AppleZulu

hmlongco said:

Okay. Now Apple needs a BassPod subwoofer and the ability to tie it and and a few HomePods and HomePod minis into a true Spatial Audio network that supports Atmos.

THAT would rock.

Minis don’t sound as good and lack the hardware for adjusting output to the room and the other HomePods, so they wouldn’t work in a set with the larger HomePods. A surround setup would require at least four regular HomePods. I don’t think, however, that a separate “BassPod” would be necessary; HomePods already put out good bass frequencies. Six would probably be required to truly reproduce the y-axis information in Dolby Atmos audio. For less than that price, you can get a really good amp plus 7.1 speakers. 

john-useless said:

The number of people in this world who know what Apple is truly planning is small, and most of them probably work at Apple. But I will be surprised if Apple actually ever builds its own car. Think they have problems these days with supply chain management, chip shortages, employee unionization efforts, bad press, and the like? Becoming an auto manufacturer is all that multiplied by 1,000. Yes, Apple (currently) has money to burn and could likely afford start-up costs far more easily than other modern EV-maker wannabes like Fisker, Faraday, and others. But should Apple go there?

I think it would be far better for Apple to establish a partnership with one or more respected, well-established automakers. Convince a company like BMW to let Apple design the various driver- and passenger-facing controls inside their cars (certainly the software, if not also the hardware). If and when that proves successful, establish additional partnerships with downmarket brands like Honda, Toyota, Subaru, and/or Chevrolet — brands whose buyers don't usually compete with Apple's initial upmarket partner brands. But let the auto companies retain control over the general mechanical designs and manufacturing of their vehicles. Apple doesn't need to control the whole stack to be successful here in the automotive space — and heaven knows that the designs of user-facing controls and software inside cars desperately need Apple's expertise.

At the very least, if Apple opts to design and build cars all on its own, they should create an all-new brand for it. What none of us needs is for the Apple brand itself to be tarnished by news reports of faulty autonomous-driving software (think Tesla), or for recalls, or for online image galleries to be full of rusty or crashed vehicles with Apple logos within a few years of their first car being sold.

This is what I'm talking about. Apple is never going to hang its reputation on the design and manufacturing decisions of some other company, and certainly not for something in which their product is deeply integrated. The closest and possibly worst example of this sort of mistake was when they didn't anticipate how integral gps and mapping would be to iOS and the iPhone. Early on, Google maps was the default mapping app on iPhone. Then they realized that a) location and mapping would be at the heart of much of the iPhone's functionality and b) Google uses gps and mapping to scrape and sell its customers' data. So Apple endured the embarrassment of cutting off Google and launching Apple Maps before it was ready. Long-term, cutting off that co-dependent partnership was the right thing for them to do.

They're not going to make a similar-but-worse mistake by playing a subservient role to one or more car manufacturers as some sort of Apple-branded insert into a vehicle designed and built by someone else. They're especially not going to pursue "downmarket brands" for that sort of partnership. Apple is as profitable as they are because they don't pursue low-margin, compromised quality downmarket products. They never, ever do that.

JP234 said:

This will go down as the second costliest mistake Apple Inc. ever made. Only the firing of Steve Jobs was worse. History has not been kind to automakers, not even great ones like Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Packard and Studebaker. Or even large ones like American Motors. Or Chrysler, whose history of bankruptcies, bailouts and buyouts is so littered it's impossible to keep track of them all (the current owner, Stellantis, just announced the closing of the Belvidere assembly plant, which makes Jeeps, laying off about 1,300 workers. Merry Christmas, at least they're giving the required 90 days notice, so workers can sabotage Jeeps on the line for the next 3 months). Why does Apple believe that they can start up a car company from scratch??? Why would ANYONE want to start a car company? Money can't assure success in this field. Heavy manufacturing is NOT the same as technology manufacturing.

If it happens, that is. Not sure the board will approve this venture when they get a true cost analysis.

Apple doesn't generally create a new product to compete with existing companies' existing products head-to-head, hoping they'll win by doing the same thing everyone else is doing but vaguely better, or by doing exactly the same thing as others, while coasting on the Apple brand. 

No, they've always entered the market with something that may nominally be similar to existing products, but comes at it from a novel direction, and shifts the paradigm, often in pretty significant ways. When rumors precede the release of such a product, the enthusiasts rarely correctly guess what the new thing will actually do, and the naysayers also guess wrong, pontificating how a new Apple product will fail, based on the assumption that it will be same thing everyone else is making, but with an Apple logo on it. They are always wrong. (The iPhone: where's the stylus and keyboard? The iPad: ha, ha! wasn't there an SNL skit about an iPad feminine hygiene product? The App Store: nobody will make money on 99¢ apps. The Apple Watch: everybody already has a clock on their phone and nobody wears a watch any more, unless it's a fitbit, and nobody's going to pay $400 for a fitbit. etc. etc.)

If Apple actually does decide to produce a car, it won't be an Apple-branded version of what everyone else (including Tesla) is already making. It won't be the limited things in the article here that would make it "a success without a wow factor." It will be something different, something that others will say "why didn't we think of that," and a few years later, whatever changes in the paradigm come with it will be assumed by everyone to be how things always were.

Honestly, it continually amazes me how even people who regularly spend time on an Apple enthusiast website don't seem to register that Apple operates differently than its competitors. There is a very repetitious pattern here of people speculating about Apple's impending doom and other people suggesting what Apple should really do, all based on assumptions that Apple operates based on other companies' business models rather than on the very different business model that's made Apple pretty darn successful so far.

Madbum said:

People are forgetting one thing

why did Musk buy this company?

He didn’t like the one sided biased and filtering of free speech. The old Twitter team likely though Sam Bankman-Fried and all of his donations to a certain D party made him a model Twitter citizen lol

He is simply cleaning out the people who made Twitter what it was, the exact reason he bought the company, to change it from what it was

Do you do that by keeping everything the same?

Twitter quite literally set aside its own terms of use for the former president, allowing him and his sycophants to spread disinformation and outright lies up until and including the point when he triggered a violent attempted coup. It literally took an attempt to overthrow the world's oldest democracy for Twitter to uphold its own terms of service, and they only did that because the coup had turned violent but failed. Up until that point, the only restriction on "free speech" was -only in the latter part of 2020- the minimal correction or removal of egregious and demonstrably false information that was literally putting people's lives at risk. So Mr. Musk may think he's on some sort of free speech crusade, but he's misguided.

And once again, your description of who Musk is "cleaning out" fails to take into account the rapid and indiscriminate approach he's taken to accomplish that "cleaning out." No serious executive does that. What he's doing is intentionally or incompetently destroying the existing company. For far less money and none of the destruction of assets and reputation, Musk could've built a new platform from scratch the way he wanted it, then quietly bought Twitter at a much lower price, merged the companies, ported the users over to the new platform and kept the Twitter brand, but this way it would actually be intact and valuable. No, Musk blundered into this thing like a man with more money than sense, and lacking the capacity for humility, he compounds his mistakes and makes things worse instead of owning them, correcting them and making things better.

I'm beginning to think that Mr. Musk is more Gavin Belson than Steve Jobs.

I wonder what sort of liability Musk has assumed by admitting he's fine with collecting $8 from "verified" fake accounts before getting rid of them, and then an $8 "verified" fake account immediately causes Eli Lilly stock to shed $20B before Musk got a chance to 'get rid of it?' I have to think that this little tidbit is probably of central note in the lawsuit Eli Lilly's house counsel is drawing up just about now.