applesauce007

Well, nothing stays the same for ever.  New talent is good.
At least with Jony Ive at the helm, bad designs will be filtered out.
Apple now has new designers like Andrew Kim of Microsoft and Tesla fame.

The Camera, Security and Computer vision patents can have many applications in autonomous systems including self-driving cars.

But then again, Apple may be gearing up to go into home automation.  
Apple recently hired Sam Jadallah, former CEO of smart lock company Otto, to head up its smart home initiatives.

Wow...  This is awesome.  Gotta check it out.
The C APIs for FDB were very low level, this layer should provide higher level APIs and hopefully seamless CoreData integration.
Keep the layers coming.  SQL?
This DB has the potential to put some established DBs to shame in terms of scalability, performance, redundancy and ease of use.

Go Apple!

Well, I have had a chance to use the AppleTV Spectrum app at someone else's home and I am very impressed.

I find the Spectrum UI to be easier to use and more responsive than my DirecTV Now and it provides the same functions except perhaps for a DVR option.  Switching stations on the Spectrum App is also visibly faster than my DirecTV Now possibly because it is on the Spectrum Network.  Moreover,  we were running 3 AppleTV and there does not appear to be a restriction on the number of simultaneous streams.

So the only advantage DirecTV now offers is that it works on any network including cell networks but it is restricted to 2 streams or 3 streams for an extra fee but cannot support zero-sign-on.  Perhaps DirecTV Now may change when AT&T 5G becomes available to support zero sign-on.

In any case, these monolithic apps show that there is plenty of room for improvements in tvOS and Apple can help.

First and foremost, people what to turn on their AppleTV and use SIRI go directly to any live network or on-demand content in their subscription.  The monolithic Apps like the Spectrum App or DirecTV Now do not allow this.  Even the smaller network specific apps do not switch directly to their live TV stream for your specific region.  When you use the network browser in these monolithic apps you can appreciate the complexity of the different streams and on-demand content that exist for different regions for each specific network.  You can always use the “Guide” to go directly to your regional live stream but scrolling through the alphabetically listed guide to find a specific network can be cumbersome although the guide is useful for show what is currently playing or is scheduled on the different networks.

How can Apple help?

1.  Apple should support SIRI shortcuts on the tvOS  for all Apps.

2.  Apple should define a common protocol to be supported by the monolithic cable provider apps and/or network specific apps to allow SIRI to switch to live streams or on-demand content from various content providers by name.

3.  Apple should provide a common Guide app that can browse guide data from any Cable TVprovider.

Overall this Spectrum TV app is a very big win for the AppleTV platform in the States.  For AT&T’s sake, I hope DirecTV Now can support zero sign-on over 5G and allow more streams soon because I imagine AT&T will lose a lot of customers if local cable providers decide to support zero sign-on with their respective tvOS apps.

Kuo actually sounds about right although I think it could be sooner.
5G will start to deploy any time now.  Significant VR and autonomous car testing has been done and some patents have been filed.
The whole integrated package including electrification, autonomous driving of newly architected vehicles and ride sharing needs to be tested extensively.

I have a feeling that some of Apple Physical Car's hardware work is being done at zoox.  ( zoox.com )
About a year ago, 17 Apple car engineers joined zoox together as a group and I think Apple may have arranged that move.  Not sure who is funding them.
Zoox is extremely secretive and they appear to use autonomous technology that is patented by Apple like map-less autonomous driving.

Check out their "crab like" 4 wheel steering capable test cars.