8 ms·

If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in

• martin8412 5y ago
  So like Tesla with FSD, though not monthly(yet)
  • flutas 5y ago
    > though not monthly(yet) It's already available monthly ($199/mo), thankfully there's the one time purchase option still though ($10,000).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• donmcronald 5y ago
  > Want to update your car's computer? $199 per update $210 after shipping for navigation updates in a GM vehicle. Welcome to the future! https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Chevrolet_Tahoe_2014/GM-North-America-Map-Update-DENSO-Global-A-v-2016/sku/23286275/en_US/GMNA/USD https://gmnavdisc.navigation.com/product/Catalog/Catalog_Che...
  • vkou 5y ago
    My car's running on a 12 year old set of navigation data... And I can't say I've ever felt the need to drop $199 on updating it. We just don't build new roads in North America.
    • brewdad 5y ago
      You obviously don't live in a rapidly growing suburb. Half of my town's roads either didn't exist 12 years ago or have been reconfigured to handle the additional traffic flows.
      • sokoloff 5y ago
        A 3-year old phone has a way better navigation system than a brand-new automobile OEM nav system. Plus it auto-updates and will usually tell you where the cops are as well.
        • mcguire 5y ago
          And vice-versa.
    • lowbloodsugar 5y ago
      Sure, but we fuck with one way systems all the time.
  • WWLink 5y ago
    The android based software randomly updates itself all the time. But it likes crashing and stuff too.
• ceejayoz 5y ago
  What monthly fees of this nature are required to use other Apple products? OS updates are free. The basic version of iCloud is free. "Find My iPhone" is free. Apple Maps is free. The App Store is free. Hell, CarPlay is free on the Apple end of things; it's some car manufacturers who've been charging for it. "Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition." Are we talking about a different Apple entirely?
  • robertoandred 5y ago
    But don't you see, Apple bad.
  • joenathanone 5y ago
    Other than purposely slowing down your devices with updates to try and coerce you into buying the new model year? https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay-113-million-to-settle-batterygate-case-over-iphone-slowdowns https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
    • dkonofalski 5y ago
      That is absolutely false. They didn't try to coerce people to buy the new model. It's quite the contrary - they were extending the battery life of devices where the overdrawn power would cause them to shut down completely. They also communicated this in the patch notes but most people don't read those. Your comment is completely ignorant.
      • mrlonglong 5y ago
        Apple still got fined millions in France for doing that.
        • dkonofalski 5y ago
          They did not. They did get fined in France but not for what you're claiming.
• wedowhatwedo 5y ago
  I don't understand why non-apple customers feel that apple is this way. I have a Mac and an iphone and haven't paid Apple a penny since the purchase of the devices.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    People like simple good guy vs bad guy stories, and some people designate Apple a bad guy.
  • tombert 5y ago
    Yeah, I will definitely admit that I was guilty of this right up until I bought a Macbook Air in 2014. I had just assumed that Apple was a nickel-and-diming corporation, and just worked to extract cash from its customers. But I really didn't experience that at all. Outside of Apple Music and Apple Arcade (both of which are optional and neither of which I use/pay for) what exactly are the ongoing costs for most Apple hardware? Yes you have to buy some of the software, but that's true of basically every operating system; my 2014 Macbook still gets free updates as of about 8 months ago (I haven't checked since then since I gave it to my sister in law). In fact I actually have found that Apple-centric apps seem to give me more options in which to pay for them outright instead of ongoing costs. Most of the the Omnigroup's software has a "just buy it once and you're done" feature, unlike something like, for example Microsoft Office.
    • Gigachad 5y ago
      The only things Apple charges subscriptions on are actual content services or server usage charges which are inline with literally every other business. Many people, even on HN it seems, have a completely distorted idea on what the products Apple sells actually are.
      • tombert 5y ago
        Yeah, I can't really blame them for charging a fee for Apple Music or Apple Arcade. Presumably they have to pay a recurring fee to the record labels for the rights to the songs or to the game publishers for the rights to the games, even if we pretended that the server costs were free (which of course they are not) and since they are, you know, a business and not a charity, of course they have to charge a subscription fee for it, just like Spotify (ad free), Youtube Music, Deezer, etc.
• qybaz 5y ago
  You will own nothing and be happy.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  I don't think that this is a problem if it's marketed clearly upfront. The violation here is for Toyota to add this fee on without informing the user of this when they bought it.
  • ajross 5y ago
    I can't believe I had to read this far down to find someone making this point. Exactly! There's nothing wrong with a subscription-based feature at all. Lots of people would love the ability to price-discriminate ("Do we actually need remote start? Is it worth $8/mo?"). The ethics problem here isn't the subscription at all, it's with the clear and good faith communication of what the product is to which the user is subscribing. In this particular case, it seems like the Toyota Remote Connect service was sold and marketed as a phone app, but when terminated it also removes the capability of remote starting the car over local radio (probably bluetooth I guess) from the key fob, which no one seems to have known was part of the product in the first place. That's bad, if so. (But to be fair, a better article would track down some Toyota owners for quotes about what they were told, and maybe a copy of the original license agreement. This coverage from Ars is IMHO a little weak.)
• ribosometronome 5y ago
  What features like that does Apple hide behind paywalls today? That doesn't sound at all like their strategy with iOS or Mac OS. I guess there's stuff like the Apple Developer Program, which I know a lot of folk have complaints about. But that's hardly a feature most folk would desire -- whereas all of those things you listed for a perspective car are. That said, if Apple did bring some of these features to market at that price, they'd be doing considerably better than some of their competition. Tesla's Full Self Driving is locked behind a $10,000 cost or a $199 monthly subscription. You'd have to subscribe to your speculated service for 42 years before it cost more than that getting the upgrade on Tesla you had 4 decades ago.
  • LanceH 5y ago
    It wouldn't really be the monthly subscriptions. The engine wouldn't be bolted in, everything would be welded into place. Parts to repair it would not be accessible, except at Apple dealerships. If it doesn't start, you could expect to replace the Main Driving Unit at a price roughly 90% of buying a new one.* The entire car would have tamper sensors. Also, they would make the car one inch shorter every year. I can't imagine Apple as a car company. * Seriously, the main logic board seems to always be the culprit and the replacement cost is up there with a new item.
    • elzbardico 5y ago
      This is the same for any other flagship notebook sold in the marketing, manufacturing has changed, most people want thinner and lighter machines with great battery life and good reliability. We are not in the 90s anymore.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        "most people want thinner and lighter machines" Not at the cost of repairability and reliability they don't. In my dell XPS, friends lebovo, etc. I can replace battery, ssd, or any other part with just a screwdriver.
      • LanceH 5y ago
• deadbunny 5y ago
  I was with you until: > Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition
• NullPrefix 5y ago
  Do you have to pay for the car itself?
• bserge 5y ago
  > Apple will be seen as a visionary By "journalists* they pay and drooling fans. No one with half a brain thinks any Apple shit is visionary or revolutionary.
• bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  I think it will be more like this, as parts of what you say seem very unApple like: The Apple car is electric, with two charging point, the batteries last a long time but the special Apple charge connection hub costs $1199, there is a part of it that is really smartly designed but somehow also more fragile than you would expect and as a consequence you replace these one per year because it breaks beyond repair. The first year you replace it fine, and the cost is actually down to $1099. The second year the old model is no longer available but the new model that will work with your car and the newer Apple cars both also will work to charge any apple device if you lay it on the Apple car dashboard while charging with the new model charger. It's some sort of clever design innovation that you're not sure why it couldn't work without the new charger but ok, anyway the new charger costs $1330. You have 3 forms of heated seat pads, these are the simple at 199, the integrated at 499 that has a dedicated app to monitor optimal healthy sitting posture and maintain vitals connection to your Apple Watch, and the Pro at 1100 that allows you handle racing speed Gs. You need to have the Pro to unlock the Racing Speed Gs because of safety features that would kick in without the Pro helping to handle that speed. In the end of year 3 the next level Pro brings in massage capabilities at 1400, but you find that it uses up too much battery requiring more and longer charging unless you update to the new Charger Pro which costs also 1400. Want Apple debug data for your car, you get extra data on your Apple iCloud, but not enough to actually make it usable in fact basically the car uses up the data you had so quickly that you have to pay for iCloud+ Andretti, which gives you a basic 3 TB storage, and a revolving time series data for car usage that can be used for diagnostics etc. $15 a month. The Car camera array is really sweet but you find that road trip you made to the keys maxed out your iCloud, so you opt in for the iCloud+ Trixie account $20 dollars a month but with 7 TB, you figure that will probably last. Most of the apps for the car are free, if you call advertising supported apps free, but there are a few ones you find essential that you pay for of course. One of them is the top notch autonomous driving app AutoDRave which costs a basic $120 but if you want the continually updated road conditions and newest ML edge case determination routines you should really pay for the $25 a month subscription. I think we all get the picture here....
• null_object 5y ago
  > If the Apple Car actually materializes, I fear this will become the new standard. All cars come with all bells and whistles, but you have to pay monthly fees in order for them to function Wow I have NO IDEA how anyone managed the jump from this story about Toyota to a totally imaginary anti-Apple rant. Writing this on a 2013 Apple iPad Air that has not cost me a single cent to use every day for the last 8 years.
  • brokenmachine 5y ago
    >I have NO IDEA how anyone managed the jump from this story about Toyota to a totally imaginary anti-Apple rant Because Apple are the nickel-and-dime masters. From removing headphone sockets in order to sell stupidly expensive wireless headphones, to stupidly overpriced soldered memory and storage upgrades, to the 30% appstore fee scam, to disallowing local backups to promote their iCloud storage racket, to unrepairable devices where you can't even replace a battery, to keyboards that need motherboard replacement to replace a key, to disallowing WebGPU so victims can't play online games instead of the games they take their 30% cut from, to proprietary connectors that they abandon a year later, to iPhone displays that can't even be replaced with another legitimate iPhone display, they do everything in their power to lock-in and bleed their victims dry. Literally everything they do is a scam to nickel-and-dime their victims. Every item they sell has all these arbitrary limitations just so they can take a cut. They are usually the first to do every terrible consumer-hostile action because their victims are locked-in suckers with Stockholm syndrome whose devices don't work with any other companies devices or accessories. And then other companies see their success and copy them. So naturally any conversation about companies being assholes will skew towards discussing Apple, because they are the biggest and most successful assholes.
    • null_object 5y ago
      > They are usually the first to do every terrible consumer-hostile action because their victims are locked-in suckers with Stockholm syndrome whose devices don't work with any other companies devices or accessories. > any conversation about companies being assholes will skew towards discussing Apple, because they are the biggest and most successful assholes. It's a pity I'm unable to downvote answers to my post because this really was one of the most worthless things I think I've ever read on HN.
• bitwize 5y ago
  > Apple will be seen as a visionary for optimizing the car manufacturing process (no more designing for multiple types of configuration types, can buy all parts in bulk, ...). There are two types of product in the computing world: shameless ripoffs of Apple products and rough prototypes for some future Apple product. Guess this would make the Model T the "rough prototype" for the Apple Car... Ford even used to make Apple-like demands of his supply chain. He insisted that parts be shipped in crates conforming to specific, peculiar dimensions. The suppliers were baffled by the request -- why those dimensions? Until a supplier representative looked down at the floor of a Model T one day... the crates had been broken down to form floorboards for the car.
• scblock 5y ago
  You're describing actual cars from BMW and Tesla with an "Apple Car" straw man. I mean come on.
• DocTomoe 5y ago
  > Public will buy into it because the cost of the car is significantly less than their competition. That's not the Apple Way. Cost will be significantly higher than the competition, but it comes with a shiny, large apple on the engine hatch, and celebrities will make it a lifestyle choice product. Having an AppleCar will be the economically and technologically inferior, but socially "more acceptable" option. And by then, people will have conveniently forgot normal gas stations/electric chargers won't work - gotta get to the premium-priced Apple fuel stations with the proprietary gas pumps/electric connectors. Users will eventually believe those are better quality, too, and when Apple finally is forced to adapt back to standards by legislative bodies, they will sell this as a "huge innovation".
  • rswail 5y ago
    Except that the EU, which is taking up EVs at a faster rate than US, has consumer protections and is starting to plan for and enforce EV charging networks. The people that currently have "Apple fuel stations" is Tesla. So I'm not sure why you're blaming Apple for something that already exists.