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The phone made sense to me because by that point Apple had clearly proven themselves as a consumer electronics company. It’s wasn’t as big a jump and cell phone

• theturtletalks 3y ago
  Apple is still waiting it out until most of the existing EV issues are resolved. Then, they can swoop in and leverage their walled garden to get buyers/users. They'll also be different than Ford, Mazda, Honda, etc since I don't think they will try to sell their cars. It'll be a subscription fee and Apple will own the car. All this news tells me is that Apple is putting EV in the back burner since users are still not convinced about EVs in the long-term. AI is here to stay so it makes sense pivoting the team to that. Hell, the AI might make it into their cars for all we know.
  • MBCook 3y ago
    What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with buying a car? I’m so tired of people claiming apples walled garden gives them magic abilities. It has nothing to do with this. Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone? I have an iPhone. I love Apple stuff. I’m not paying any premium for an Apple car, they have to convince me it’s worth it over the competition.
    • theturtletalks 3y ago
      What does Apple‘s walled garden have to do with bluetooth headphones? Now, look at AirPods, simple bluetooth headphones, with tight integration with iOS. I was the one ridiculing Apple for even entering this market and I thought they looked dumb. Sony XMs looked way better. Now headphones are a sizable market for Apple. So many of my friends are awaiting the refreshed AirPods Max. The same people that said they would never buy AirPods when they launched.
      • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        You still haven't said what the differentiator of an Apple car would be.
        • theturtletalks 3y ago
          Maybe an enhanced version of CarPlay or something more nefarious like cutting off other auto makers from using CarPlay anymore. People that are used to CarPlay might be inclined to jump ship. Trust me, Apple will find a way to leverage their walled garden, to my chagrin. Just look at how they’re maliciously complying with the EU DMA law. I want to leave Apple’s walled garden myself, but can’t deny it exists. Green bubble vs blue bubble another example.
        • type0 3y ago
          Proprietary tires that you can only blow up with special hardware that you rent from Apple
      • vel0city 3y ago
        > simple bluetooth headphones That's the thing. With other Apple devices, they're not simple bluetooth headphones. They have added features and functionality that only really work with other Apple products due to their proprietary protocols on top of regular Bluetooth. _No_ other Bluetooth headphones can work quite like Airpods do, because of the walled garden. So, you have your expensive Apple headphones that only really give full functionality with Apple devices so you're more likely to keep buying an iPhone. And vice-versa, you have more of a reason to buy the expensive Apple headphones because no other headphones will give the full experience the Apple headphones can give you on that platform. Are there really features that Apple is going to bake into their cars to ensure it only really gets those features for Apple users? Like what, the head unit will only work with an iPhone? Would you really buy a $30,000+ piece of equipment that necessitated a specific phone model to actually get a lot of key features out of it?
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone? Given that 30k is the difference between an entry level and mid level car, sure. The premium brands would definitely want to get Apple's branding under their wing, and those buyers are already used to paying a premium when they can buy a $30k car.
      • MBCook 3y ago
        The problem is I think Apple would want to be premium above existing luxury cars. I don’t think it would be 60k. I think they would be 90k or even 120k. Sure Apple’s $60k car is better than a $30k Honda. But is it better than a $60k Acura or BMW or Lexus? That’s where I think the trouble would be.
    • svnt 3y ago
      And this truth is probably the biggest reason why they killed the program.
    • lmm 3y ago
      > Do you really think people are going to pay an extra $30,000 for a car because it works with the iPhone? Yes. People happily pay an extra 1-200% for something because it's Apple, all the time. I'll probably never understand why, but I've come to accept that they do.
  • dartos 3y ago
    That’s some Apple fan boy cope.
    • theturtletalks 3y ago
      Nope, just seen it in action over and over. No one thought they would do VR and they did. No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now. No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did. The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.
      • ClumsyPilot 3y ago
        > No one thought they would do VR and they did What has this VR achieved? Nothing so far. Cannibalising your own product isn’t an achievement They have never shipped a large physical product or anything mechanical in the entire history of the company, this is outright delusional.
        • MBCook 3y ago
          It’s been like a month. Seriously. That’s a ridiculous hurdle to clear. “The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”
          • dartos 3y ago
            That’s what’s weird though. A month of near 0 buzz for apples introduction to the era of “spatial computing” Usually Apple parades around a few exemplar apps or use cases, but for the vision pro, it was just business meetings? imo just having infinite floating screens is a better feature to show off.
        • theturtletalks 3y ago
  • oldpersonintx 3y ago
    [dead]
  • tim333 3y ago
    Subscription would be odd. All my other Apple gear I've bought for cash. Also it would be odd for a physical thing you can crash/scratch. I mean you can hire or lease cars but there is generally a heavy cost if you trash it to be picked either by you or your insurance company.
• pg_1234 3y ago
  If a car model won't run, you can't all your customers they're "holding it wrong".
  • microtherion 3y ago
    Tesla is employing that strategy with some success.
  • rezonant 3y ago
    I see no reason Apple couldn't tell their customers that. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
• ethbr1 3y ago
  > And really I’m not sure how much they could add a special “Apple touch” outside infotainment/interior controls compared to luxury automakers. The right time was between 2010 (iPad launch) and 2014 (CarPlay launch), with a complete infotainment-only product. Essentially, mimic the iPhone-on-one-carrier bargain. Go to a struggling automaker (Fiat Chrysler?) and say "What if we told you that you won't have to worry about any of your infotainment solutions? We'll build the unit, in exchange for owning the exclusive app store it uses. And you'll get to say your cars are powered by Apple." Win/win. Instead, they dicked around until the automakers figured their consoles out (mostly... still looking at you angrily, Nissan) and Apple was left without a key differentiator. Hell, the mind-numbingly obvious reason for Apple -- do it at a loss for the real-time mapping and traffic data!!
  • dtjb 3y ago
    I think the risk to the carmaker is your customers getting used to the apple infotainment system. Maybe they start to see the car as less a Fiat and more an Apple car. Then the exclusive expires or needs to be renegotiated.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      From Apple's perspective, yes. That's exactly the playbook that built the iPhone into what it is today. People forget that when the iPhone launched, carriers had an iron grip on their customers, to the extent of "pay us to put ringtones on our device that temporarily happens to be in your hands." iPhone-in-car would have let Apple dangle some interesting data deals in front of car manufacturers, while retaining ultimate control, before the car manufacturers realized data was a monetizable revenue stream.
      • eli 3y ago
        The carmakers are unfortunately well aware that they can mine and sell data. They just suck at it.
• dr_dshiv 3y ago
  I saw Huawei cars being sold in Huawei stores in China. (Huawei stores are like Apple Stores). They were incredibly normal, beautiful cars. In contrast, Apple would have to make a gamechanger. Too big of a risk?
• borski 3y ago
  > The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. That’s not quite how that happened. They were turned down and laughed out of the room by nearly every carrier they approached. The only one that didn’t was AT&T; but they definitely weren’t “desperate” at the time. They had lots of leverage, which is how they got exclusivity.
  • MBCook 3y ago
    Sorry I meant the carrier was desperate, not Apple. That was the case with AT&T (Cingular when the deal went down). They wanted customers so bad they were willing to give up everything for a possible hit phone. And it worked out. You’re right Apple was riding high on the iPod, they weren’t in any danger of going under. They could have waited longer. I think it would have been funny if they released it in Europe or something where the carriers weren’t in control and then told Americans “call your carrier, sorry, they wouldn’t let us”. Not that that would have ever happened.
    • eli 3y ago
      The carriers were probably right to be concerned. They used to be the ones with the ability to charge an "app store tax"
    • rezonant 3y ago
      I'm not sure if the GP here was edited to be substantially different, because your response doesn't match what they are saying. AT&T wasn't desperate, and I'm sure Jobs would have preferred to skip on exclusivity, since that really didn't serve iPhone. "Desperate for more customers"? Well sure, but I'm sure Verizon was even more desperate for more customers considering they were so close to being number one (AT&T was number one at the time, by a slim margin). After all, Pepsi literally bought restaurants and forced them to serve Pepsi in order to force consumers to drink their sodas from the runner up spot. I don't have any reference for this, but just on its face it would make sense that if Apple needed to sweeten the pot for a carrier to allow it, exclusivity was a way to do it, and it would have been in Apple's best interest to pick the carrier with the biggest market share at the time, which was AT&T. EDIT: Others corrected me that at the time the deal was signed in 2005 and during the famous 2007 keynote, the partner was Cingular. Through a series of M&A Cingular became what we know of as AT&T, and by the time the phone launched in July 2007, it was AT&T who held the deal. Interestingly, > Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise. In Jobs' keynote he referred to Cingular as the #1 carrier with 58 million subscribers. I think the logic above still makes sense given that.
• spiderice 3y ago
  > But they’ve never done safety critical stuff like a car. Of highly mechanical stuff like a car. Or things that need something of a dealer network the way a car does And SpaceX had never launched a rocket into space, until they had. I don’t get this idea of a company like Apple not being able to get into a space, when tiny startups get into spaces all the time. Nobody expected Tesla to take on Ford either, but here we are. Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty.
  • randmeerkat 3y ago
    > Surely Apples massive vault of cash doesn’t decrease their chances on ideas that fall outside their specialty. That cash ironically is an obstacle to Apple being able to innovate. Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is nothing but a “phone company” with a bank attached, which is fine, it will continue to operate, but it won’t continue to grow and innovate.
    • yreg 3y ago
      >Instead of creative problem solving it solves problems with cash. Instead of collaborating and recruiting people to come work for a common vision, they join to pursue cash and status. Apple is rather frugal with acquisitions and hires and somewhat frugal with salaries.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    Hmm I don’t think the SpaceX metaphor works super well here. One is an established tech company trying to do business in a space it’s unfamiliar with. It has existing forces pulling it in a certain direction because it already makes money in those ways. Google is the perfect example of how this hampers innovation. It’s one of the reasons the concept of Alphabet exists. SpaceX has one singular purpose. It’s not like it was trying to counterbalance its burgeoning space business with existing cost and profit centers that are not even tangentially related to its primary goal
• rezonant 3y ago
  > The carrier thing was true, but they could have launched outside the US. Instead they found a carrier desperate enough. The carrier the iPhone launched with in the US was AT&T. While they were neck in neck with Verizon at the time, AT&T had the technical majority of the market. How were they desperate?
  • eli 3y ago
    Rumor I heard at the time is Apple went to Verizon first but Apple insisted no one see the phone until shortly before launch and Verizon balked.
  • ericlewis 3y ago
    Actually, it was Cingular, which got purchased by ATT (I think)
    • rezonant 3y ago
      Oh, it was Cingular at announcement and AT&T at launch. Interestingly, > Cingular chief executive Stan Sigman signed a secretive deal with Apple in 2005 before seeing any designs or prototypes of the phone. Other carriers had been scared off by Apple's reputation for controlling every aspect of its products. But Cingular and AT&T leadership saw the partnership's promise.
    • MiscIdeaMaker99 3y ago
      Actually, it was the other way around. Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, which was _not_ part of the original AT&T at the time. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Wireless_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Wireless_Services
      • rezonant 3y ago
        Yes this seems to be right, although in short order the resulting firm was once again branded AT&T.
• WrongAssumption 3y ago
  Tesla doesn’t use dealerships.
• Lio 3y ago
  > The phone made sense to me because… Only in hindsight. At the time Apple had tried once before with the Rockr, and it really sucked. The iPhone launch was wonderful because it changed the game enough for a 2G phone to be an acceptable trade off in a 3G market. It was not clear at all that would happen before the launch presentation.
  • sumedh 3y ago
    > At the time Apple had tried once before with the Rockr, and it really sucked. Steve Jobs said that Motorola were calling the shots which is why Apple decided to do its own phone.