6 ms·

Apple Drops Hints About Working on Self-Driving Cars

24 points by uptown 10y ago

revelation 10y ago
Companies write to regulators or act as amici curiae all the time. So maybe this is another "hint" of Apple, but so far we had a whole bunch of hints that media have willingly eaten and the only thing to come out of that was a bunch of crap.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  I can't see it happen. The company is struggling to ship bread and butter products like laptops.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Can you explain what you mean by “struggling to ship”? Maybe you’re talking about their previous quarter results which were down a bit year-over-year, depressed by people waiting for laptop updates? I haven’t heard any news of notable production problems. Supposedly they’ve had record online orders of their new pro laptops http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/apple-macbook-pro-new-philip-schiller-interview-phil-iphone-ios-criticism-a7393156.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...
  - cooper12 10y ago
    Oh really? > The MacBook Pro made more money in 5 days than most laptops in the whole year, Slice added. "In only 5 days the new MacBook Pro's sales already equal 78 percent of all the revenue generated by the MacBook 12-inch since it became available in April 2015." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-2016-macbook-pro-sales-defy-criticism-initial-revenue-strong-says-market-researcher/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-20...)
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      There's no accounting for taste...
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      That kinda makes my point. You had an explosion of pent up demand for a neglected core product line.
- Animats 10y ago
  This may just be Apple's lobbying operation running on because nobody officially told them to stop. There were previous rumors last summer of Apple testing at GoMentum Station, which is part of the old Concord Naval Weapons Station north of Oakland. But nothing much has been reported about that. It's not that secret; BART tracks go over it, you can see most of it from nearby roads, and a high school faces it. Honda has been testing there, using an Acura with the inevitable spinning Velodyne on top. Apple doesn't have a California autonomous vehicle testing license, although 19 other companies do.[1] [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...
Bud 10y ago
The actual article belies the headline, and supports instead the same notion that most recent reporting has supported, which is that Apple has given up on building entire cars, but still may be interested in building software for said cars.
neom 10y ago
I don't drive so ask HN: I seem to recall apple saying years ago that they wanted to make the entertainment/ui for cars, did that ever happen, was it a success?
- pain_perdu 10y ago
  http://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/ http://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Not sure. It's a tough sell imo, because carmakers have a maniacal obsession for shipping garbage entertainment systems. I've only seen it in a few cars, as my social circle are mostly cheapskates with old cars. It's a pretty good system.
  - massel 10y ago
    Used to be true, but now, ads for any CarPlay-enabled vehicle seem to almost exclusively feature the stereo as the key selling point. A notable holdout: Toyota, who has arguably the garbagest entertainment system.
    - Spooky23 10y ago
      That's great news. I haven't been car shopping for awhile. A friend has a 2016 Honda Pilot. The enerertaintment system on this thing is a pure shitshow... I think it's 3 clicks on some awful touchscreen to turn the radio on.
analog31 10y ago
Will there be an "escape" button? ;-)
haswell 10y ago
Let's just pretend for a moment that there's no ambiguity and they're actually doing this. Would you drive...or rather...ride in a car powered by Apple software? I would not. If there's one thing the current iteration of Apple has shown, it's that it's not great at writing software. And with this in mind, I'd be terrified to ride in a vehicle powered by carOS. This isn't coming from a place of anti-Apple sentiment...I use quite a few Apple products...I just accept that they're pretty bad at this stuff these days. Edit: Trying to understand the downvotes here. Care to follow up with a comment instead? I'm genuinely interested in discussing this.
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  Didn't downvote you but here is my guess: it should be save to assume that Apple will approach developing software that drives a car completely differently than the consumer software they typically produce where bugs in the very vast majority of cases do not result in physical harm to anybody. Any sane software developer/company would. It would be foolish to develop your music player like it's a car or airplane and it would be foolish to develop your car like it's a music player. Edit: fixing phone autocorrect issue.
  - haswell 10y ago
    I completely agree that one should expect a very different approach to developing this sort of software, but that also leads to a key question that should be asked about any company approaching this sort of thing: is there a good reason to believe they're capable of this different approach? And if other facets of the company are showing signs of fundamental problems, do they deserve trust that "this will be different"? None of this to say they're not capable of this, but I think there are good reasons to doubt that a hardware company with a spotty track record when it comes to software has the ability to put forth the software engineering effort required to build something of this caliber. $0.02, just my opinion, etc.
  - Corrado 10y ago
    Then again, I think its safe to say that traditional auto makers are developing electric vehicles exactly the same way they develop ICE vehicles. They market them the same, they build them the same, they sell them the same. I don't think its too much to say that when a company has gotten very large they tend to do the "safe" thing and build upon what has worked in the past. Given that, I would tend to expect Apple will develop its auto"mobile" products similarly to their iOS and macOS products.
danielhooper 10y ago
Why play the role of BMW and manufacture vehicles when you can play Mastercard and collect 0.5% of every penny spent on ubers/lyft when asking Siri for directions and confirming with Apply Pay and Touch ID. If anything, Apple is gearing themselves up to profit off the movement of people and not the vehicles themselves. Seems like a better strategy if you ask me, but I'm not a strategist of any sort...
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Or how about I just cut Apple out of the picture, which is what is actually happening.
- lowglow 10y ago
  Come help integrate services with us! :)
zemvpferreira 10y ago
I wonder if Apple would launch a self-driving Uber competitor, and I wonder if they'd make it iphone-only and deeply integrated, like their other services. Will Apple cars have access to more information about iphone users than Google/Uber cars? Enough to be anti-competive? It's really interesting to see their hardware-advantage-driven approach to services come to bear on different industries.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  How much of an edge do you get from information? The average car fare wants to go from A to B, for some price, probably usually cheap. They are going to be pretty willing to share A and B. There's probably some more sophisticated planning you can do to increase utilization by using further information, but I bet that ends up being a pretty small edge.

24 points by uptown 10y ago

Companies write to regulators or act as amici curiae all the time. So maybe this is another "hint" of Apple, but so far we had a whole bunch of hints that media have willingly eaten and the only thing to come out of that was a bunch of crap.

Spooky23 10y ago
I can't see it happen. The company is struggling to ship bread and butter products like laptops.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by “struggling to ship”? Maybe you’re talking about their previous quarter results which were down a bit year-over-year, depressed by people waiting for laptop updates? I haven’t heard any news of notable production problems. Supposedly they’ve had record online orders of their new pro laptops http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/apple-macbook-pro-new-philip-schiller-interview-phil-iphone-ios-criticism-a7393156.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fea...
- cooper12 10y ago
  Oh really? > The MacBook Pro made more money in 5 days than most laptops in the whole year, Slice added. "In only 5 days the new MacBook Pro's sales already equal 78 percent of all the revenue generated by the MacBook 12-inch since it became available in April 2015." (http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-2016-macbook-pro-sales-defy-criticism-initial-revenue-strong-says-market-researcher/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2016/11/08/new-20...)
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    There's no accounting for taste...
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    That kinda makes my point. You had an explosion of pent up demand for a neglected core product line.
Animats 10y ago
This may just be Apple's lobbying operation running on because nobody officially told them to stop. There were previous rumors last summer of Apple testing at GoMentum Station, which is part of the old Concord Naval Weapons Station north of Oakland. But nothing much has been reported about that. It's not that secret; BART tracks go over it, you can see most of it from nearby roads, and a high school faces it. Honda has been testing there, using an Acura with the inevitable spinning Velodyne on top. Apple doesn't have a California autonomous vehicle testing license, although 19 other companies do.[1] [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...

Bud 10y ago

The actual article belies the headline, and supports instead the same notion that most recent reporting has supported, which is that Apple has given up on building entire cars, but still may be interested in building software for said cars.

neom 10y ago

I don't drive so ask HN: I seem to recall apple saying years ago that they wanted to make the entertainment/ui for cars, did that ever happen, was it a success?

pain_perdu 10y ago
http://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/ http://www.apple.com/ios/carplay/
Spooky23 10y ago
Not sure. It's a tough sell imo, because carmakers have a maniacal obsession for shipping garbage entertainment systems. I've only seen it in a few cars, as my social circle are mostly cheapskates with old cars. It's a pretty good system.
- massel 10y ago
  Used to be true, but now, ads for any CarPlay-enabled vehicle seem to almost exclusively feature the stereo as the key selling point. A notable holdout: Toyota, who has arguably the garbagest entertainment system.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    That's great news. I haven't been car shopping for awhile. A friend has a 2016 Honda Pilot. The enerertaintment system on this thing is a pure shitshow... I think it's 3 clicks on some awful touchscreen to turn the radio on.

analog31 10y ago

Will there be an "escape" button? ;-)

haswell 10y ago

Let's just pretend for a moment that there's no ambiguity and they're actually doing this. Would you drive...or rather...ride in a car powered by Apple software? I would not. If there's one thing the current iteration of Apple has shown, it's that it's not great at writing software. And with this in mind, I'd be terrified to ride in a vehicle powered by carOS. This isn't coming from a place of anti-Apple sentiment...I use quite a few Apple products...I just accept that they're pretty bad at this stuff these days. Edit: Trying to understand the downvotes here. Care to follow up with a comment instead? I'm genuinely interested in discussing this.

ajmurmann 10y ago
Didn't downvote you but here is my guess: it should be save to assume that Apple will approach developing software that drives a car completely differently than the consumer software they typically produce where bugs in the very vast majority of cases do not result in physical harm to anybody. Any sane software developer/company would. It would be foolish to develop your music player like it's a car or airplane and it would be foolish to develop your car like it's a music player. Edit: fixing phone autocorrect issue.
- haswell 10y ago
  I completely agree that one should expect a very different approach to developing this sort of software, but that also leads to a key question that should be asked about any company approaching this sort of thing: is there a good reason to believe they're capable of this different approach? And if other facets of the company are showing signs of fundamental problems, do they deserve trust that "this will be different"? None of this to say they're not capable of this, but I think there are good reasons to doubt that a hardware company with a spotty track record when it comes to software has the ability to put forth the software engineering effort required to build something of this caliber. $0.02, just my opinion, etc.
- Corrado 10y ago
  Then again, I think its safe to say that traditional auto makers are developing electric vehicles exactly the same way they develop ICE vehicles. They market them the same, they build them the same, they sell them the same. I don't think its too much to say that when a company has gotten very large they tend to do the "safe" thing and build upon what has worked in the past. Given that, I would tend to expect Apple will develop its auto"mobile" products similarly to their iOS and macOS products.

danielhooper 10y ago

Why play the role of BMW and manufacture vehicles when you can play Mastercard and collect 0.5% of every penny spent on ubers/lyft when asking Siri for directions and confirming with Apply Pay and Touch ID. If anything, Apple is gearing themselves up to profit off the movement of people and not the vehicles themselves. Seems like a better strategy if you ask me, but I'm not a strategist of any sort...

wavefunction 10y ago
Or how about I just cut Apple out of the picture, which is what is actually happening.
lowglow 10y ago
Come help integrate services with us! :)

zemvpferreira 10y ago

I wonder if Apple would launch a self-driving Uber competitor, and I wonder if they'd make it iphone-only and deeply integrated, like their other services. Will Apple cars have access to more information about iphone users than Google/Uber cars? Enough to be anti-competive? It's really interesting to see their hardware-advantage-driven approach to services come to bear on different industries.

maxerickson 10y ago
How much of an edge do you get from information? The average car fare wants to go from A to B, for some price, probably usually cheap. They are going to be pretty willing to share A and B. There's probably some more sophisticated planning you can do to increase utilization by using further information, but I bet that ends up being a pretty small edge.