineering terms in how much you have to build for what price, and what the market will be," advised Wozniak on the company's success. As for why it worked, Woz noted "It fit one person's ideal of this will be the most beautiful, elegant, and simple device to use."
"It was really built for Elon's own life. What car would he like, and when things come from yourself, knowing what you would like very much and being in control of it, that's when you get the best products."
Tesla and Apple have a considerable rivalry that has led to the two companies trying to lure employees from the other, such as MacBook Air designer Matt Casebolt moving from Apple to Tesla in January. Last year, Apple recruited Tesla's former VP of Vehicle Engineering, Chris Porritt, to work on "special projects."
Where Tesla has self-driving capabilities within its cars, Apple has also been rumored to be working in that direction as well. Known as "Project Titan," the secret project was earlier rumored to cover the construction of an Apple-designed car, but the rumors have scaled down the size of the project to in-car systems, with Apple recently found to be testing its own self-driving technology on public roads.
Aside from Tesla, CEO Elon Musk has also backed other transportation projects, including the high-speed Hyperloop transit system. More recently, he started up the Boring Company, a firm that aims to drill tunnels under cities to give an alternative transport network for commuters.
Later in the interview, Woz suggested the chances of major firms like Apple coming up with the next major breakthrough were slim, due to the risks involved. "Look at the companies like Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft that changed the world - and Tesla included. They usually came from young people, they didn't spring out of big businesses."
"They really came from new people who didn't know that what they were doing was so risky, and big companies don't want to take the risk."
Comments
Although it's even more likely that the next major revolutions will come from companies that don't even exist yet.
As for Tesla, personally I find a car company less exciting than a computing company.
Self-driving cars will probably turn out to be the same -- a hugely important product for the economy overall, but possibly not a creator of big profits for any one company.
The thing that has driven Apple's success over the years has been innovations in how humans connect to computers (aka, UI). There is a lot of room to improve UI, and as more devices become computerized, there are more devices that require a good UI. Apple clearly views AR as an important next step in UI, and they're probably right about that. Eventually we will be looking at direct and seamless connections between the brain and a computer. I think Apple has a huge advantage in terms of branding for something like that because things like security and privacy will become incredibly important issues. You'd really have to be a total fool to let Facebook, Google, Amazon, or even Microsoft be the company that sells you that ability.
Both Apple and Tesla are doing great things. I'm happy to have both of them as neighbors.
To the excellent point you raise, true Disney is still cranking up the magic and Ford still makes cars, but when Walt ran things Disney created Mikey mouse and Lion king nothing recently comes anywhere close to those in endurance and cultural relevance, and there's nothing much to be said about morden Ford really other then they're still around. I'm not saying the death of the leader means the company withers and die, that would mean that those companies were not that impressive to begin with, Disney won't just die, Walts' efforts like Steve's were just too monumental and heculian to be so easily squandered, even by the most incompetent successor. what I'm saying is that these companies are never ever going to be the same as what made them so special was so closely link to the people who in many cases founded them, and lead them to great success and how that in many ways is the way of nature, like how there have been many musicians who've come and many to come still but there'll only be one Mickael Jackson
2) There was an excellent NOVA episode about 6 weeks back on battery tech. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a watch.
3) I know it wouldn't come close to adding enough energy to a moving car, but I wonder if it would still be beneficial to integrate solar panels into the roof and bonnet so that some amount of energy can be generated whilst driving, idling, or just sitting in a parking lot during a work day.
Anyway, here it is again...
The car of the future is already here. It's called a Smartphone. Think about it. If you were to clear the slate, look at the modern world and ask yourself, how would I design a transportation system given existing and soon-to-come technologies, like autonomous driving, real-time availability scheduling. Route optimization, etc, no way you'd conclude there should be a car, or two, in every garage. You'd create a technology/software infrastructure to allow individuals to call up the transportation they need (car, truck, van, etc) on-demand. And it would show up wherever they are, or wherever they are going to be, when it's needed. You'd be able to schedule transportation in advance, like the airport shuttles of yesteryear that you'd schedule a week in advance. Über pretty much killed that business, I expect.
Or schedule recurring transportation, such as to take the kids to soccer practice and back. In this case the transportation technology system might suggest a shared van service, that knows the schedules for local after school sports practice and offers up and constructs pick-up and drop-off routes based upon participation; a regular route to gather up the kids and deliver them. Accommodation for security will be considered when children are being transported without accompanying parents, such as real-time tracking and a constant open line of communication, both audio and video streaming from the vehicle to parent's smartphones.
The specific vehicle that arrives can be determined by number of passengers, whether you'll be transporting something large or just yourself, etc. The notion of owning, maintaining, accommodating parking requirements of, insuring, etc, a personal vehicle, for many people, has already begun to feel like 'the old paridigm.'
To create this infrastructure, you need route optimization software, that incorporates the real-time whereabouts of all vehicles in a local fleet. You need scheduling software. You need to deal with remaining charge/range of each vehicle out in service to know when a vehicle can accommodate an additional requested or scheduled route without running out of juice. You need to accommodate stand-by, where the vehicle drops someone off at a location and is requested to stand-by for an indeterminate time while the person goes into a store or bank to run an errand. In short, you need a very sophisticated set of interacting technologies to accommodate smooth operation of a transportation network that provides near immediate responsiveness to a population's constantly fluctuating needs.
If I were Tim Cook, this is exactly the way I'd envision the future, and this is what I'd set out to create. It's not so much about constructing vehicles yourself, but about getting sign-in from all vehicle manufacturers such that their vehicles can work within the envisioned transportation network. And that means that people who do own vehicles could lend them into their local autonomous transportation fleet in order to earn money (this has already been suggested by Musk and makes sense for a maker of vehicles to accommodate, as it helps him sell more Teslas direct to consumers). It means that new rental fleets will simply be staged in large metro areas, with one or more depots that the vehicles come back to for recharging, maintenance, cleaning, etc. And that means that there's a path forward for the rental companies, because they already have staging areas for their existing fleets. The big picture can be accommodated during a transition phase from the world we have today to a world where almost all transportation is shared and autonomous.
Extend this to trucking, inter-city bussing, etc, and the whole thing becomes a future that Apple could play a major role in developing. Without ever producing, on their own, a single vehicle.
Also key to this is that everything Apple needs to do to revolutionize transportation does not require Apple to do any work on autonomous driving, nor does Apple need to build a single vehicle model. Nope, Apple will want to own the end user interaction used to summon and schedule transportation, and it'll want to own the route optimization algorithms and server side scheduling and dispatch. And take a cut of every ride.
There will need to be some tech in each car to pick up the user interaction that began on a rider's smartphone or Watch, once the car arrives to pick up the rider. The car will need a voice interface to interact with the rider. The car will need to constantly ping its whereabouts to the dispatch and scheduling servers, along with its charge level, so that the dispatch system can determine its next pick up and determine when it needs to exit the active fleet and return to a nearby depot for recharging or maintenance. The car will need to contain sensors, like internal cameras, to monitor for left-behind packages, spilled coffee, etc, and report appropriately to riders or to dispatch. The car will need streaming audio/video capabilities to stream to parents when children are riding without adult accompaniment. All of this can be designed as a set of interfaces that automakers can implement in order to be compatible with Apple's dispatch and routing servers, and the vehicles might also be required to utilize Apple's mapping infrastructure.
Once verified as able to serve a ride request, the car is handed details on the location of the rider, and the rider's destination, and it can then utilize its own autonomous driving capabilities to serve the request. And all of this can integrate both driverless and human driven vehicles into the same service. So as vehicles are developed that are licensed for autonomous operation, these can be added to an existing Uber-like fleet of human driven vehicles, both serving together to form a centrally requested and directed/dispatched swarm serving a metrolitan area. Eventually, the human driven vehicles would all be replaced with autonomous vehicles, and the future will have arrived.
More to the point, bicycle's are having a renaissance in urban areas, especially in Europe, and in first world countries, car ownership will likely be decreasing over time.
Lot's and lot's of large battery manufacturing facilities going up in China. and world wide production will likely double by 2020. Panasonic isn't the only party to launch a "Gigafactory" for battery production. New battery tech may come from the Tesla/Panasonic partnership, but is as likely from others.
As for Woz, his pronouncements aren't really a bellwether of anything. Woz was king when he was designing discrete logic circuits. That time has long passed.
BTW, the next big thing is medical sensors/devices for realtime, personal monitoring. Disruption will come from some startup that we haven't heard of before, with something that we don't yet know that we want.
Anyway, there's no shame in Disney purchasing successful companies for their characters. It's no different than Apple purchasing NeXT, Beats, Siri, and countless others to help further their expertise.
As for politics, there's always been a lot of buzz that Walt was a anti-semite, but there's also plenty of other evidence to discount that. At most, it would seem that he was a capitalist first and foremost.
Apple can keep its momentum for many decades. I work for another company that is in a long, highly profitable death process. The jobs are good and I am thankful for customers who don't think about the future or constantly search the horizons for new things. That's most people. I don't fault Apple for anything, I am just placing it in its proper context.
Woz you did great work starting Apple but what have you done of late other than shoot your Big Mouth off.
Lets see your brilliant ideas....