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>The existing technology really blows, and Apple can make a significant contribution. This is absolutely ridiculous. Apple is starting out at 0 with no real c

>The existing technology really blows, and Apple can make a significant contribution. This is absolutely ridiculous. Apple is starting out at 0 with no real competence in this area, the least of which is interaction with regulatory bodies tasked with consumer protection.

jameshart 10y ago
All of which is also true when Apple set out to make a phone. They had no competence in RF engineering, or interaction with the diversity of cellphone network providers throughout the world, the conventional wisdom at the time was that an outsider couldn't just break in to the phone market without acquiring an existing manufacturer.
- maroonblazer 10y ago
  The difference is that cell phones can't inadvertently kill people to the degree automobiles can.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
  There's a huge difference between iterating an iPod into a phone and moving from consumer electronics to a completely different market that just happens to depend on some electronics but requires a whole lot more engineering know-how that Apple has in its stables.
- billiam 10y ago
  Sorry, I call BS on this. I know a good bit about the semi-secret history here. I worked at Motorola before and during the launch of the first iPhone and also knew some of the people on the original iPhone product team. While it is true that they started with very few mobile industry veterans, they hired a few key people; they either quickly learned how to maneuver inside Apple or disappeared without a trace. So it is not accurate to say Apple just learned how to make smartphones really fast, more that they effectively hacked the whole process with a number of Jedi mind tricks as well as key product decisions, all cemented by classic Steve Jobs dickery. 1. They cultivated us at Motorola shamelessly by pretending to make an "iTunes phone" (remember the Rockr?) while they were just pumping our teams for information on how the byzantine portfolio and terminal acceptance process at carriers worked. They never intended that phone to ship and used the whole sordid con to get into Ralph de le Vega's office (sorry, Ed Zander). They then used all the persuasion and BS they had to convince AT&T to give Apple a pass on the incredibly complex field network testing all phones must pass. The reason the overall phone experience of the first iPhone was so bad was not just because Jobs and co wanted it to be a great music and Internet experience first, but because they couldn't make a great phone at all then. I don't see the exact analogy with teh car industry. cars. The mobile phone business was laughably over-regulated and unlike the extremely competitive phone industry, wireless carriers were not really. And oh yeah, smartphones were terrible, and cars today, whether you like the way they look or not, are some of the most incredibly optimized products ever made by man: safe, reliable, efficient. Cars just can't be disrupted via a Jesus phone coming in at the high end with innovative features. The Jesus car already exists (Tesla) and it has been extremely successful at influencing one of the biggest industries in the world in numerous ways. But if your goal, like Apple, is to not just influence but manufacture at scale, then Tesla has failed and it appears it will take any company, even Apple, decades to learn how to really make cars for more than a few. I sure hope this isn't just abut cars as a service, because Apple has demonstrated it just can't do services, even when latched to a truly beautiful shiny object it has made.
  - smcnally 10y ago
    > because Apple has demonstrated it just can't do services "In Fiscal 2015, the Services bin, “revenue from the iTunes Store ® , App Store, Mac App Store, iBooks StoreTM and Apple MusicTM (collectively “Internet Services”), AppleCare, Apple Pay ® , licensing and other services” counted for $19.9B, 8.5% of the company total." http://archive.mondaynote.com/2016/01/25/watching-apples-first-fiscal-2016-quarter/ http://archive.mondaynote.com/2016/01/25/watching-apples-fir...
    - FireBeyond 10y ago
      People in this thread are talking about the "bullshit" of existing cars and how the AppleCar will be a "come to Jesus" moment. Pointing to revenue as proof of success is a bad metric here. Great, the App and Mac App Store make lots of money, not the least because one of them is the only way for anyone to make revenue from iOS. No-one could point to MAS, for example, and pretend with a straight face that it's a "service done right" for anyone except Apple's bottom line.
      - tjl 10y ago
        I can point to one service Apple has done right, Messages.
        cocoflunchy 10y ago
        I just switched to iOS and the part I like the least has to be iMessage... it sucks. It will always try to send a message over HTTP even when you're in the subway instead of sending over SMS and not realize that it's an issue and just getting stuck halfway through sending.
        sangnoir 10y ago
        > I can point to one service Apple has done right, Messages Is it the same message that for many years disappeared all message sent to you when you switched from Apple? Perhaps as a final "fuck you" for leaving our ecosystem or them not just caring
rpgmaker 10y ago
It is also bullshit. Existing technology doesn't "blow" either.
- phatfish 10y ago
  Yup, there seems to be worrying trend on HN that any company not a part of the tech inner circle has no idea what the are doing. Funny because more than once there have been articles here about how assuming unusual/ugly code is the work of an incompetent engineer is short sighted, as often professionals DO know what they are doing, and it was done for a good reason that is not immediately apparent.
kalleboo 10y ago
> Apple is starting out at 0 with no real competence in this area, the least of which is interaction with regulatory bodies tasked with consumer protection Couldn't that competence be hired in? Tesla also started from zero.
- aphextron 10y ago
  >Tesla also started from zero. Yes they did, 15 years ago. Even with their deep pockets, Apple has a long way to go from zero to production.
ddebernardy 10y ago
Your assessment, whether correct or not (I've no idea), has an oddly familiar ring: > “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” -- November 16, 2006, Palm CEO, Ed Colligan > “Apple is slated to come out with a new phone… And it will largely fail…. Sales for the phone will skyrocket initially. However, things will calm down, and the Apple phone will take its place on the shelves with the random video cameras, cell phones, wireless routers and other would-be hits… When the iPod emerged in late 2001, it solved some major problems with MP3 players. Unfortunately for Apple, problems like that don’t exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren’t clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good.” -- December 07, 2006, CNET, Michael Kanellos http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/06/29/iphone-turns-5-here-are-the-naysayers/ http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/06/29/iphone-turns-5-here-ar...
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Your assessment, whether correct or not (I've no idea), has an oddly familiar ring I'm going to go ahead and claim your argument adds little value due to overgeneralization. Just because some guys were wrong in their criticism of Apple doesn't mean everyone who criticizes Apple is wrong. If I weren't feeling lazy, I would produce a long list of quotations that wrongly claimed the iPad would deprecate desktop computing (from both inside Apple and outside). The term "post-PC era" was being bandied about. So no, Apple doesn't always achieve their goals - even stated ones.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    The analogy was fitting because it was basically the same argument: "they're not (phone|car) people...". It doesn't mean that it's a certain success, but it does show that Apple can innovate in new areas and complacency is possibly not the best idea for the current market leaders.
    - zajd 10y ago
      Building a car is a little different than a phone, from pretty much any perspective.
tlrobinson 10y ago
No, Tesla started at 0. Apple is starting at 0, plus many billions of dollars of cash in the bank.

jameshart 10y ago

All of which is also true when Apple set out to make a phone. They had no competence in RF engineering, or interaction with the diversity of cellphone network providers throughout the world, the conventional wisdom at the time was that an outsider couldn't just break in to the phone market without acquiring an existing manufacturer.

maroonblazer 10y ago
The difference is that cell phones can't inadvertently kill people to the degree automobiles can.
kevin_thibedeau 10y ago
There's a huge difference between iterating an iPod into a phone and moving from consumer electronics to a completely different market that just happens to depend on some electronics but requires a whole lot more engineering know-how that Apple has in its stables.
billiam 10y ago
Sorry, I call BS on this. I know a good bit about the semi-secret history here. I worked at Motorola before and during the launch of the first iPhone and also knew some of the people on the original iPhone product team. While it is true that they started with very few mobile industry veterans, they hired a few key people; they either quickly learned how to maneuver inside Apple or disappeared without a trace. So it is not accurate to say Apple just learned how to make smartphones really fast, more that they effectively hacked the whole process with a number of Jedi mind tricks as well as key product decisions, all cemented by classic Steve Jobs dickery. 1. They cultivated us at Motorola shamelessly by pretending to make an "iTunes phone" (remember the Rockr?) while they were just pumping our teams for information on how the byzantine portfolio and terminal acceptance process at carriers worked. They never intended that phone to ship and used the whole sordid con to get into Ralph de le Vega's office (sorry, Ed Zander). They then used all the persuasion and BS they had to convince AT&T to give Apple a pass on the incredibly complex field network testing all phones must pass. The reason the overall phone experience of the first iPhone was so bad was not just because Jobs and co wanted it to be a great music and Internet experience first, but because they couldn't make a great phone at all then. I don't see the exact analogy with teh car industry. cars. The mobile phone business was laughably over-regulated and unlike the extremely competitive phone industry, wireless carriers were not really. And oh yeah, smartphones were terrible, and cars today, whether you like the way they look or not, are some of the most incredibly optimized products ever made by man: safe, reliable, efficient. Cars just can't be disrupted via a Jesus phone coming in at the high end with innovative features. The Jesus car already exists (Tesla) and it has been extremely successful at influencing one of the biggest industries in the world in numerous ways. But if your goal, like Apple, is to not just influence but manufacture at scale, then Tesla has failed and it appears it will take any company, even Apple, decades to learn how to really make cars for more than a few. I sure hope this isn't just abut cars as a service, because Apple has demonstrated it just can't do services, even when latched to a truly beautiful shiny object it has made.
- smcnally 10y ago
  > because Apple has demonstrated it just can't do services "In Fiscal 2015, the Services bin, “revenue from the iTunes Store ® , App Store, Mac App Store, iBooks StoreTM and Apple MusicTM (collectively “Internet Services”), AppleCare, Apple Pay ® , licensing and other services” counted for $19.9B, 8.5% of the company total." http://archive.mondaynote.com/2016/01/25/watching-apples-first-fiscal-2016-quarter/ http://archive.mondaynote.com/2016/01/25/watching-apples-fir...
  - FireBeyond 10y ago
    People in this thread are talking about the "bullshit" of existing cars and how the AppleCar will be a "come to Jesus" moment. Pointing to revenue as proof of success is a bad metric here. Great, the App and Mac App Store make lots of money, not the least because one of them is the only way for anyone to make revenue from iOS. No-one could point to MAS, for example, and pretend with a straight face that it's a "service done right" for anyone except Apple's bottom line.
    - tjl 10y ago
      I can point to one service Apple has done right, Messages.
      - cocoflunchy 10y ago
        I just switched to iOS and the part I like the least has to be iMessage... it sucks. It will always try to send a message over HTTP even when you're in the subway instead of sending over SMS and not realize that it's an issue and just getting stuck halfway through sending.
      - sangnoir 10y ago
        > I can point to one service Apple has done right, Messages Is it the same message that for many years disappeared all message sent to you when you switched from Apple? Perhaps as a final "fuck you" for leaving our ecosystem or them not just caring

rpgmaker 10y ago

It is also bullshit. Existing technology doesn't "blow" either.

phatfish 10y ago
Yup, there seems to be worrying trend on HN that any company not a part of the tech inner circle has no idea what the are doing. Funny because more than once there have been articles here about how assuming unusual/ugly code is the work of an incompetent engineer is short sighted, as often professionals DO know what they are doing, and it was done for a good reason that is not immediately apparent.

kalleboo 10y ago

> Apple is starting out at 0 with no real competence in this area, the least of which is interaction with regulatory bodies tasked with consumer protection Couldn't that competence be hired in? Tesla also started from zero.

aphextron 10y ago
>Tesla also started from zero. Yes they did, 15 years ago. Even with their deep pockets, Apple has a long way to go from zero to production.

ddebernardy 10y ago

Your assessment, whether correct or not (I've no idea), has an oddly familiar ring: > “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” -- November 16, 2006, Palm CEO, Ed Colligan > “Apple is slated to come out with a new phone… And it will largely fail…. Sales for the phone will skyrocket initially. However, things will calm down, and the Apple phone will take its place on the shelves with the random video cameras, cell phones, wireless routers and other would-be hits… When the iPod emerged in late 2001, it solved some major problems with MP3 players. Unfortunately for Apple, problems like that don’t exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren’t clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good.” -- December 07, 2006, CNET, Michael Kanellos http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/06/29/iphone-turns-5-here-are-the-naysayers/ http://www.loopinsight.com/2012/06/29/iphone-turns-5-here-ar...

sangnoir 10y ago
> Your assessment, whether correct or not (I've no idea), has an oddly familiar ring I'm going to go ahead and claim your argument adds little value due to overgeneralization. Just because some guys were wrong in their criticism of Apple doesn't mean everyone who criticizes Apple is wrong. If I weren't feeling lazy, I would produce a long list of quotations that wrongly claimed the iPad would deprecate desktop computing (from both inside Apple and outside). The term "post-PC era" was being bandied about. So no, Apple doesn't always achieve their goals - even stated ones.
- matt4077 10y ago
  The analogy was fitting because it was basically the same argument: "they're not (phone|car) people...". It doesn't mean that it's a certain success, but it does show that Apple can innovate in new areas and complacency is possibly not the best idea for the current market leaders.
  - zajd 10y ago
    Building a car is a little different than a phone, from pretty much any perspective.

tlrobinson 10y ago

No, Tesla started at 0. Apple is starting at 0, plus many billions of dollars of cash in the bank.