mpantone

AppleZulu said:

mpantone said:

Nobody sane really thought that Apple Car was going to ship. If you looked at Apple's publicly available autonomous vehicle driving logs available on the California DMV website, they were hardly doing any testing at all. There was a long span of several months when they didn't log a single mile.

Only some of the tech media turned Apple Car into a done deal. Yeah, Apple probably learned something from it, both what to pursue and what not to. For sure some of the gained knowledge would be applicable in other parts of the company. For sure they burned through a lot of R&D dollars on Apple Car/Project Titan/whatever.

Let's remember that the way any Apple Car would be marketed and priced would exclude 99.9% of the planet. Hell, look at Apple Vision Pro at $3500.

The biggest problem with all the Apple Car discussions online was the fact that most people were looking at the project through American blinders, seeing it only from the myopic perspective of the number one car culture on the planet. We know you love walking to your garage, planting your big fat ass in your big fat SUV, attach your iPhone to its MagSafe holder, drive to your company's big fat ass parking lot, and bitch and moan when you have to park more than 50 feet from the front door of your office. We get it. 

The rest of the world does not have a car culture like the USA. Plain and simple. Sure, most people want them but for a lot of people, even in technologically advanced countries like Japan, the personal auto is more of a leisure device. Construction workers in Tokyo go to job sites on the subway, not in Ford F-150s or GMC Sierras. In Europe getting a driver's license can be very expensive. It's not like the USA. I think a California driver's license today is $40. Forty years ago it was $2, about the same as three gallons of gasoline.

In the USA, getting your driver's license is a rite of passage for teens. It is not the case anywhere else. ONLY HERE.

Uhhh. O.K. What does that have to do with CarPlay?

Some people online think that CarPlay is a really, Really, REALLY important feature in a car purchase decision. It's not because the rest of the world doesn't have the same car culture as the USA. It's unlikely that CarPlay Ultra will trickle down to mass-market models. Even regular CarPlay won't make to many of these. We've already seen some auto manufacturers pull back from CarPlay or decide not to pursue it. Full integration makes more sense for premium models, trim lines, and EVs that are essentially computers on wheels.

But the average Honda or GM sold in Indonesia or Bangladesh really doesn't need it that much.

Many of these automobile manufacturers are looking at shaving costs from a global perspective. Putting in the extra engineering effort to address a benefit that really benefits a handful of markets isn't a great value proposition, especially when they aren't making money off of it. Infotainment systems are a cost center. Most companies would prefer to put in the least amount of effort without coming in dead last amongst the competition especially on basic trim levels.

Nobody really needs album art thumbnails on their dashboard.

I realize that many of these basic concepts, particularly how different US car culture is compared to the rest of the world is beyond the comprehension of many people online.

In the end, whatever infotainment/UX standard the Chinese (or possibly Indian) car companies come up with will dominate. Not tomorrow, not next months, but give it 10 years.

As Charlesn mentions, having your own proprietary infotainment system gives you the luxury of monetizing driver data and/or upselling subscription services. There's nothing inherently new about this. Car navi systems requires paid upgrades. Even standalone GPS devices (Garmin, TomTom et al.) required payment for new map data. Even early iPhone GPS navi apps had add-on features like lane guidance.

Most companies would like user data under their own TOS not Apple's. I expect more car companies to follow GM's lead and abandon CarPlay and Android Auto in the next few years.

Nobody sane really thought that Apple Car was going to ship. If you looked at Apple's publicly available autonomous vehicle driving logs available on the California DMV website, they were hardly doing any testing at all. There was a long span of several months when they didn't log a single mile.

Only some of the tech media turned Apple Car into a done deal. Yeah, Apple probably learned something from it, both what to pursue and what not to. For sure some of the gained knowledge would be applicable in other parts of the company. For sure they burned through a lot of R&D dollars on Apple Car/Project Titan/whatever.

Let's remember that the way any Apple Car would be marketed and priced would exclude 99.9% of the planet. Hell, look at Apple Vision Pro at $3500.

The biggest problem with all the Apple Car discussions online was the fact that most people were looking at the project through American blinders, seeing it only from the myopic perspective of the number one car culture on the planet. We know you love walking to your garage, planting your big fat ass in your big fat SUV, attach your iPhone to its MagSafe holder, drive to your company's big fat ass parking lot, and bitch and moan when you have to park more than 50 feet from the front door of your office. We get it. 

The rest of the world does not have a car culture like the USA. Plain and simple. Sure, most people want them but for a lot of people, even in technologically advanced countries like Japan, the personal auto is more of a leisure device. Construction workers in Tokyo go to job sites on the subway, not in Ford F-150s or GMC Sierras. In Europe getting a driver's license can be very expensive. It's not like the USA. I think a California driver's license today is $40. Forty years ago it was $2, about the same as three gallons of gasoline.

In the USA, getting your driver's license is a rite of passage for teens. It is not the case anywhere else. ONLY HERE.

Guys, enough of this robotic assembly stuff. Apple has been making iPhones for 18+ years, if it were easier/cheaper to build/operate a robot than use humans, I'm sure they already would have started deploying them. I'm sure there is increasing automation in parts of the supply chain where it makes the most sense.

If robots were that cheap and capable, you'd be getting your Quarter Pounder at McDonald's that was made by a robot and not some pimply teen. But McDonald's has used machine assistance in large parts of their operation (processing raw ingredients, using machines to make supplies like bags and boxes, using forklifts in warehouses to move pallets).

Expanding iPhone production in India makes sense because India was making iPhones before the current administration took office. There's already a supply chain infrastructure set up there plus a labor market. And places like India, China, Vietnam have two 12-hour shifts. Here in the USA, it would have to be 8-hour shifts and finding a place where there's a sizable labor market that can hire skilled individuals to work graveyard shift would be very challenging. Apple's manufacturing partners can't build an iPhone factory in Boondocksville, USA and find enough people to staff it. Something like a chip fab works better since the staffing requirements are much lighter.

It's easy to find 100,000 people in Shenzhen to build iPhones because it has a population of over 17 million. The top twelve Chinese cities have a population over 9 million (which are all larger than New York City). In the USA there are only four cities with a population over 2 million.

India overtook China several years ago in total population and is growing at a much faster rate.

While Apple's Apple Silicon reveal at WWDC 2020 was certainly important, it was really the final piece of the puzzle. They controlled the entire hardware/software stack for the iPhone (by then the dominant revenue source) for years.

Some people quietly predicted it when the A7 SoC debuted in 2013, the first 64-bit chip widely deployed on smartphones. It was a mic drop moment and the rest of the competition in the semiconductor industry were stunned into silence. It was clear then that Apple could take that architecture to the desktop.

The next clue was macOS High Sierra in 2017 which probably had an internal requirement that every release had to run on prototype Apple Silicon chips. It was just a question of when Apple Silicon would debut, not if. Intel's process node failures, slipping schedules and overall ineptitude simply cemented Apple's resolve.

Apple debuted their own in-house silicon -- the A4 -- in 2010 but it was probably 7-10 years of development. It probably got its start right around when Apple started working on tablets and smartphones (i.e., years before the iPhone launch in 2007).

Stabitha_Christie said:

I appreciate the irony of an objectively bad businessman, multiple bankruptcies, multiple failed business ventures) is trying to tell one of the most successful CEOs how to run a business.  

Yes, it would make a great gameshow I reckon. Maybe it could be called "The Felon."

Alas, this is real life.

And I was under the impression that Foxconn has other customers than Apple. Am I wrong?