[josteink]

> We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious.

When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market.

They took something which existed and was awkward to use, and re-did the UI layer of the whole thing. They refined something else which was already proven. They didn't invent something original from scratch.

Here Apple is clearly trying to design a new kind of a car, where every part is different from what's already out there in the industry. Where none of the new bits has been invented yet.

They are trying to do original discovery in addition to refining things, in an industry where they have absolutely zero experience.

> Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently .... Apple, as always focused on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone.

That they were even considered things like this important in a self-driving car when they hadn't even solved the self-driving bit (or even car-bit) yet tells me all I need to know about the realism of this project. There was none.

It was doomed from day one.

[danso]

Also, the iPhone was preceded by years of producing iPods, which at least gave them expertise in portable electronics. What has Apple produced that is remotely similar to an automobile? It's not just design expertise, but the supply chain and manufacturing. Auto parts industry is massive. Is controlling the parts for a computer on the same scale as for an entire automobile? I suppose if Tesla can do it...but Tessa's cars so far don't seem as ambitious as what Project Titan was looking at.

[olyjohn]

Remember Tesla's first car? It was not the Model S. The Roadster was based on a Lotus chassis. They built a car on an existing vehicle platform before venturing into producing their own.

[rothbardrand]

People claimed the iPhone was doomed-- even after it was shipping-- because Apple couldn't "just waltz in and start making phones".

Apple is not going to produce a gas automobile, but an electric one.

An electric car is a lot closer to a computer in terms of supply chain, than it is to a gas car.

[simonh]

>When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing...

That's what it looks like from the outside, but listening to interviews with current and former Apple people that's not at all how it looked from the inside.

When they initially developed the OSX derived core OS, System architecture and UI libraries they weren't thinking about phones at all. It was intended to be a tablet computer OS. It's only fairly late on in development that Jobs pivoted the team to adapt the technology to a phone form factor and tacked on a phone app and cellular radio. It was not at all developed from the starting point of looking at existing phones and going from there. Things like touch swipe to scroll and pinch to zoom were taken straight from contemporary touch UI research, not Palm or any other existing commercial products.

[usrusr]

Interesting what-if: would the iPod touch have been significantly less irrelevant in absence of the iPhone? Could the iPad have been a success without the iPhone paving the way for apps?

I remember the last generations of high end feature phones as quite capable media consumption devices, who knows what could have come from that strain of development had they stayed in the limelight a few years longer.

[simonh]

iPod Touch sales were about one quarter as many as iPhone sales. That came to 100 million units in the first 6 years. Given their lower ASP that's a bit less in revenue but it's still pretty significant.

Sure, without the iPhone they'd probably have sold a lot more, but it's not a very compelling counterfactual. Palm started off selling PDAs, but a smartphone is really just a PDA with a cellular radio and a phone app. By the time the iPhone came out standalone PDAs were already dead.

I don't think it would have made a lot of difference to the iPad. It is what it is. It might have had more of a 'wow' factor rather than the 'just a big iPhone' jibes, but even so it sold, and is still selling in very large numbers. Sure sales are down, but they're still selling about 40 million a year. That's more than Dell's annual PC sales and twice as many as Apple's Mac sales, it's also one sixth of global PC sales. So bear that mind when people say it's a declining business. It's slowly declining from spectacular success.

[ars]

Yup, exactly this. They have no idea how to make a self driving car so wasted time on other things hoping someone will solve the actual hard part.

It's pretty common when given an impossible project, and you need to show something.

[coldtea]

Or you know, the have multiple teams, and they don't just want to put out a "self driving car" out, but a great self driving car that rethinks what a car should be like -- on top of "self-driving".

[Superleroy]

But does that even make sense? That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet. Wouldn't it make more sense to just go for the self driving car first and then, after you are sure that you can build that, creating teams which make it better?

[coldtea]

>That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet.

At Apple don't do basic research and leave it at that.

They are trying to build a commercial product.

In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).

So that, if the self-driving research pans out, they have a complete product, not just some run-of-the-mill car design that basically sells for its self driving capability.

And even if their self-driving thing doesn't pan out, they can always enter the car market licensing some other self-driving technology (like they license/buy batteries, ssd, cpus, etc) but with their own spin on the general product.

[ars]

> In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).

No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.

They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.

[coldtea]

>No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.

They are not the same teams doing each, so there's no opportunity cost involved.

And whether it might or might not actually "take decades", if Apple considered it would "take decades to solve" they wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. The idea was that we are close to a breakthrough and commercial applications, not that we'll have something in the market by 2040, maybe.

So, for Apple it was more like "can we get something out in 5-10 years at most? Oh, and if it just self-drives, nobody will care -- by that time there would be 10 more self-driving cars from Google, Tesla, Audi, GM, etc. We also want it to be great/different in other aspects".

>They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.

There's nothing backwards about it -- given that the car will need a LIDAR (which I don't think their self-driving researchers where doubting), they should explorer the design space for placement/hiding it etc.

[usrusr]

> They took something which existed and was awkward to use

This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone. The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades.

Everything unpleasant about cars is happening to the outside. Not just to pedestrians, cyclists and residents, but also to other drivers: just imagine how much nicer your commute would be without all the other commuters. A Lada on an open road would be more enjoyable than a Rolls Royce in a traffic jam. It's a commons problem, one that cannot be designed away with cute UI and expensive surface finishing. Even self-driving won't really solve that, as anyone who has been a passenger in gridlock should know. The only way to significantly improve transport is by making it more space-efficient by cooperation. Public transit with the Apple doover? Could be amazing, but it's just not in the Apple DNA. Autonomous cars with extreme platooning? Massive potential, but just like with public transit, the biggest benefit goes to those who refuse to cooperate and stick to individualistic reaping of the benefits of lower congestion.

[FussyZeus]

> This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone.

I'm part of that (seemingly ever shrinking) demographic that does indeed love cars; I love their shapes and their looks, the roar of an engine (or the thrust of an electric, both hit me in different places), but even I have to admit that people like me are going away. The vast majority of people want a way to get from point A to point B relatively quickly in some measure of comfort; they don't give a shit how cheaply the car is built, as long as it comes with a warranty and the cabin is spill proof, and they don't care how ugly or bland the outside is as long as it keeps the rain out. There's not nearly the same appreciation for cars and driving as their once was, which is why I firmly believe a lot of people these days can't drive very well nor take decent care of their cars; they don't care. Driving is a means to an end, whereas to me, driving is half the fun of doing anything.

> The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades.

I'd say the enjoyable car and the enjoyable smartphone (iPhone, yes I know, my opinion) have about the same market share these days. :)

I don't mean to say Apple was on to something: I think it was doomed from the start for many of the reasons listed here. I just think you're misreading the market is all. That being said, I do hope the self driving revolution leaves room for enthusiasts who truly love putting the hammer down and seeing what our machines can do; I'm willing to pay more for manual mode or even a much higher fee to continue to have a license to operate; I understand what being put into an enthusiast market means and I'm willing to put up the cash.

[erikpukinskis]

There is no such thing as a UI layer. UI and function are inextricably linked.

For example, see iPhone's voicemail. Or the touch screen. Or the app store. None of those things could have been executed by UI teams at any other device manufacturer at the time.

[taneq]

Only when you're talking about software, which is arguably the "UI layer" of a physical computing device. Hardware needs actual things which do the things, independent of interface.

[2bitencryption]

when I was watching the keynote live, and Jobs swiped his finger to scroll, I audibly gasped.

[enjo]

Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002.

That doesn't take away from what Apple did. They really took all of the best ideas (and in many cases hired the engineers who made them in the first place) and put them into one incredibly tight and delightful package. Just about every individual feature can be traced to Palm, Symbian, or a host of other systems... but the magic is making the whole thing work.

Still, it's important to remember that the iPhone was largely a logical evolution more than something invented by Apple wholesale. The iPhone was not the first touch screen slate phone that I ever saw FWIW. That honor belongs to an internal project at Nokia (based on Series 60) that died under it's own engineering weight.

Which again is meant as a compliment to Apple. They actually were able to execute on the thing where others failed.

[ralfd]

>> when I was watching the keynote live, and Jobs swiped his finger to scroll, I audibly gasped.

> Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002.

I don't know how good Palm OS was at that time, but the contrast between the iPhone and the rest of the industry was blinding 2007:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMzg70MIZCo

[dkonofalski]

That is seriously laughable how bad that is. The parent to your comment either doesn't remember what things were like prior to the iPhone or they're intentionally ignoring the differences.

[robertlagrant]

The only new thing was a capacitive touchscreen, which allowed more responsiveness to a touch input. It just came along at the right time.

[lmm]

That wasn't even new, it's just that no other manufacturer dared to put out a phone at $600 (that's with contract, single carrier exclusive).

[dragontamer]

Capacitive screens were less responsive than resistive screens.

The difference was that you used your physical finger instead of a stylus. Personally speaking, I preferred resistive screens for their responsiveness and accuracy.

The capacitive screen was needed for "pinch to zoom" and other gestures of the modern era. The delay in the UI compared to resistive screens (as well as the higher-CPU time required for processing) turned out to be a smaller deal than multi-touch technology.

[piyush_soni]

Is there some more information on that? I believed so far (or the industry made me believe) that capacitive screens were much faster than the resistive ones.

[thaumasiotes]

The app store already existed for Blackberries at the time.

I'm not sure what you're talking about with voicemail.

[bluthru]

The iPhone was the first phone with visual voicemail.

[72deluxe]

Sorry to be completely lost but what is "visual voicemail"? This is an odd term - almost as daft as "visual BASIC"

[intoverflow2]

Instead of calling a number and listening to messages one by one you have an inbox and can play/delete them using a UI.

[macintux]

I think we've gotten so used to it we forget just how awful it used to be.

[72deluxe]

Well I've never had that on Android here in the UK. I still have to ring my EE voicemail and listen to messages one by one. Thanks for the info.

[rothbardrand]

No. Apple invented the smartphone. There were no smart phones before the iPhone. There were PDAs and feature phones.

People like to pretend Apple never invents anything and to do so they always point at vaguely similar things that aren't nearly as good as if they support the point.

Someone one here once told me that Apple didn't invent multi-touch because it existed in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey

[grwthckrmstr]

Apple is reinventing the car?

[usaphp]

> When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market.

Isn't a car a proven thing? All apple is need to do is re-invent it and slap a nice AI on top of it.

[empath75]

I'd buy an apple car that wasn't self driving.

[omegaworks]

They have no clear visionary at the top vetting things for quality user experiences. Had Jobs still been with us we might actually have beautiful 3D Touch experiences. We might be seeing a beautiful refinement of the driving experience. Instead they're flailing. Hopefully this is a realignment and rededicated effort to do what they do best: make cool, proven tech perfect and accessible.

[IBM]

"When Steve is gone," Tevanian said, "the competition still will not have Steve Jobs."