muthuk_vanalingam

radarthekat said:

nht said:

radarthekat said:

sagan_student said:

rogifan_new said:

Just another example of how automakers don’t need Apple to be able to build autonomous and self driving vehicles. If Apple really wants to play in this space they’re going to need to build their own vehicle, and maybe it’s not something sold directly to consumers. Maybe Apple becomes its own ride sharing service.

The idea of the ride sharing service just screams Apple to me. By the time this happens, Apple could have committed lines of production and control the lifespan of these vehicles; essentially they could then provide a transportation experience that only Apple can provide.

Question - Couldn't Apple just join this consortium? I don't think this would affect them negatively, if this were the case.

As I've been saying all along, autonomous vehicles might not be the next big thing.  

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.  

You've essentially described uber and lyft

Neither of those deal with several aspects of a fleet of autonomous vehicles, such as monitoring remaining charge per vehicle to return a vehicle to a depot, cleanliness and operating condition of an autonomous vehicle, scheduling rides in advance, combining multiple fleets, such as from competing rental car agencies, into a single efficiently managed fleet, handling requests for different vehicle types, such as a car, van, truck, etc, route optimization across an entire fleet with varying remaining charge levels and varying distances to each vehicle's available service/charging depots, sharing of depots and charging centers across competing fleets and assiciatedaccounting. Uber and Lyft are very rudimentary versions of a true ride-sharing society, relying upon the individual drivers to deal with maintenance, fueling, cleaning, routing, uptime, downtime, etc. all this needs to be rethink once the fleets ae autonomous. And it's a very big challenge. Thus, a tech player like Apple with a penchant for designing systems that yield excellent user experiences, and happens already to have a billion plus pieces of hardware out n the field through which users could interact with such a service.

There are few additional points you might want to consider:

i) Cars are ONE of the transportation modes, NOT the ONLY transportation mode available to people. Buses, Trains, Bikes, Planes will continue to be available as choices for people

ii) As already mentioned by @GeorgeBMac, there are genuine reasons which would prevent "autonomous" cars as the ONLY option even in countries where autonomous cars make sense. At best, it would co-exist with manually operated cars (electric or non-electric), apart from buses and bikes on the same roads

iii) Only in US, Europe and other rich countries cars are one of the main transportation options. Not sure about china. But countries like India (where I live) and other not-so-rich countries, cars would NEVER be a main transportation option - due to lack of roads, population density, cost of vehicle (either manually operated or autonomous) etc

iv) There will be about 50% to 60% of the world population which would rarely see (if at all they see) autonomous cars in their countries

While autonomous cars will play an important role in transportation in future, I don't see it eliminating manually operated cars. It has to be designed to co-exist with bikes, buses AND manually operated cars and be damn good at it. It would be a long way out (at least 2 decades) for that to become one of the main transportation options in future in US/Europe, possibly China and few other counties. In rest of the world, autonomous cars would play a marginal role, if any.

I don't think less demand for 10nm chipsets by Mediatek and Huawei (HiSilicon) has anything to do with "waiting for iPhone 8" to copy. They do that ALL the time (i.e. throughout the year), before release based on rumors or previous iPhones and after release of latest iPhones.

The clickbait title itself is misleading. Mediatek is at best a "mid-range" Android SoC volume provider. Their high-end X30 10-nm SoC has very few takers, if any. Meizu (low budget/quality OEM) is one of them. I am not aware of any other popular Android OEM, planning to use Mediatek X30 SoC in their high-cost device so far. The other OEM Huawei releases its flagship Mate series usually in November with their latest Kirin SoC. They don't have a 10nm chipset yet (with the upcoming Kirin 970 on 10nm set for mass production in October/November timeframe I guess), so the demand from them in Apr-Jun OR Jul-Sep quarter would be 0 and that should NOT be surprising either. So TSMC having very little demand for 10nm SoC (apart from huge Apple demand) is fairly obvious, with Samsung fab owning the other 10nm Android SoCs manufacturing (for Qualcomm and themselves).

ihatescreennames said:

cali said:

I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would choose an iPhone knockoff. Unless money is a problem I can't wrap
my head around it. 

Roger even mentioned that his Galaxy Nexus started to run poorly and that he went through 3 phones in 3 years, but at the end makes those things sound acceptable enough to go back.  I used my original iPhone until I upgraded to an iPhone 4 on launch day (6/24/2010).  I used that 4 until I went with a 5s and I still use the 4 several times a week at the gym just for music.

He also mentions noticing the smoothness of iOS as his main discovery.  Why go back to a less smooth experience?  Does anyone really pine for the days of watching 12 fps videos on the internet? I know I don't.

A friend of mine won't switch from Android and recently made a comment along the lines of "remember those commercials years ago showing an iPhone with people doing pinch-to-zoom and it was really smooth.  It's funny that just now we're actually getting to that point."  My reply was, no, it's always been that way on an iPhone.  He doesn't believe it.  Oh, and he is constantly charging his phone. Sitting down to eat? Charge the phone.  Just got out of the car? Go in and charge the phone.  Just been on FB for 30 minutes? Charge the phone while we have a conversation.  It's ridiculous. 

He already answered that in the article itself - "There are pros and cons to both platforms. It's just a matter of smart shopping, and deciding which tradeoffs you're willing to live with. "

As to your friend having an Android phone charging it more time than using it - There are multiple solutions to that (find the apps which kill battery and uninstall them, change battery, change to a phone which has good battery life etc etc). The fact that he has chosen to live with it - is his choice. It is NOT a problem faced by majority of Android phone users (only a minority is impacted like that).

cali said:

I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would choose an iPhone knockoff. Unless money is a problem I can't wrap
my head around it. 

i) Access to File System (The most important one. I know everyone in this forum would laugh at this point - only to be hypocrites 1 year later when Apple opens it up in iphones as well, apart from opening it up in iPads this year)

ii) Better battery life (of course not through optimization, but by use of larger batteries)

iii) Customization (yes, even basic customization options can go a long way in improving user experience, which is just NOT possible in IOS)

And a salute to the author for sharing his viewpoints openly, particularly about Android - which WILL infuriate MANY people in this forum.

misa said:

schlack said:

Still sitting on my iPad Air. Wanting to upgrade for a couple years now. But that protruding camera. Still keeps me from clicking the buy button. What's wrong with Apple for not just going with a camera that will fit.

Because it would have to be thicker. Would you prefer a thicker iPad? Please let Apple know.

This is one of those issues where that part simple can not be made thinner without drasticly lowering the quality. Similar reasons for the OIS on larger iphone models.