charlesn

Under the usual Apple hardware standards, yes it's a surprise. But with only 3 models of HomePod ever released, it makes sense to support them all, and doesn't screw over the early adopters of HomePod 1. 

I really wish Apple would release data on how many people are actually using its self-repair options. Would love to know what tiny fraction of 1% all of this "right to repair" legislation is designed to serve, although I'm sure the Radio Shack and Heathkit diaspora are thrilled with it. Gosh, maybe we should force Apple to provide the parts, tools and instructions so I can build my own iPhone? No surprise that the EU, which leads the world in tech regulation, badly lags the U.S. and Asia when it comes to tech manufacturing and innovation. 

nubus said:

charlesn said:

But Project Titan wasn't just about designing a car--it was a proof of concept as to whether a car could be built, delivered and sold in sufficient quantities at the price point Apple would need. Pulling the plug when Tim did was better than delivering the automotive equivalent of Lisa. 

A 10 year POC for designing a car? How many decades would Apple then spend on building it?

As for not delivering a Lisa.... AVP is an unsellable miracle of tech like Lisa. It has to be more affordable and open a new market (like DtP) to become a Mac - but for now Cook shipped a Lisa. Which is obviously better than shipping two. I do however believe Car would have been able to disrupt a market.

Again, not just designing a car, nubus--there are incredibly challenging problems for a non-car company to manufacture a $50K (and up, no doubt) vehicle, and to Apple standards no less.. but let's assume Apple had figured out design and manufacturing--you're still left with the problem of setting a price point that's competitive, and whether the profit margin is worth the effort, assuming there IS a profit at all. For every car company not named Tesla, EVs have only been a sea of red ink. So even if Apple designed and manufactured a disruptive car, you're back to the problem of the original Mac: a great, disruptive product mired in low sales because prices were too high. 

A metal microphone wouldn't mean much to them — it barely means much to me, and I'm nearly 40.

I don't disagree with the gist of what you're saying, but you probably couldn't have chosen a worse example than the microphone. Big, radio-style mics are arguably more popular than ever with younger generations thanks to the boom in streaming and podcasting. And considering the gen alpha and Z embrace of old analog tech like cassette tapes, I have to think someone is making a big mic with a retro metal look like the one pictured here from iOS 6. 

I somehow missed the Gruber article when it came out, but just went back and read it. I can't say that I found it rude, per se, and in fact, the vast majority of it was just recounting 'facts on the ground" about which there is no dispute. However, there's eventually a fork-in-the-road with "Apple Intelligence-gate" where you either believe that Apple honestly thought it could get it done in the timeframe that it outlined last year, but (wildly) underestimated the challenges OR you believe Apple knew it wasn't gonna happen and proceeded to mislead on a pretty epic scale. Both are bad, by the way, but the latter is truly disreputable and intentionally dishonest. Gruber came down really hard on it being the latter, so yeah, he's probably not the most popular person in Cupertino right now, especially if he's incorrect in his assessment. 

Personally, I give Cook the benefit of the doubt, though not without some serious questions that I'll mention in a minute. But he has been Apple CEO longer than Jobs 2.0, coming up on 14 years this October, without a hint of deceptive or dishonest behavior during that time. So to quickly throw Cook in with the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio era of failure and broken promises seems like a VERY cheap shot, and one not deserved by Cook. Sure, be angry... call this out as the major f-ck-up that it is and that it shouldn't have happened. That's all fair game. But don't jump to dishonest and disreputable when Cook has never been either in his 14 years of leadership. And aside from his past record, Tim just seems too damned cautious and conservative a leader to take a flyer on intentionally misleading the public. 

But yeah, I have questions. My first reaction to last year's WWDC timeline for "AI Siri" was: if Siri still sucks so badly after 14 YEARS, how is Apple going to achieve all this in less than a year? I know I have old posts from that time which said as much. And my second, more damning question Is: why did Apple wait until less than a month before it was supposed to deliver AI Siri to announce that it needed (A LOT) more time? The best it could do for an estimate was "within the coming year" which, technically speaking, means as late as the end of 2026, since that is "the coming year." Sorry, but even if Apple had, at the outset, wildly underestimated the challenges it faced, it would have known it was going to miss its delivery date months before it made the announcement. That's not something that creeps up by surprise. Did the Siri team keep insisting that it was going to get it done? We'll probably never know the real answer. 

longfang said:

charlesn said:

blastdoor said:

I have now fully come around to agreeing that It’s time for Tim Cook to go. 

A lot of great things happened under his leadership, especially apple silicon in Macs, but the Apple car debacle and now the AI debacle are convincing me that Apple needs a “product guy” leading the firm again. 

Please explain what you see as a "debacle" for the R&D that Apple put into a possible car. There was never any assurance that a car would result from this effort--the whole point of doing research and development is to determine if manufacturing a competitive and superior product is possible and financially viable. And for Apple, never having been in the car manufacturing business, the challenge was even more difficult, especially considering that Apple's business model is based on very high profit margins, while autos are a fraction of that. At the end of the day, Apple decided there was no financially viable path forward and shut down the project. Look around at the EV business and you'll understand why this was the smartest decision: Fiskar is already out of business, Rivian and Polestar continue hemorrhaging money like it's water, and every company not named Tesla that produces EVs is losing a massive amount of money on every EV they sell. Ford has been manufacturing cars for 123 years, yet Car & Driver reported that in the Q1 2024, it was losing $130,000 on every EV that it sold. And now, with the EV business already a black hole money pit for car makers, Trump is ending the incentives that helped to bolster EV sales, so things are about to get even worse.

The inescapable truth from all available evidence is that Apple avoided a money-losing debacle by shutting down Project Titan. The only argument one might make--and there's no way to know the truth of it--is that they should have shut it down sooner than they did. We also don't know what R&D for Project Titan might be useful for breakthroughs on other projects, so it's not as if the whole thing was pointless. 

If by every car manufacturer you mean every American car manufacturer then sure. They do exist outside the US too.

It's the same situation for all global car makers except, possibly, for the Chinese--their EVs have now made China the world's leading automaker, but if any of the Chinese companies are profitable, its hard to say how much Beijing's financial support of them has made that possible.