rcomeau

thethirdshoe said:

There is a way to avoid supporting it for 40 years.

Don't ever sell the car to anyone. 

Go with an Uber/lift like business model. A person pays so much per month to have a car available all the time. The car shows up when needed.  After the vehicle has been completely depreciated in a few years, scrap it and put out the new model.

40 years, yeah right.

Most people don't buy cars just to get from A to B or carry the groceries for the same reason we don't all just wear burlap sacs for clothes. Cars are an also expression of ourselves, so driving that grey Prius on weekends for groceries does not cut it for most car buyers. I am not saying this is good, but it is human nature and why we have so many different model cars and clothes other than burlap sacs.

Keep in mind that not every developer got an M1 the day they came out. We have been developing on the Mac for over 20 years (I recall getting the developer Intel iMac) and we just got our first M1 mini last week. We ordered extra RAM and that was a "special" order.

You have more than your own code to worry about. All of your dependencies have to be migrated and then you have a lot of testing to do. Since Intel chips are still here, there is no fire and most of us have more to do than spend 100% of our development resources porting stuff... Most of us will get there when we need to.

emcnair said:

Prior to the new M1 Macs, there was little functional differents between a Mac and a PC. What really made the difference was external design and Mac OS? Apple's defining difference in the computer market was user experience. How different is that from what they are rumored to do for cars? Most people only care about what they can touch, see and feel. Only geeks and gear heads are going to care about performance specs. And cars are worse than computers. With computers, users will often hit the peak the performance of there computers. I have never driven faster than my car go.

Actually, when Apple made beige boxes that looked like a PC with MacOS running they almost went under. Only when they looked at all aspects of design (the chassis, motherboard design, keyboard, mouse etc...) did they get back to being unique and able to charge a premium for it (and the Intel part was unimportant). If all they are going to to is re-skin a Kia and have some Apple software in the dash screen, they are going to make the beige box mistake. No one is going to pay a premium for a re-skinned Kia.

CheeseFreeze said:

If so, Apple is treating a car like a phone; get the screen from Samsung, the cellular modem from Qualcomm, etc.

In this case you’re not really getting an Apple Car, but a branded Kia with CarOS.

I’m not saying this leads to a bad product at all, but it doesn’t make me excited for the brand and have respect for building a car company from the ground up, like Tesla has been doing. They’ve created their own factories, their own production tech and processes, their own battery tech, chips and software. 

Feels like Apple tried to do this but failed and are now going for a different strategy, which is completely dull and uninspiring.

That said - rumors! We don’t know anything for sure yet. 

Agreed. They can't farm out the design and manufacture of parts that make a car a car to whoever makes the cheapest and then put an Apple logo on it and expect to charge a premium.

I had a Ford Escape once, and while it was dependable and functional, every part inside looked like it came from a different supplier (plastics with different colours and textures that were supposed to the the same), so it oozed a car designed around manufacturing efficiency not driver satisfaction. Apple's strength is in the integration of all the components by controlling the design and manufacturing process (even of the manufacturing is subbed out). Just changing a few side panels on a Kia and putting apple software in it means they completely miss the point of why one buys a premium car. I'll keep my EV Jag, thank you very much and plug in my iPhone to the dash to fix the software.

fastasleep said:

rcomeau said:

Sorry, but these are stupid and not innovative in any way.

What the heck are you trying to hide on your dashboard screen and from whom? Your wife sitting next to you? You are in a private, closed environment. Someone not wearing shutter glasses can see the screen perfectly well, just at 50% brightness. How stupid are you going to look wearing shutter glasses over your regular (for those of us who wear glasses) to drive a car? By the way, shutter glasses are 30 years old, so hardly new. They were among the first 3D glasses (Stereopgraphics) and the method was swapping left-right news in two alternating buffers. Pretty simple to have both shutters on/off at the same time (instead of alternating) so again, nothing new.

Try reading the article again, specifically about shared screens with multiple users' content on them. Dummy content to obscure from outside observers. It's for passengers, not drivers.

Really, maybe Apple car feature rumours should be limited to features that might actually be appealing to someone. This throw all the noodles to the wall to see what sticks method hardly makes anyone excited at the prospect of an Apple car (on top of the rumour that Kia will be making them?). Not getting me excited at least.

Or they can just write about the myriad patents that have been coming out for the past five years and you can skip over the ones you're not interested in? Some of us are interested in the patents, thank you very much. What gets you excited could not be less interesting to me.

Sorry, I did not realize anyone looked at porn while driving and worry about people sitting next to you at a traffic light sticking their heads out the window and peeking at your screen? What would one want to hide? Is the battery charge state a national secret? Is that screen so expensive that you can't have two, if viewer-specific content is so important? Instead, you have to double the brightness (since your eyes are getting a 50% duty cycle of the screen) and you have to have specific shutter glasses that you cannot lose or break by sitting on them accidentally. Anyone else in the car will have a distractingly bright screen in their face unless they are to wear the glasses.

There are a million things Apple can do better than other companies, but this is not anywhere on any reasonable person's list. BTW, these forums are here exactly for al of us to comment with our opinions. None of our opinions matter to Apple, so it is really for the entertainment of us exchanging ideas and opiions.