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Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels
- seatac76 3y agoWonder what they are cooking ? - AR Glasses would be one but they still feel like a decade away - Whatever happened to the Apple Car? - Apple Watch with more sophisticated medical sensors for sure must be in there. Wonder what else?
- shitpostbot 3y ago[dead]
- iamwpj 3y agocomponent chips maybe: https://www.reuters.com/technology/qualcomm-supply-apple-with-5g-chips-until-2026-under-new-deal-2023-09-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/qualcomm-supply-apple-wit... Also, battery technology might be overcoming a hurdle. https://electrek.co/2023/12/20/welion-reportedly-expects-to-send-nio-150-kwh-solid-state-batteries-at-volume-in-q2-2024/ https://electrek.co/2023/12/20/welion-reportedly-expects-to-...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- isaacisaac 3y agoI guarantee LLMs are a big piece of it. Not necessarily ChatGPT-like interfaces but instead dynamic interfaces/behavior that intuit what you want the device to do, especially on mobile where the user <> device interaction bandwidth is quite constrained.
- mustacheemperor 3y agoThis is pretty much confirmed: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-22/what-is-apple-doing-in-ai-revamping-siri-search-apple-music-and-other-apps-lo1ffr7p https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-22/what-i... >the company built its own large language model called Ajax and rolled out an internal chatbot dubbed “Apple GPT” to test out the functionality. The critical next step is determining if the technology is up to snuff with the competition and how Apple will actually apply it to its products. >Giannandrea is overseeing development of the underlying technology for a new AI system, and his team is revamping Siri in a way that will deeply implement it. This smarter version of Siri could be ready as soon as next year, but there are still concerns about the technology and it may take longer for Apple’s AI features to spread across its product line. I wonder, will they launch this as "Siri, but actually useful" or will the Siri brand be replaced altogether.
- jwells89 3y agoIf this next-gen LLM-based Siri is built to take advantage of local documents/data with all processing happening on-device, I think it could be more useful than incumbent LLMs in some ways even if it’s technically not as smart simply because it has far more relevant context by default. It being local-first could also help assuage privacy concerns and make users less reluctant to use it.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI'd be happy if they used an LLM interpret the command so Siri could better understand what to do without specific wording or requiring multiple separate commands.
- mustacheemperor 3y agoThere are unlabeled, very slick looking LIDAR enabled cars driving around the Mountain View area - I've been told by a few folks on HN and IRL that 'everyone knows' they're Apple vehicles.
- ayewo 3y agoAny photos of these slick vehicles you could point to?
- mustacheemperor 3y agoUnfortunately no, and I should mention a cursory search turns up known driverless startups active in Mountain View - so I think unless any other HNster has better evidence, treat me as hearsay. I also shouldn't oversell them, the ones I've seen look 'slick' in that they are similar to other well-polished LIDAR test vehicles that aren't just a bunch of sensors bolted to a roof rack, and they're 'mysterious' in that they're unmarked.
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoProbably Ghost Automation
- AlotOfReading 3y agoFor context, this is what Apple's autonomous vehicles look like: https://dmxvlyap9srmn.cloudfront.net/article/pictures/8e1f6d4b-3e3b-4e8a-a3f9-20b4ebffff88.jpg https://dmxvlyap9srmn.cloudfront.net/article/pictures/8e1f6d... They're Lexus' with mattresses on the roof. Ghost has a weird pattern and their name on the sides of the vehicle. Nuro is uses Prius' mostly. Woven planet/Toyota tends to have slicker looking vehicles. They're the right vehicle in this picture: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordpress.com/2023/02/woven-planet-pair.jpg https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordpress.com/2023/...
- pests 3y agoWhat is attached to the back wheel in the Apple photo?
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoI think AR/MR are good candidates for investment for Apple right now. They just launched sales of their Vision Pro today, shipping in two weeks. They are launching an entire new category of product which necessarily requires a broad spectrum of deep engineering investment. The current product is clearly too bulky and expensive for mainstream appeal, so they are going to need to release repeated generational improvements to both cost and size. The ten years from AR glasses is ten years of heavy product investment. And as others said, there is a lot happening in AI too which would go well with headsets and phones alike.
- sneak 3y agoThe Apple Silicon project has to have been fantastically expensive. They now use them in all of the watches, all of the phones, all of the macs, all of the ipads and ipad pros, all of the headphones, and the current and future AR systems (there is also a special Apple Silicon AR coprocessor in the Vision Pro, separate from the Mx CPU/GPU/SoC). They are designing and iterating like 4 or 5 different custom chips, with many of them incorporating industry-leading GPUs, and having them manufactured at scale (which I’m sure is not a simple handoff but involves additional engineering to support high yield manufacture). This project alone is larger than most technology companies that have ever existed, and a lot of the staff for it must be extraordinarily compensated to retain them (as evidenced by the fact that a bunch of them recently left to start a new chip company (Nuvia) which was then acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4B).
- novok 3y agoIMO for a place like apple, where they are buying chips in such volumes they define entire production runs anyway and define target design specs for vendors there is probably already a lot of cost they are consuming where adding something like the apple silicon design project is cheaper. The marginal cost of going full apple silicon is lower as a result. Apple has also been very frustrated with their chip vendors, especially intel, in making what they want so I imagine it started as a 'last resort' project after they've exhausted their vendors. While another smaller place that wanted to do something like apple silicon would have much higher marginal costs because they would need to spend on the things that apple was already spending on implicitly. It became an economy of scale thing.
- readyplayernull 3y agoThey've been working on an EV since several years ago, wonder what happened to that project: https://i.redd.it/2npa5ztl1o751.jpg https://i.redd.it/2npa5ztl1o751.jpg
- andy_ppp 3y agoProbably secret spending on getting away from Chinese iPhone production…
- mensetmanusman 3y agoGPUs!
- thiago_fm 3y agoMoney likely spent on crap. Apple is now a really bloated company that barely innovates, and now with plenty of governments breathing on its neck. Just look at how many IPhone models exists nowadays, Steve Jobs would be shocked to see Apple in 2024.
- mustacheemperor 3y agoI don't think he would be shocked to see this comment, though, since it is materially identical to the complaints I remember reading circa 2010 and is as willfully ignorant of the Vision Pro as those complaints were of the iPad, and later the Apple Watch and the AirPods (when 'the FBI will destroy Apple's privacy edge' was the government conflict du jour). I don't mean to come across as standoffish here, it's just, this complaint reads to me like the "HN is becoming reddit" complaints. People have been saying it forever, so, without any new evidence, it just reads like the same old prediction that hasn't come true yet.
- mattmaroon 3y agoAnd if they didn’t invest in r&d the same people would say they’re stodgy dinosaurs cashing in on what they’ve got ABC heading for extinction. Like HN said about Microsoft 15 years ago.
- 0x457 3y agoTo be fair, AirPods that aren't Max and (maybe) Pro are complete garbage. Any wireless headphones in the same price range and often cheaper is better at every category except integration with Apple ecosystem.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> as willfully ignorant of the Vision Pro as those complaints were of the iPad, and later the Apple Watch and the AirPods These are the evidence of the opposite. Apple's hardware from the 70s and 80s, like the original Macintosh, were something special. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got rebranded as Mac OS X when Apple bought them, was the first modern OS to be simultaneously good and popular. The iPhone changed what a phone is. The iPad is an iPhone, but bigger. The watch is an iPhone, but smaller. These are not innovations of the same kind. They're the sort of thing you'd expect out of Facebook or Amazon or any other large mature bureaucratic corporation. If the Apple II was the 70s and the Macintosh was the 80s and NeXTSTEP was the 90s and the iPhone was the 2000s, name the thing of this caliber they did in the 2010s.
- master_crab 3y agoI don't think it's anything as sexy as some world-shattering AGI, etc. Remember they are doing a lot of building and research on things other companies already do: cellular modems, microled, etc. This is probably where a large portion of these costs go: the refinement of production ready devices and the manufacturing processes/plant needed is incredibly expensive.
- nerdjon 3y agoThis makes me wonder, sure there is a large investment cost in creating many of those things. But is the Maintence/upgrade cost (particularly for things like the modems) the same or less than the investment to do it in the first place? If they are going to own as much of the internal hardware as they clearly want to, they have to be ready to continue to innovate or risk falling behind. I ask because I legitimately don't know the answer, but its something I have been curious about.
- parl_match 3y agoWith how much they pay for modems and licensing, I can imagine that they have done forecasts of how much they could save by DIY. Even having a slightly inferior modem product in one low price sku is a huge bargaining chip that could save them billions in the long term.
- CharlesW 3y ago> I don't think it's anything as sexy as some world-shattering AGI, etc. AGI is a moonshot, and Apple doesn't talk about their in-development moonshots until very late in the product development cycle. There's evidence that ChatGPT lit a fire under their butt¹ as it did the rest of the tech industry, so I'd be surprised if whatever they're working to launch this year didn't have tendrils reaching years and decades into the future. ¹ https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-gpt/ https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-gpt/
- tambourine_man 3y agoIn absolute values, not percentage. IIRC, Apple was a ≈200b dollars company back then. It’s a 2 trillion dollars company now.
- pohl 3y agoTFA: "...R&D spending as a percentage of sales, to levels last seen before the iPhone launch..."
- tambourine_man 3y agoRight, I misread.
- MBCook 3y agoNo, as a percentage. They’ve always been spending more than last year. It goes up every year. What’s new, as the graph in the article shows, is that as a percentage they back to spending the level they used to before the iPhone.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoNice. The only company out of the FAANG which is worth its salt and will survive into the future.
- aworks 3y agoIt's behind a paywall but Barron's just removed Apple, Meta and Tesla from their "magnificent seven." Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, NVIDIA remain. They were bearish on Apple due to revenue declines for 4 consecutive quarters and lack of growth in sales in iPhones and Macs as well as a high PE ratio. They suggest Vision Pro won't "move the needle." They prefer Alphabet over Meta and having both in a portfolio might be "redundant." https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-tesla-meta-magnificent-7-buffett-berkshire-9d4cc818?mod=Searchresults https://www.barrons.com/articles/apple-tesla-meta-magnificen...
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoIf Barron knew anything about the stock market they would have made money
- chx 3y agoIf you go back to Steve Jobs' original iPhone speech, the crux of it was: revolutionary user interfaces (mouse, click wheel, multi-touch) enabled revolutionary products (Mac, iPod, iPhone). And while we know the LG Prada shipped with a capacitive touchscreen that's a technicality: LG took the UI of a feature phone, minimally adjusted it for touch and that was it. Meanwhile Apple took their desktop OS and shrunk it to the phone. This is to say, if Apple is working on something big, we can't predict it. To quote David Pogue's first iPhone review > The iPhone is revolutionary; it's flawed. It's substance; it's style. It does things no phone has ever done before; it lacks features found even on the most basic phones. Even if we had an inclination of what they are cooking, figuring it out is near impossible. And we don't. Of course, as a person who lives with T2 diabetes, I'd love an Apple Watch with a noninvasive glucose sensor. But while I have no doubt it costs dearly to develop and most importantly, validate that, I would guess it costs like 9 figures total (which is enough for most companies not-Apple not to be able to crack it). These numbers here are 11 figures. Yearly. Not even close.
- MBCook 3y agoI’m really hoping they crack that nut. I’m not diabetic, but I do wonder what would happen when someone figures it out. All of a sudden you could basically put real time glucose monitors on a huge chunk of the population with all sorts of medical conditions or none at all. What could we accidentally learn from that that no one was ever looking for? The benefits to diabetics are obvious and life changing unless you already have a CGM. And if we never learn anything we didn’t already know it would still be a fantastic improvement. But what if there is more?
- chx 3y agoTrust me my friend, even if you have a CGM the benefits would be gigantic. I can't speak for T1 people who spend their entire lives like this and maybe it gets easier but inserting the CGM sensor, even if you use a local anesthetics is unpleasant and psychologically taxing. Then it interferes with your daily life and more importantly, it interferes with your mental health. Do you need a visual, can-be-felt reminder every second of your life you have a disability? I thought not. I have worn one and made my own meal plans while doing so and then stopped wearing them and I am fine, I can control my own blood sugar fine with just eating well, I am now down to six month blood sugar checks just to make sure I do not relapse. Still, having a non-invasive check so you can more easily test new stuff would be more than welcome.
- Legion 3y agoHope that includes the non-invasive glucose monitor for the Apple Watch.
- Someone1234 3y agoI think everyone is hoping that. Non-invasive glucose monitoring is a major holy-grail piece of medical technology that would help people almost immediately. If they did develop this, they'd likely make as much money selling the IP to medical technology partners (e.g. hospital equipment) as they would adding it to the Apple Watch.
- Havoc 3y agoYeah same. I’ve been holding off on buying one for this reason
- paxys 3y agoThis is yet another instance of people simply not understanding what R&D spending means in the context of tech. Most employee salaries are R&D. Cloud compute is R&D. Any expense related to developing any of their existing products or services gets categorized under that bucket, and they get tax breaks on it. R&D does not only mean new research.
- sho_hn 3y agoThis is correct and should top the thread.
- edgyquant 3y ago> Most employee salaries are R&D. > and they get tax breaks on it. This isn’t true anymore. The tax break for engineers counting as R&D ended last year and this is cited as one reason for so many layoffs
- syspec 3y agoI read that it was more about splitting it over 5 years and that for big companies this would actually help them (since they have the runway)
- keenmaster 3y agoAI is the greatest threat to Apple’s dominance. They might be spending billions on creating an AI-centric iOS and iPhone, and that would be money well spent. If Android phones put a personal secretary in your pocket, fully integrated throughout the device, then iPhone users would be very tempted to switch without feature parity.
- nojvek 3y agoApple would hire those engineers and build something similar. AI needs those GPUs/TPUs to run and on mobile phones they need to be power efficient. Apple has the best flop/$/watt SOCs right now. But you never know.
- nojvek 3y agoApple should be spending some money on robotics. They’re obviously going into spatial computing. Robotics is also spatial computing.