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The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla... not sure what to take from that. Makes me think wha

The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla... not sure what to take from that. Makes me think what an Apple Car would be like. My argument on autonomous driving is that it can't just match the safety of the average human driver. It needs to be 100-1000x better, unquestionably better for everyone, always. Until that happens it's a dead end. I think that's probably only achievable with LIDAR, which will come down in price as volumes ramp up. The thing that surprises me is that Tesla has invested so much into various hardware technology (even their own silicon), but completely ignored LIDAR. With their resources, volume and investment, they could have reduced the cost to a tenth of what it is now. They go for big challenges, but decided not to try on that one.

hutzlibu 3y ago
"Makes me think what an Apple Car would be like." Probably very expensive. But wasn't there some rumor already some time ago, that apple wanted to make a car? But cars are a different ballpark, than consumer electronics. So they are likely cautious to not burn their money there.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  It’s slightly more than just a rumor, at least the part that they’ve been researching it heavily for at least 8 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_electric_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_electric_car_project
- gcanyon 3y ago
  I don't disagree with the ultimate point (that an Apple Car might be expensive) but it wouldn't be for this reason. (Almost?) All cars come with some sensor/display package at this point. Let's say that costs, on average, $500. The Vision Pro costs $3500. So the MSRP of a Hyundai Ioniq 5 might go from $41,000 to $45,000. If that gets you a car with a ridiculously better set of sensors and displays, that hardly seems "very expensive" by comparison. Again, I'm not arguing that Apple might not make a number of other design decisions that could lead to the car costing much more than that. I'm just saying that the cost of the Vision Pro sensors won't be the reason. And to be clear: I don't think the Vision Pro implies that Apple would needlessly increase the price of a hypothetical car. The Vision Pro is as expensive as it is not because of some perceived "Apple Tax" but because Apple had a vision (ahem) of what they wanted to build, and it was at the very limits of technical possibility, and they chose to release it now (2024) instead of five years from now. For comparison, the original iPad, which was anticipated to cost a thousand dollars, shipped at half that price.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    > Let's say that costs, on average, $500. The Vision Pro costs $3500. So the MSRP of a Hyundai Ioniq 5 might go from $41,000 to $45,000. Ah. And then there is Tesla ditching an external temperature sensor and relying on weather info for the GPS location to save a few bucks. I think the automotive industry works on a completely different standard when talking about parts and margins.
    - bradstewart 3y ago
      The auto industry does, but would Apple operate the same way?
      - darkwater 3y ago
        With all the due differences, Tesla's is the most Apple-esque approach to automotion to date. But yeah, Apple might beat that (although I think the car project was scrapped a few years ago now?)
      - qznc 3y ago
        Apple squeezes profits from their suppliers very aggressively. They operate very similar to the automotive industry there. Even more aggressive probably because they have a larger market share than any car OEM.
tester756 3y ago
I'm not a fan of Apple, but I tend to say "if Apple did X then it'd be more userfriendly" and I'd want to see if cars+roads+whole infrastructure designed from scratch by Apple
- milkytron 3y ago
  "Only Apple cars are compatible with this road" /s
- anaganisk 3y ago
  No way I want Apple's obsessions to go into the infrastructure. Please no even as a thought.
  - hanniabu 3y ago
    Whether or not you like them, Apple's product team is among the best in the world
    - anaganisk 3y ago
      I agree with you, but the product != Infrastructure. I don't want to overpay my taxes, drive one type of car, that refuels only at a particular fuel station, and it be a judge on when and where my car can drive, restrict me from visiting other states.
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      > Apple's product team is among the best in the world Best at what?
      - hanniabu 3y ago
        Product development
fatnoah 3y ago
> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla I'm sure it does, but that's also because you need much greater degrees of precision and accuracy to anchor virtual content in the real world. Inches and centimeters matter here, whereas an autonomous vehicle can get away with coarser measurement.
- generalizations 3y ago
  Eh, if they can't anchor virtual content at the millimeter level they'll probably be stuck in the uncanny valley.
ajross 3y ago
> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla And it costs about 9% of what a new Model 3 would run you. It's also coming to market almost 5 years after the Tesla HW3 stack that runs almost all cars on the roads to which you're making the comparison. > My argument on autonomous driving is that it can't just match the safety of the average human driver. It needs to be 100-1000x better, unquestionably better for everyone, always. That sounds like maybe a marketing argument? You're saying that if it was only 2x better at some visceral metric (total traffic deaths, say) that you think people wouldn't accept it and it would be regulated out of existence, either by liability concerns or actual lawmaking? The counter argument is that those metrics are, after all, visceral. The US has 40k traffic fatalities per year. You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? No. "Merely better" is the standard that will stick. > I think that's probably only achievable with LIDAR Everyone on your side of the argument does, but frankly this has become an argument of faith and not substance. LIDAR capability has become a proxy for "not Tesla", so people line up along their brand loyalties. For myself, LIDAR is actually the technology looking like it isn't panning out. It's not getting cheaper or more reliable. LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Most importantly, LIDAR at its best still only gives you the 3D shape of the world, and that's not enough. LIDAR doesn't help with lane selection, it doesn't help with traffic behavior modelling, it doesn't help with sign reading. It doesn't help with merge strategies. All that stuff has to be done with vision anyway. The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side.
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  > The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side. You don't spend much time on the Tesla subreddits. The only reason there aren't more crashes is because most people seem to be reasonably good at keeping their hands on the wheel to take over. Every day people post videos of the wacky choices FSD makes. The most interesting part is that frequently the graphics on the screen suggest it can actually detect the correct lane markings and such, and still chooses to cut the corners and cross into other lanes. Anybody who's being honest and has watched FSD from the beginning is under no illusions that real self-driving Teslas are happening anytime soon, or with the current hardware. It's not even close.
fabbari 3y ago
When I saw the R1 chip in there and the functions it has I immediately thought: 'This is a chip they are using for sensor fusion in their self-driving moonshot, it just happens to also work for the AR headset'.
- tpmx 3y ago
  Or perhaps eventually the other way around: the primary reason they had to build the R1 was the required extreme power effiency in headset. Using 25-50 watts for this is okay in an EV.
rootusrootus 3y ago
> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla... IIRC a number of cars, even Subaru, have better cameras than a Tesla. Really, the cameras Tesla included on the Model 3/Y are fairly mediocre off-the-shelf hardware from years ago. But they do have more of them pointed in different directions, so there's that.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  They just updated them fyi
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    Yeah I had heard they had something in the pipeline, particularly on the Y, wasn't sure if it had actually rolled into production yet, and on what models.
- dheera 3y ago
  > IIRC a number of cars, even Subaru, have better cameras than a Tesla Are you saying this from datasheets, or looking at the camera images? Tesla cameras aren't optimized for humans, their Bayer matrix is likely designed for day and night machine vision including infrared, so the colors might look washed out to you. I heard at one point they were using RCCC and later moved to RCCB [1]. If I'm not mistaken C allows all light, including infrared. Cameras designed for human viewing are RGGB. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    The dynamic range, glare and resolution would still be good tel-tales of quality.
    - Kirby64 3y ago
      Dynamic range isn't a simple problem to solve depending on how it's mapped to the screen. If the mapping isn't done well, then it could look much worse than what the camera can 'actually see.' Glare and resolution concerns, though. certainly.
lawn 3y ago
It says more about Tesla than it does about Apple.
sunflowerfly 3y ago
They have also built two real time operating sytems, one for their car project and one for the Vision Pro. I was curious how much code they shared?
- samwillis 3y ago
  Same here, I wander if the new R1 processor has any shared use case with the car project. As I understand it it's a real-time sensor fusion chip...

hutzlibu 3y ago

"Makes me think what an Apple Car would be like." Probably very expensive. But wasn't there some rumor already some time ago, that apple wanted to make a car? But cars are a different ballpark, than consumer electronics. So they are likely cautious to not burn their money there.

tshaddox 3y ago
It’s slightly more than just a rumor, at least the part that they’ve been researching it heavily for at least 8 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_electric_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_electric_car_project
gcanyon 3y ago
I don't disagree with the ultimate point (that an Apple Car might be expensive) but it wouldn't be for this reason. (Almost?) All cars come with some sensor/display package at this point. Let's say that costs, on average, $500. The Vision Pro costs $3500. So the MSRP of a Hyundai Ioniq 5 might go from $41,000 to $45,000. If that gets you a car with a ridiculously better set of sensors and displays, that hardly seems "very expensive" by comparison. Again, I'm not arguing that Apple might not make a number of other design decisions that could lead to the car costing much more than that. I'm just saying that the cost of the Vision Pro sensors won't be the reason. And to be clear: I don't think the Vision Pro implies that Apple would needlessly increase the price of a hypothetical car. The Vision Pro is as expensive as it is not because of some perceived "Apple Tax" but because Apple had a vision (ahem) of what they wanted to build, and it was at the very limits of technical possibility, and they chose to release it now (2024) instead of five years from now. For comparison, the original iPad, which was anticipated to cost a thousand dollars, shipped at half that price.
- darkwater 3y ago
  > Let's say that costs, on average, $500. The Vision Pro costs $3500. So the MSRP of a Hyundai Ioniq 5 might go from $41,000 to $45,000. Ah. And then there is Tesla ditching an external temperature sensor and relying on weather info for the GPS location to save a few bucks. I think the automotive industry works on a completely different standard when talking about parts and margins.
  - bradstewart 3y ago
    The auto industry does, but would Apple operate the same way?
    - darkwater 3y ago
      With all the due differences, Tesla's is the most Apple-esque approach to automotion to date. But yeah, Apple might beat that (although I think the car project was scrapped a few years ago now?)
    - qznc 3y ago
      Apple squeezes profits from their suppliers very aggressively. They operate very similar to the automotive industry there. Even more aggressive probably because they have a larger market share than any car OEM.

tester756 3y ago

I'm not a fan of Apple, but I tend to say "if Apple did X then it'd be more userfriendly" and I'd want to see if cars+roads+whole infrastructure designed from scratch by Apple

milkytron 3y ago
"Only Apple cars are compatible with this road" /s
anaganisk 3y ago
No way I want Apple's obsessions to go into the infrastructure. Please no even as a thought.
- hanniabu 3y ago
  Whether or not you like them, Apple's product team is among the best in the world
  - anaganisk 3y ago
    I agree with you, but the product != Infrastructure. I don't want to overpay my taxes, drive one type of car, that refuels only at a particular fuel station, and it be a judge on when and where my car can drive, restrict me from visiting other states.
  - kwhitefoot 3y ago
    > Apple's product team is among the best in the world Best at what?
    - hanniabu 3y ago
      Product development

fatnoah 3y ago

> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla I'm sure it does, but that's also because you need much greater degrees of precision and accuracy to anchor virtual content in the real world. Inches and centimeters matter here, whereas an autonomous vehicle can get away with coarser measurement.

generalizations 3y ago
Eh, if they can't anchor virtual content at the millimeter level they'll probably be stuck in the uncanny valley.

ajross 3y ago

> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla And it costs about 9% of what a new Model 3 would run you. It's also coming to market almost 5 years after the Tesla HW3 stack that runs almost all cars on the roads to which you're making the comparison. > My argument on autonomous driving is that it can't just match the safety of the average human driver. It needs to be 100-1000x better, unquestionably better for everyone, always. That sounds like maybe a marketing argument? You're saying that if it was only 2x better at some visceral metric (total traffic deaths, say) that you think people wouldn't accept it and it would be regulated out of existence, either by liability concerns or actual lawmaking? The counter argument is that those metrics are, after all, visceral. The US has 40k traffic fatalities per year. You really think the government is (or courts are) going to kill a technology that could save 20k people every year? No. "Merely better" is the standard that will stick. > I think that's probably only achievable with LIDAR Everyone on your side of the argument does, but frankly this has become an argument of faith and not substance. LIDAR capability has become a proxy for "not Tesla", so people line up along their brand loyalties. For myself, LIDAR is actually the technology looking like it isn't panning out. It's not getting cheaper or more reliable. LIDAR autonomy isn't getting better nearly as fast as vision solutions are iterating. Most importantly, LIDAR at its best still only gives you the 3D shape of the world, and that's not enough. LIDAR doesn't help with lane selection, it doesn't help with traffic behavior modelling, it doesn't help with sign reading. It doesn't help with merge strategies. All that stuff has to be done with vision anyway. The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side.

rootusrootus 3y ago
> The "don't hit stuff" bar has, quite frankly, already been crossed. Tesla's don't hit stuff either. If you give them LIDAR, they.... still won't hit stuff. But all the work, even for LIDAR vehicles, is on the camera side. You don't spend much time on the Tesla subreddits. The only reason there aren't more crashes is because most people seem to be reasonably good at keeping their hands on the wheel to take over. Every day people post videos of the wacky choices FSD makes. The most interesting part is that frequently the graphics on the screen suggest it can actually detect the correct lane markings and such, and still chooses to cut the corners and cross into other lanes. Anybody who's being honest and has watched FSD from the beginning is under no illusions that real self-driving Teslas are happening anytime soon, or with the current hardware. It's not even close.

fabbari 3y ago

When I saw the R1 chip in there and the functions it has I immediately thought: 'This is a chip they are using for sensor fusion in their self-driving moonshot, it just happens to also work for the AR headset'.

tpmx 3y ago
Or perhaps eventually the other way around: the primary reason they had to build the R1 was the required extreme power effiency in headset. Using 25-50 watts for this is okay in an EV.

rootusrootus 3y ago

> The new Apple Vision Pro arguably has a better set of cameras, sensors and signal processing than a Tesla... IIRC a number of cars, even Subaru, have better cameras than a Tesla. Really, the cameras Tesla included on the Model 3/Y are fairly mediocre off-the-shelf hardware from years ago. But they do have more of them pointed in different directions, so there's that.

iknowstuff 3y ago
They just updated them fyi
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  Yeah I had heard they had something in the pipeline, particularly on the Y, wasn't sure if it had actually rolled into production yet, and on what models.
dheera 3y ago
> IIRC a number of cars, even Subaru, have better cameras than a Tesla Are you saying this from datasheets, or looking at the camera images? Tesla cameras aren't optimized for humans, their Bayer matrix is likely designed for day and night machine vision including infrared, so the colors might look washed out to you. I heard at one point they were using RCCC and later moved to RCCB [1]. If I'm not mistaken C allows all light, including infrared. Cameras designed for human viewing are RGGB. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  The dynamic range, glare and resolution would still be good tel-tales of quality.
  - Kirby64 3y ago
    Dynamic range isn't a simple problem to solve depending on how it's mapped to the screen. If the mapping isn't done well, then it could look much worse than what the camera can 'actually see.' Glare and resolution concerns, though. certainly.

lawn 3y ago

It says more about Tesla than it does about Apple.

sunflowerfly 3y ago

They have also built two real time operating sytems, one for their car project and one for the Vision Pro. I was curious how much code they shared?

samwillis 3y ago
Same here, I wander if the new R1 processor has any shared use case with the car project. As I understand it it's a real-time sensor fusion chip...