[CharlesW]

> I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space.

Many people didn't understand their move into MP3 players or mobile phones, either.

If you take a step back, Apple is an "affordable luxury" technology products company with a heavy emphasis on design and user experience.

In the luxury and "affordable luxury" tiers, cars are technology products with a heavy emphasis on design and user experience.

Apple knows that smartphones, as we know them today, are likely to be an anachronism by 2030. The market for transportation is large enough to be interesting as a potential source of revenue when the iPhone cash cow falters.

[theluketaylor]

Especially now that car makers manufacture very few of the parts that actually make something a car. There is a whole network of suppliers that make wheels, brakes, control arms, struts, transmissions, differentials, basically all the bits that make something travel down the road. Car makers only really kept engines and final assembly. Engines will give way to electric motors and will be extremly easy to commoditize since they already are. The car industry shed nearly all its manufacturing due to labour costs. They assumed the high cost of starting a car company and the complex safety regulations would prevent anyone else from joining the industry.

Apple is extremly skilled at collecting a tons of parts suppliers, giving them extreme specifications while simultaneously buying up their entire output, and creating an incredibly polished product.

The final reason apple is wanting to make a car is driving experience is now largely driven by software. The basic suspension geometry has to be decent and the mechanicals can't leave you stranded, but the basic day to day interaction with your car is now all software. Apple is great at software, they are a software company. None of the car manufacturers are great at software. They have all become good enough to get by. Is there anyone out there who thinks Apple won't blow the auto industry away at simple but powerful UI?

Car manufacturing hasn't been this easy to disrupt since the original brands moved out of sheds in the early 20th century. Tesla has joined the game but is struggling with manufacturing scale, something that has always protected the big car makers. Apple is unbelievably good at manufacturing scale, they have endless cash available, and they have a ton of software components to leverage already in use by hundreds of millions of people. Sounds like a winner to me.

[some1else]

On the other hand, Apple's design mistakes have proven extraordinarily disappointing and costly (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8). That type of performance with a 40 times more expensive product could decimate their offshore savings in years.

[coliveira]

Apple has enough money that it doesn't matter if this research is not successful. At least they want to try this, if the result is good enough they may eventually release a car. If not, they will just consider as a lost research cost.

[londons_explore]

Apple doesn't have a history of developing products and then not releasing them.

[ChrisRR]

How do you know that? Apple has historically been very secretive about their development

[kszxgz]

If Apple doesn't expect to achieve a satisfactory return on investment they shouldn't enter a new business area, regardless of their liquid assets ('money reserves').

If expected ROI is too low they should return the money to investors (share buyback or dividends) and let investors choose a different investment with better prospects by themselves.

[nanis]

And, just like that ... The "Principal-Agent problem"[1] makes an entrance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

[mercer]

If Apple made decisions that way, I suspect they wouldn't have done as well as they did. While I'm sure they did plenty of research beforehand, their biggest successes don't strike me as products where 'a satisfactory return on investment' was certain or predictable enough to optimize for.

[egd]

Honestly, I agree with @saagarjha further down thread - I think things like AR and personal assistants are much closer to their core model.

Grant the MP3 comparison, though - and that's why I'm trying to understand this. They've got smarter people than me pushing for this.

That said, I do agree the idea that they're fundamentally a company good at making high-tech, well manufactured items cheaper and at a larger scale than anyone else can and extrapolating that to luxury cars as a market is a reasonable and possibly sufficient view of this.

[origami777]

Another way to look at it is that the entire relationship to personal transportation is going to be reinvented over the coming decades. It's going to be very profitable. And who knows where it will take us. I understand why lots of companies are betting the farm on it.

[thx4allthestuff]

Good point. What are people going to do when they’re sitting in their autonomous vehicles? Probably a great time to display an ad for the week’s best selling AR game.

[breatheoften]

I don’t see why this is downvoted — when self driving cars are a reality the car windshield hud will become one of the highest value “displays” around. The computing infrastructure to support this display will also be highly controlled compared to previous generation consumer computing hardware — I think the only model for computing on this surface will be “walled garden”s — if Apple doesn’t want to be locked out of this interface they’ll have to build their own platform for it.

[Klover]

What do commuters do now while using mass transportation? Read the news, read ads or social media, talk, work. You could say that Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Samsung are already big in the “autonomous” section, in that they already provide the information, entertainment and work environment for commuters who do not drive to work.

I think it’s only natural that those companies want to get in on the autonomous car industry, at least for the software side. I’m thinking that it might be more likely that companies who do hardware have a greater interest in it, but so far, from the 3 companies with a hardware side; Samsung mainly, but also Apple and Microsoft, only Apple seems to be putting research into autonomous cars. (I have too little knowledge about Huawei and other Chinese companies to know if they have the same possible reasons or approach)

Perhaps driving to work is mostly an American thing and Samsung and Microsoft see the world going more towards increasing remote work, increasing mass transportation.

It’ll be interesting to see the development. Maybe I will still be alive in 30 years to look back on this comment and see what happened.

[Latteland]

I thought all that people do is listen to podcasts. I usually ride the bus (and listen to podcasts), but when I do drive and suffer through 45 minutes of bumper to bumper boredom interspersed with terror, I listen to podcasts. It's a bad day when driving if I forget to setup my podcasts in order.

There should be a startup opportunity for a smart scheduler, combined with voice integration. There are three types of things to listen to (corpuses?): music, a book or similar on tape, or podcasts. If I'm listening to a book, I probably want to continue listening. I want voice recognition to switch between them. 'play abbey road" already works in my car, but I can't continue the book i'm listening to. I can't ask for my usual daily podcasts - marketplace morning report for 5 minutes, then NY Times the daily, maybe a nasa podcast or something about politics, then yesterday's marketplace morning.

[dnhz]

I'd like to see how all this tech battles motion sickness. Like many people I think, reading while riding in cars/buses gives me motion sickness. This doesn't happen aboard trains.

[jakobegger]

With an AR windshield, you could put the content in the real world. Instagram posts could show up on fake billboards, or tweets could appear to be written on the road. Then you wouldn't get sick because what your inner ear feels matches visual input, but you could still consume your content.

[stochastic_monk]

I was surprised by the last paragraph. What kind of device or system of devices do you think will fully replace the current concept of a smartphone?

[ATsch]

I understood this not as that smartphones will be replaced, but that they will reach a plateu where few people will have a desire to upgrade or to pay the apple premium over cheaper devices. I'd say it's very clear that this is starting to happen already.

[Joeri]

Once there’s a socially accepted high quality AR solution you basically don’t need screens anymore. Your wrist is your smartwatch, your palm is your smartphone, the air over your desk is your PC screen, every object in the world can be a smart device, and every face an infographic.

The challenges are (1) miniaturizing, (2) input devices and (3) social acceptance, but as far as I can see AR as the universal display technology is inevitable. Not sure though on the time frame and whether it will be glasses, lenses or implants.

[mirimir]

Implants, I bet. Maybe not by 2030. But even 11-12 years is a long time, when stuff is developing exponentially.

[mamp]

I wonder if the fact there will be no effective antibiotics by 2030 will influence people's decisions to put foreign bodies under their skin.

[eanzenberg]

We are always a decade away from complete destruction of civilization...

[njarboe]

With a full global nuclear exchange, I would say more like 15 minutes.

[mirimir]

With any luck, we are always at least a decade away from "a full global nuclear exchange" :)

[baloki]

More like two minutes I hear?

https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/2018%20Doomsday%...

[mirimir]

That is a good point. But again, a decade is a long time now.

[CharlesW]

> What kind of device or system of devices do you think will fully replace the current concept of a smartphone?

Today, my Apple Watch, iPhone, and iPad provide different "lenses" on my digital self + my digital stuff. If I run an errand without my phone, I can still make phone calls, text my wife, play my music, etc.

Things like CarPlay, Apple TVs, and HomePods are other lenses. CarPlay happens to need an iPhone now, but something wearable will be enough to power CarPlay at some point. Eventually, cars will have enough native computing power and connectivity that they won't require a proxy device to work.

By 2030 I expect AR smart glasses to be fairly common, hopefully with less-conspicuous options for people who don't need vision correction. Maybe they'll be powerful enough on their own, or work more like CarPlay and require a wearable complement. Additionally, voice user interfaces will continue to evolve and work with all of these lenses.

TLDR: Instead of today's "hero device" model, I think we're moving toward an "many devices" model.

[saagarjha]

AR and wearables?

[kart23]

Mp3s and mobile phones made sense because apple had tech that nobody else had. The touchscreen and allowing tons of music to be stored were gamechangers. I dont think apple has anything up there sleeve here, just trying to compete in a segment they are already behind on.

[tinus_hn]

The iPod had less disk space and lacked features other players had. It was a hit mostly because it was easy to use and looked good.

[geerlingguy]

The scroll wheel. Every other player was a 'techie' device back then. I had a couple other MP3 players at the time; the entire experience from loading songs onto it to navigating around the UI with awkward buttons was annoying at best.

The iPod's simple UI, coupled with easy iTunes integration, made it head and shoulders above the rest... though the first few iterations were quite expensive compared to the competition.

[FabHK]

It also came after iTunes, and would just basically sync your entire iTunes library (few people had more than 5GB music back then) including artist, song title, etc. in mere minutes (over FireWire). It had amazing ease of use, and a great UI.

[jonny_eh]

The iPod had a smaller form factor than competing hard drive mp3 players.

[shawn]

The original iPod didn't have a touchscreen.

[Twisell]

Do we have actual fully-autonomous* cars sold today?

No.

So by definition Apple can’t be behind of nothing.

*Tesla "autopilot" which require all time human supervision clearly doesn’t count as of now.

[tonylemesmer]

They can be behind on R&D. Not saying they are, but advantage starts years before it gets to market.

[Twisell]

Only people under heavy Non Disclosure Agreement could assert that any of the competiting company is leading/behind in terms of R&D. An no such people would be foolish enough to comment about that publicly. Big money and strategic informations are at stack.

Conversely if any company brag about it’s leading mastery without delivering this should be considered as a PR stunt until proven otherwise.

[simion314]

I think you are right, luxury cars would make Apple tons of profit.

[on_and_off]

>"affordable luxury"

It always surprises me when Apple is described that way, this is an oxymoron.

It goes to show how great their PR is.

[toomuchtodo]

>"affordable luxury"

> It always surprises me when Apple is described that way

I realized this was true when I noticed low wage workers (McDonalds/Dunkin Donuts drive thru staff) on their iPhones and with their Apple Watches on their wrists, folks making right around minimum wage. You might not be able to afford a starter home, or a nice vehicle, or your student loans, but by god all of us could afford an iPhone on a 24 month payment plan (~$20-30/month).

Apple's marketing and brand is invaluable.

[tokyodude]

I doubt that's why. They were able to get one.for what felt like cheap by signing a contract. People who don't have money generally don't buy Macs. You can get 5 Dell notebooks for the price of a single $999 macbookair. Of course I'd by the air but I know plenty of working class people that wouldn't dream of spending 5x on a notebook PC which they will basically only use to browse the net, watch YouTube and shop on amazon

[TomMarius]

It is not an oxymoron. An item can be simultaneously seen as "affordable" and "luxurious". Since it's just a phone, anyone can save up enough money given enough time and/or external sources of money (e.g. parents), but that doesn't mean it's cheap (not luxurious) - "cheap luxury" would make an oxymoron, but this is merely "affordable".

[on_and_off]

le million' Piece Unique is a luxury phone (and a terrible idea). Mass market products are not luxury.

[rimliu]

I am pretty sure neither "affordable" nor "luxury" is the part of their PR.