
Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car - fmihaila
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/technology/apple-self-driving-car.html
======
tambourine_man
“From the beginning, the employees dedicated to Project Titan looked at a wide
range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed
silently. They also studied ways to redesign a car interior without a steering
wheel or gas pedals, and they worked on adding virtual or augmented reality
into interior displays.

The team also worked on a new light and ranging detection sensor, also known
as lidar. Lidar sensors normally protrude from the top of a car like a
spinning cone and are essential in driverless cars. Apple, as always focused
on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone.

Apple even looked into reinventing the wheel. A team within Titan investigated
the possibility of using spherical wheels — round like a globe — instead of
the traditional, round ones, because spherical wheels could allow the car
better lateral movement.”

Very interesting, and one heck of a leak if true.

~~~
jacquesm
This so reminds me of the discussion about fire from the Hitch Hikers Guide to
the Galaxy.

The challenge of a self driving car is to get it to drive by itself, not to
try to make it look good and to solve a whole pile of engineering problems
that have had everybody in engineering looking at them since as long as we
have the profession.

Making gadgets and making a self driving car require a different mind-set. The
first is an exercise in consumer packaging, the second is a serious endeavor
in engineering something tremendously difficult from the ground up.

What the vehicle looks like is not important at this stage, what is important
is whether it can be done at all with sufficient reliability to let it out of
the lab and into the mass market.

When someone seriously suggests to 'reinvent the wheel' it is time to re-
focus.

~~~
ptero
Apple often tries to re-engineer the thing they develop.from the ground up.
Seems it started this way on Titan, too, then scaled back and decided to focus
on the main problem: safely getting around. Nothing wrong with this I think.

On reinvented wheels, early ideas rejected today may get a second life later,
e.g. spherical wheels for moving in very constrained environments.

~~~
ams6110
I can't see spherical wheels working well. They would have a smaller contact
patch on the road surface than a standard wheel, and consequently less
traction.

~~~
jacquesm
And then there is stronger braking to be considered, which almost always is
some kind of disk brake which you can't do if there is no shaft to mount one
on. Which means the spherical wheel system would have to be oversized to
compensate for lack of such a shaft even if it would work to drive the car.
Magnetic wheels have other interesting problems that would need to be solved
such as when two cars get close to each other the wheels would start to
attract or repulse depending on their orientation.

This is mostly likely not something that could be rolled out even in a concept
car with present day technology unless there is some kind of trick that I'm
not aware of. Halbach arrays are not without problems if you allow them to be
unconstrained in all dimensions.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Could you just use standard wheels, but let all four of them turn 90 degrees?
Then the car could move laterally.

~~~
Retric
There are some cars that already do this.

It's a lot simpler with independent electric motors per wheel, but generally
not that useful as self drivings cars can already parallel park just fine.

------
iiiggglll
> Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the
> autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an
> operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about
> whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming
> language, or the industry standard, C++.

Wow. Few things guarantee success like starting off a project with a good old-
fashioned language flamewar!

~~~
djb_hackernews
My guess is it wasn't much of a debate and in actuality they used something
like Simulink to model the control system and then had that generate the C++
code for the target hardware. I doubt any car control system software is
written by hand these days.

~~~
robotresearcher
Operating system. Not control system. You don't write an OS in Simulink.

------
IBM
This is a weirdly titled report which implies it just happened. The "Apple
scales back" part was already reported first by Bloomberg last year (which
seems to be behind a paywall now) [1]. Bob Mansfield was brought on to refocus
Project Titan on the fundamentals (being self-driving) rather that producing a
car [2]. But both of these reports have the exact same hedging:

>Apple Inc. has drastically scaled back its automotive ambitions, leading to
hundreds of job cuts and a new direction that, for now, no longer includes
building its own car, according to people familiar with the project.

>Five people familiar with Apple’s car project, code-named “Titan,” discussed
with The New York Times the missteps that led the tech giant to move — at
least for now — from creating a self-driving Apple car to creating technology
for a car that someone else builds.

And that's because the idea that Apple is going to be an auto parts supplier
like Delphi that sells middleware to car companies is completely laughable.

There isn't actually much news in this report. The tidbits that the reporter
got clearly motivated writing this article but it doesn't actually live up to
its premise. In fact, PAIL seems like an expansion of Apple's efforts from
what was previously reported.

[1] [https://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/28/apple-car-autonomous-
dr...](https://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/28/apple-car-autonomous-driving-
system/)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/how-
apple...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/how-apple-scaled-
back-its-titanic-plan-to-take-on-detroit)

~~~
IBM
Looks like John Gruber has confirmed what I suspected.

[https://daringfireball.net/2017/08/titan_nyt](https://daringfireball.net/2017/08/titan_nyt)

~~~
dilemma
Looks like he didn't confirm anything at all.

~~~
IBM
>“Shelved” is an accurate word, but I think many people have interpreted it as
meaning that Apple has given up on designing its own vehicles. My
understanding is that it’s more like “Let’s get the autonomous shit down
first, and worry about designing vehicles to put it in after that.” Eat the
steak one bite at a time rather than all at once.

~~~
Matt3o12_
I don’t get why Apple would do that. They have enough employees who are
capable of doing both in parallel. Furthermore, the talent capable of creating
autonomous software are not the kind of people who excel at designing the
vehicle itself. Apple could easily be doing both so that they have either one
ready at the time of the release (and if one team fails, they could buy the
self driving part from another company).

~~~
neospice
> They have enough employees who are capable of doing both in parallel.

Number of employees isn't what determines whether it's deliverable or not.
It's likely they're deferring a decision to design the rest of the car until
they're certain that they can do autonomous

------
mypalmike
If Apple were truly serious about building self-driving cars, they would buy
one of the big 3 US auto manufacturers. It could buy all 3 with cash and still
have one of the largest hoards of cash ever accumulated.

~~~
ctdonath
Over the decades I've noticed how businesses need to recognize and focus on
their core competencies - if they don't, they die. _Everything_ must feed that
core, and undue distractions are lethal. Occasionally there's a need to
_pivot_ , which is deliberately stepping from one competency to another, but
that is rare and difficult. Apple's core is to build small computers;
everything else they do (music, video, cloud services, Siri, AI, AR, operating
systems, etc) are _all_ built to draw customers deeper into the ecosystem for
the sole purpose of buying more small computers. Electric self-driving cars,
while very nifty, are decidedly _not_ small computers (at best being a tiny
part of a large product demanding other competencies); to compete in that
market requires scale which Apple could certainly buy but would fiercely
compete for the attention vs small computers.

~~~
trapperkeeper74
When companies focus on just one thing in a vertical, they're incredibly
vulnerable. Samsung does lots of things fairly well, with some hiccups, well
beyond just personal electronics and home appliances. It's diversification.

EDIT: Samsung does all sorts of things including ship-building, life
insurance, construction and advertising.

For example, Apple MacBook Pros have become uncool, expensive, unrepairable
and impractical... a giant FU to customers. That business is tettering on
failure because they've been hypnotized on elixir of utopian, aspirational
design rather than technical, environmental and practical usability. iPhone is
the lion's share of Apple's business, and they're losing ground to Android.
That's a problem and most other products have plateaued and aren't anywhere
near as dominant-capable or category-defining as the smartphone. That means
Apple is a basically a banana republic (pun intended) unless they create or
retake a category with a non-incrementalist product.

Disclaimer: I own an A1278 13" from 2013 but refuse to buy a $3000 soldered on
RAM and SSD laptop that can't be transfered without proprietary service tools
and whose glued-on batteries are a PITA to change. Also the low-travel, flush
keyboards are terrible. Looking at Lenovo and System76 machines instead.

~~~
technimad
I mostly agree with this post but the more I type on my new MBP keyboard the
more I love it. Was skeptical at first, made a lot of noise, felt weird, but
this flipped pretty fast to big appreciation.

~~~
dasil003
Yeah but not the touch bar.

~~~
trapperkeeper74
Touchbar is definitely a no-go, requires looking down and breaks flow.

------
pvg
A moral of this story is "don't name things 'Titan' or titan-related names".
It's asking for trouble - Blizzard's 'Project Titan', Titan A.E., the Titanic.
Things didn't end all that well for the titans in Greek mythology either.

~~~
schoen
Nice point, but I guess so far the chemical element titanium is doing all
right.

~~~
pvg
It's faking it, still bitter about the time Apple kicked it out their laptops.

------
uberuberuber
A vehicle with a similar external sensor array has been parked in a lot near
my workplace every weekday at lunch time for the past several weeks. Given the
proximity to AC3 at Central and Wolfe, my coworkers and I had all assumed it
was an Apple test of some kind.

Accords with the rumor mill surrounding Apple leasing a former Pepsi bottling
plant down the street.

[https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/03/01/apple-
le...](https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/03/01/apple-leases-old-
pepsi-bottling-plant-in-sunnyvale.html)

~~~
briandear
Was it a Lexus?

~~~
uberuberuber
I believe so... however it is gold unlike most of the media pics showing a
white Lexus.

------
anilshanbhag
This is the right way. Building a mass market car is an enormous exercise. We
have seen this with Tesla, which has thrown money at the problem and will
still take 4 years to become mass market (2.5 already over + another 1.5
years). After these 4 years, its unclear what the value add will be.

~~~
hkmurakami
Tesla has built a category from the ground up. That is a very different
challenge from replicating an existing business that has gone through decades
of refinement.

~~~
ctdonath
But isn't what Apple (at least via rumor) was planning to do - build a
category from the ground up a la Tesla, even if outright buying the full
capacity of a major automotive manufacturer which barely has a grasp on EVs
(think Bolt, Leaf, i3, etc)? I mean the OP referenced rumors of _spherical
wheels_ and other total revamping/replacing of existing tech plus totally new
tech to boot.

If anything, "replicating" (or outright purchasing) what was developed over
decades is just entrenching the past. Apple succeeds as it does by practically
inventing future tech and making it instant commodities (yes, they're not
always first, but hit so hard and go so far they dominate first movers).

------
pentae
I'd just be happy if they put all those people back on the Mac and OSX team.

------
fastelephant
"But __our_ai_project_here__ ran into trouble, said the five people familiar
with it, dogged by its size and by the lack of a clearly defined vision of
what __our_company_here__ wanted in a __our_ai_product_here__. Team members
complained of shifting priorities and arbitrary or unrealistic deadlines."

------
tunetine
This is news from almost a year ago when they laid-off a few hundred in
October 2016.

------
cletus
So anyone who has been around for even a few years has witnessed probably more
than AI hype cycle. This has been going on since probably the 1960s. While
there have been (I'm sure) advances over the years, some no doubt substantial,
what's clear is that the big thing that was and is needed is a truly massive
amount of computing power.

Now I believe that self-driving cars will ultimately be transformative for
society in a way not seen since the automobile itself or possibly even mass
electricity generation.

But I just think this is still way further off than the more bullish pundits
are predicting.

To be clear, there are two milestones here:

1\. Assisted driving

2\. Autonomous driving.

It's the second that'll be truly transformative. This is when cars won't be
designed to have human drivers at all.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit here like highway driving where basically
you need to not hit the vehicle in front of you and you need to stay in a lane
at a fairly constant speed.

Assisted driving is the incremental approach needed to prove these
technologies and bring self-driving to market (IMHO). This will be gradual and
slowly replace some aspects of manual driving. It will probably soon reach the
point where the car will intervene to prevent an accident. I expect even this
to be cautiously adopted as there is a massive product liability issue here.

A drunk driver drives on the wrong side of the road and has a head on
collision and society just tends to write that off as unfortunate, the cost of
doing business basically. But as swoon as the car makes a decision that
injures or kills someone (and it will) the lawsuits will be swift and massive.
That's a problem. In fact, it may be the biggest problem. Nevermind the
inherent risk to drivers, passengers and bystanders when you put a meat sack
behind the wheel.

But the long tail of this problem is huge, to the point where I'm not sure you
can really solve it without having an almost or actual general AI. So much of
this is anticipating what humans will do. I mean things like placing a bucket
or a plastic bag on the road and seeing what an autonomous car does.

Thing is, people seem to think this is totally going to happen real soon now
when we have a long history with this in the form of aviation. People have
been trying to automate humans out of flying planes forever. Unfortunately
there seems to be an uncanny valley type situation where too much automation
can actually make things more unsafe. I'm talking here about incidents where
automated systems did or nearly did cause incidents that the humans had
problems overriding.

And planes have to deal with probably substantially less situations than cars
do.

I honestly don't know why Apple thinks it can compete in this space. It
doesn't play to any of their core strengths.

If I had to pick anyone in the box seat here it would be Tesla.

Tesla already produces cars and has a go-to-market strategy. After Tesla, I'd
add Google simply because you can never totally discount Google.

I take Apple scaling back as a positive sign here... for the company. I take
it to mean that they realize just how far away this is and how difficult a go-
to-market strategy is and also that this just doesn't play to their strengths.

~~~
jozzas
> It will probably soon reach the point where the car will intervene to
> prevent an accident. I expect even this to be cautiously adopted as there is
> a massive product liability issue here.

Volvo already have this with auto brake and pedestrian protection:

> Collision Warning with Auto Brake & Pedestrian Detection is an aid to assist
> the driver when there is a risk of colliding with a pedestrian or vehicle in
> front that is stationary or moving in the same direction. Collision Warning
> with Auto Brake & Pedestrian Detection is activated in situations where the
> driver should have started braking earlier, which is why it cannot help the
> driver in every situation.Collision Warning with Auto Brake & Pedestrian
> Detection is designed to be activated as late as possible in order to avoid
> unnecessary intervention

~~~
frankchn
Multiple manufacturers have the technology available in production cars today.
Here is a demo involving a Mercedes coupe:
[https://youtu.be/eMUmI6LeZ_8?t=10m](https://youtu.be/eMUmI6LeZ_8?t=10m)

------
ianai
Call me crazy but why not consider ways to let someone remote drive the
vehicle? I'm sure there are all sorts of corner cases (bad signal for one) but
it's done all the time with drones.

~~~
likelynew
How will it solve anything?

~~~
azinman2
Theoretically you could find someone far away who will drive cheaply.

Lot of trust in that individual when they too don’t get killed if the car
crashes. Also hope you never have packet loss!!! There’s also that pesky speed
of light restrictions on low latency, etc.

~~~
pramodzion
That "someone" is exactly a Lyft/Uber driver !

~~~
thisacctforreal
Maybe we should put them in the trunk of the car instead?

Have another lyft driver drop them off at your car before you leave for work
in the morning

------
iamgopal
They should be more focused on iPhone and related stuff, and invest a million
here and there in such self driving companies. One of them is going to be
successful, or many. And after car being driven automatically, people will be
using smartphone more, hence win win. And with VR, AR, 3D scanning etc, we are
very far from reaching epitome of mobile technology anyway.

------
mozumder
Why does the tech industry focus on self-driving cars so much? It's absolutely
never going to happen, ever.

The world would be much better off if we converted our roads to a
rail/streetcar system and drop the personal car concept entirely.

The hype around this is worse than VR.

~~~
slackoverflower
Is it that you don't want self driving cars to happen or you don't THINK it
will happen? I, for one, am super excited for self driving personal vehicles
and will be glad to see the eradication of mass public transportation like
trains and buses.

~~~
jamestimmins
There's a strong case to be made that this isn't a desirable outcome in a lot
of areas. Trains and buses are _much_ more efficient at moving people than
individual cars, even if they're self-driving. I'm also extremely excited
about autonomous cars, but neither desire nor think they will replace mass
transit.

edit: As a few people have mentioned, my suggestion that "trains are buses are
_much_ more efficient" is dubious. And I certainly don't mean to say they're
better in all circumstances. It's more accurate to say that in certain
scenarios, it still makes sense to use mass transit instead of self driving
cars. Moving inside Manhattan, or commuting from a suburb to Manhattan, are
examples where mass transit likely makes sense. With the obligatory disclaimer
that I could be incorrect, this is simply my understanding.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Trains and buses are much more efficient at moving people than individual
cars, even if they're self-driving."

I've said this on here before, but I'll say it again: _efficiency is not
everything_.

Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having
everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating
some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias.

Human beings have goals other than efficiency. One ignores this fact at one's
own peril.

~~~
lmm
> Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having
> everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and
> eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias.

Efficient at what? The comment you replied to explicitly talked about what's
"efficient at moving people".

Of course some people like cars for reasons other than how good they are at
getting from A to B, but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or
something more like fashion? Certainly people who commute by car don't seem to
actually enjoy doing it.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Efficient at what?"

Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I
replied to was using it.

"but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like
fashion?"

I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a
conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".

~~~
aninhumer
>being able to go where you want, any time you want

And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys, and rely on
more efficient public transport for everything else.

> in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine

This is not an inherent issue with public transport. I take the bus to work
every day and it's never smelled of urine.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys"

No.

You will have to call the taxi and wait for it to arrive, and (inevitably)
you're going to have to wait a lot longer at peak times.

That is not the same as going any time you want.

~~~
aninhumer
Well okay. If you really feel that being able to take a trip to a less
accessible location at a few seconds notice at peak times is vitally important
to you, then you're still free to own your own self-driving car.

But I think most people would much rather wait a few minutes on those
occasions and save their money.

(And FWIW, I think it could be fairly quick, since you don't have to pay a
self-driving car to sit around in a small town in case someone needs it.)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Evidence is against it. We have cabs (also Uber, Lyft, etc.) _now_ , but most
people outside dense urban cores still choose to own their own car.

~~~
lmm
That's less true of the younger generation though.

------
baybal2
Can somebody explain for what reason Apple suddenly decided to make cars?

------
amelius
Transportation is becoming a service rather than a product. There is no room
for a Veblen good in a market of non-owners.

~~~
tim333
In the future perhaps, not just now
[https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/02/ferrari-race-
secon...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/02/ferrari-race-second-
quarter-q2-2017-earnings.aspx)

Though I expect in the future some people will still want fancy cars

~~~
amelius
That's not really the market segment Apple will be aiming for.

------
capex
I wonder if Apple would consider building a driver-less RV. That's something
they could do really well.

~~~
annnnd
RV = Recreational Vehicle (camper van,...)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recreational_vehicle)

------
chrisbennet
What are the margins on making the physical part of automobiles compared to
other things that Apple could be doing? Average profit margin is 8% for auto
manufactures. [1]

[1] [http://marketrealist.com/2015/02/intense-competition-
leads-l...](http://marketrealist.com/2015/02/intense-competition-leads-low-
profit-margins-automakers/)

------
coredog64
Apple's corporate attitude is fundamentally incompatible with Magnuson-Moss.

------
flylib
I mean they didn't scale anything back really, neither Google or Uber are
manufacturing the cars either

------
bernardsoundest
was a failure from the beginning...

------
1_2__4
Can the "mass production self driving cars are just a couple of years away"
meme finally die yet? Are we ready to admit that maybe this is a harder thing
to invent than we've been trying to make ourselves believe?

~~~
Eridrus
What about this article makes you think this? Do you have some insight that
all the major automakers are missing when they say they expect to have
autonomous cars on the road in the next 5 years?

~~~
zb
As of last year, Waymo were saying it will take up to 30 years, and they're
widely considered to be in the lead:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-
for-some-in-decades-for-others)

~~~
MarkMc
The article you linked to indicates that places with good weather and good
roads could see the technology in 3 years. For all places in all conditions it
may take 30 years: "this technology is almost certainly going to come out
incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is
good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there
first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more
challenging locations."

~~~
stevenwoo
Even in the Bay Area, there is periodically bad to less than perfect weather -
we had 30+ straight days of rain about 15 years ago in one of the El Nino
years, and that would have killed Waymo's steering wheel-less cars'
useability. It's almost like none of the people who made that decision were
here when that happened.

~~~
Eridrus
The Bay Area only has a lot of self-driving cars because the engineers are
there, note that WayMo is letting people take rides in Phoenix, not the Bay.

~~~
stevenwoo
Thanks for the clarification. I see them on San Antonio and in out of the way
neighborhoods in Los Altos all the time but I guess from this article they are
simulating more novel situations for the self driving AI and doing real world
regression testing. It was only last year I saw one Waymo slow at every
pedestrian crosswalk on San Antonio and there were no pedestrians nearby and
the crosswalk lights were not blinking so definitely a necessary step.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-
waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/)

------
0xbear
If they scale them down even more than they already have, we'll end up with a
horse drawn buggy. Hey, it's self driving!

~~~
feintruled
Reminds me of a story my dad told about a guy in his village who still drove a
horse and cart in the 1960s. He drove it down to the pub where he would get
blind drunk but it didn't matter as "the horse would take him home".

------
freehunter
How much energy does it take to move one train 500 miles? How much energy does
it take to move 10 cars 25 miles each? That's your question.

Why do people always frame public transport in the light of "everyone can just
take a single train!"? It doesn't work like that. It never works like that.
It's a ridiculous argument barely even worthy of a response. 500 people might
take one train in LA or NYC, but how about Greenville, Wisconsin? How about in
Bitely, Michigan? How about Linn Grove, Indiana?

Suddenly the argument breaks down, doesn't it? Good luck replacing 500 cars
with one train when the town only has 150 people and they all work in
different cities. Now suddenly cars are looking pretty damn efficient, aren't
they?

~~~
Apocryphon
You raise good points, but they're specific to American urban design, and the
long-term solution is probably to redesign and rebuild our cities to move away
from those designs.

~~~
freehunter
So the solution is to tear down our cities, abandon our homes, and rebuild
everything somewhere else. Gotcha. I mean that's probably environmentally
friendly, right?

~~~
Apocryphon
Urban renewal is a policy which exists, yes.

------
adamnemecek
Welcome to the club.

~~~
senatorobama
They probably realized that designing a safe (to their standards) self-driving
car is equivalent to strong AI.

~~~
MichaelApproved
I think we will need roads designed for autonomous cars, to make them truly
safe and autonomous. They'll need sensors and digital markers to augment the
visual markers. Otherwise, conditions like snow or rain would make it too
difficult to work.

~~~
drewrv
This should be a big part of the conversation around self driving cars. If we
added some basic markers and beacons to our roads we could have self driving
cars a lot sooner. Start with the interstates, we'll save a ton of lives and
bring down the cost of shipping.

------
hungerstrike
That's too bad. I was really hoping for Apple to spend all of their resources
trying to build a car and then go out of business because IMO they ruined
computing for everybody by popularizing walled gardens, anemic UIs and super
limited software.

~~~
Retric
Phones where a walled garden long before the iPhone. J2ME apps sucked, but
there where a lot of them.

Calling the iPhone the first smartphone is mostly just marketing and form
factor. They got the interface right and built a better browser, but you could
use the web, email, apps, take pictures etc on phones long before the iPhone.

~~~
hungerstrike
> Phones where a walled garden long before the iPhone.

No they weren't.

~~~
Retric
There have always been a unlocked phones. But, in many cases these phones did
not even have data ports, just the built in connection to a walled garden
unless you physically opened them.

PS: I was writing phone software 2004-2006 so really walled gardens where a
thing. People would even _gasp_ pay for ring tones.

------
MicroBerto
Good, now if only we can get Musk to stop live alpha-testing his decapitation
death code and slow down for a few years, then maybe some actual experts who
have working sensors can get this done properly.

~~~
MichaelApproved
> decapitation death code

What are you referencing here? If you mean the accident that caused a car to
drive under a truck, that driver ignored several alerts and warnings from the
auto pilot system.

That accident was human error, not software.

Edit: Results of NTSB investigation
[https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/06/20/tesla-s...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2017/06/20/tesla-
self-driving-car-crash/411516001/)

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nadim
More proof Apple is done innovating. This is literally a story about giving
up, in the NYT. Can we have SJ back please?

~~~
objclxt
> More proof Apple is done innovating.

It's literally the opposite of that. They spent billions of dollars on R&D in
a new market segment. Just because you cancel the project or decide it's a
failure doesn't mean a) you didn't learn anything, b) you didn't get any tech
out of it, and c) it's not innovation.

You cannot be innovative if you are not prepared for your efforts to fail. If
Apple was "done innovating" they wouldn't be taking massive bets like this at
all.

~~~
nadim
> Billions on R&D?

Proof?

~~~
brisance
[https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/r_and_d_expense](https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/r_and_d_expense)

~~~
nadim
On Titan?

"billions of dollars on R&D in a new market segment"

~~~
ninkendo
Probably. After all, they're pushing 3bn per quarter and titan presumably
lasted a few years. If it was 10% of R&D for 3 years it would be over 2bn
according to that graph.

~~~
nadim
Ok that makes sense.

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kartD
"But people within the industrial design team including Jonathan Ive, Apple’s
chief designer, believed that a fully driverless car would allow the company
to reimagine the automobile experience, according to the five people."

Ah Jony Ive, first he ruined iOS 7 and now this constant need to tinker with
things that work fine. I love the hardware design but please leave the
software and HID bit alone... of course YMMV

P.S. Anyone feel iOS usability has been going down with the move to a flat
design?

~~~
notfried
I think iOS usability has become and is increasingly becoming, more
complicated and less easy to use. But this doesn't have anything to do with
the flat design, but with the many features, buttons, and gestures being added
every new release.

~~~
post_break
Having to teach my dad that buttons and settings are hidden until you tap
something or swipe around has proven to me that the new UI is trying to be
more clever all while being extremely confusing.

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segmondy
Apple really is a one hit wonder. Outside of computing devices, phone,
tablets, laptops, (let's throw in desktops & watches) They really haven't been
able to build and innovate much since Jobs. I was short on the idea when they
announced a self-driving car. Without a major change and internal culture
shock, they are going to stay on this course, hit peak cash extraction until
they start mortgaging cash quickly. The only thing that has been pretty
interesting has been AR. Innovation dilemma is strong.

~~~
BoorishBears
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not

~~~
D-Coder
I'm reading it as, "What have the Romans ever done for us? Apart from the
sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a
fresh water system, and public health."

