• m0darn@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    Shifts team to generative AI.

    If your car development team can be transferred to AI developement you weren’t building much of a car.

      • erwan@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Still, self driving and generative AI are very different. Just because they fall into the same big “AI” bucket doesn’t mean it’s the same.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            4 months ago

            Well yeah they were achieving absolutely nothing in self-driving vehicles so I suppose they can transfer those skills to achieve absolutely nothing in AI

            If you’re only just now entering the AI market you’re not going anywhere

    • danl@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Not sure if 100% a joke or just partly but Volkswagen was probably providing the mechanical engineers who were retrofitting Lexus vehicles of the project as they had for the already-deployed driverless vans. See NYT & MacReports

    • PlasmaDistortion
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      4 months ago

      Skilled developers can easily transition to another field of software engineering.

      • Fuck_u_spez_@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Even in 2024, there’s still a lot of non-software (automotive) engineering involved in building a car – even an electric one.

      • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        No one can become a skilled ML/AI dev overnight. That will still take a year or two or more of working with it daily. If you transition to a new field you basically become a junior dev all over again for a while. Domain knowledge is a big part of being a good programmer.

    • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Except news always was that Apple was pushing pretty hard into self-driving vehicles, which would use much the same AI learning systems as you need for generative AI.

      • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Ehh, that’s a bit of a stretch. They’re very different technologies with only limited overlap.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        4 months ago

        Unless Apple had invented artificial general intelligence and not told anyone then the technology isn’t transferable.

        • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Chances are very good the AI technologies they were working on involved developing a GAN, then the knowledge and experience of creating a GAN is fully transferable.

          It’s the skills of the developers I’m talking about transferring — not the source code or neural net output.

    • Formesse@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Once upon a time, stoves had a dial you set, and it was basically a resistor and some wires. Today, a stove has a computer built in it that operates the entire thing.

      While the computer in a modern oven is simple - it is an illustration that more, and more of what we have is computerized. When you add in reinforcement learning algorithms to adjust factors like say, If the fridge is aware of what time you generally open the fridge it can opt to kick on the heat pump a little before that to bring the temperature down and avoid running while it is open. This could save pennies of electricity in a year. But more importantly - could lead to less duty cycles on the condesor that could cause a fridge to say instead of lasting 10 years, last 12 years.

      If you are starting a car company today, what you have to be thinking about is a reality where we move to “Humans don’t drive, the cars drive you” - I mean even a manual control situation could have the AI actually being a watcher in effect we “Let” people drive, but if the AI detects an unobserved obstacle etc it immediately takes over and adjusts. Well: You need to build that - and that, is AI.

      If a company isn’t thinking about AI, and makes anything but basic appliances - they are likely on a limited time window because at some point Autonomous cars WILL be good enough, and the safety consideration will make both people, and governments, along with insurance companies to eliminate human driven vehicles.

      Apple isn’t looking next year, or a year after. They are looking 5 to 10 years out and they don’t see a path where they can effectively compete in the car industry and make the profits they are after. However, if they can solve the AI driving problem - they don’t NEED to make a car, they can sell the brains and system that drives the car.

      • gayhitler420
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        4 months ago

        Cleaning the coils would make the condensers last longer than the fraction of a percent of duty cycle that cooler ambient air during the time the doors open would.

        Actual good compressors would be even better.

        Adding computers to everything is a marketing gimmick. We already know how to make good stuff that lasts a long time, it’s just too expensive for underpaid customers to afford a 25% price premium on quality appliances so they slap a ten dollar iot kit on what would have been bottom shelf junk thirty years ago and call it a day.

  • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Thank fucking god. Imagine the kind of monetization that would exist inside an Apple car. You think subscription seatwarmers are bad, and they are, but I can guarantee Apple had much worse in mind, and that most companies would simply follow suit.

    • dan1101
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      4 months ago

      Or blaming customers for problems, “You’re shifting it wrong.”

      • meco03211@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Not sure if you’re aware that EVs don’t “shift” or if that’s an indictment to the level of idiocy that would likely be employed by Apple.

        • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          It’s a reference to an actual response from Jobs when the iPhone 4(?) had a bad antenna design.

        • Mac@mander.xyz
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          4 months ago

          Porsche begs to differ.

          All you had to do was a basic search for what EVs have multiple gears, but you didn’t.

          • meco03211@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            What I like is that a bunch of idiots seemed to take offense to my comment which was meant more as a joke. I do admit I wasn’t aware there were EVs with gears. Though this is mainly because I won’t be in the market for my next EV for hopefully years. When I was looking into it, it was largely seen as unnecessary.

        • dan1101
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          4 months ago

          Yeah I’m aware. There is mostly no reason for EVs to shift, but Toyota was trying to add a manual transmission to an EV for some reason.

          But “you’re shifting it wrong” would be a scenario like the car wouldn’t shift from P to D and Apple blames the driver.

      • joneskind@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        TBF This is how luxury car manufacturers sell their options. Always have been.

        Space Karen sells his false self-driving option for €7500 as a software option.

        • dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Yes, but historically the purchase of an option included the physical installation of that option and its associated hardware. Not just turning on parts of the car that are already in it, after you bought it.

          To be clear, I don’t think anyone is arguing that options should not cost money. We’re arguing against A) recurring subscriptions, and B) paying more money to activate features already built into the car you already bought.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Exactly. At a certain point luxury features stopped becoming standard and that’s associated with them being cheaper to install in every car but them deciding to sell it anyway

        • dimath@ttrpg.network
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          4 months ago

          I know the current circlejork but last time I’ve checked the self-driving required an additional processer inside the car.

          • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            For many options in cars, the sensors and electronics are already built in but disabled in software. It’s cheaper to build while optimizing profit with options.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        “Base model is this, but if you want seat heaters that’s another $8,000$10,000, if you want lane assist, that’s another $5,000 $25,000 and requires a 512GB storage bump for $2,000”

        Ftfy to more realistic numbers

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      They would come up with a charging port that only existed in the parking lot of Apple stores

        • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          Deserves a shoop

          alt-text: actual Apple Mouse charging via its bottom port

          (Interesting, this guy says it gains hours of charge in three minutes, and thinks Apple knew some would leave it plugged it at all times. Intentional sure but not exactly “brilliant”.)

    • Thatuserguy@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Genuinely, this is the best news I’ve heard in a while for the reasons you listed. Apple is already fucking up the phone industry with anti-consumer policies that become industry trends. I shudder to imagine how deeply and irrepairably they would have fucked up the car market for consumers.

    • gian @lemmy.grys.it
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      4 months ago

      Up to a certain point only. In most places you cannot hope to be able to sell a car that has not a minimum set of features mandated by the law.

      And Apple cannot hope to compel states to change the rules just because so they can sell their car.

  • NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone
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    4 months ago

    I was genuinely looking forward to them refusing to install airbags because it compromised the dashboard being 100% screen, and then later installing airbags in a “notch”, but calling them iBags, and advertising them as a revolutionary new feature that only Apple could think different enough to invent.

    • neutron@thelemmy.club
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      4 months ago

      Courage. You need to put courage to charge extra few grands somewhere to complete the apple experience.

  • Raxiel@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Aww and I was looking forward to a chipped windscreen requiring the replacement of the entire cabin, unless the car had ever been in the rain, in which case fuck you buy a new one.

  • boonhet
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    4 months ago

    Not sure why everyone’s cheering, more competition is never bad and there are already plenty of manufacturers adding subscriptions and such, I doubt Apple would even have been the worst.

    At the very least, they probably would’ve had a slick UI in a world of crap infotainment UIs.

    However they announced Carplay 2 a few years ago and I’m hoping manufacturers will go ahead with adding that as an option so you could just opt in to Apple UI all over the car and revert back at any time. This is probably the best of both worlds. There are plenty of companies that know quite well how to build a car, they just mostly still all suck at UI.

    • Cheerstothe90s@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      A problem with apple…Like if my friend has a Toyota, i can borrow that. If they have an icar, I probably couldn’t drive it because I don’t have an iPhone required to start it or apple shoes required to activate the pedals. You know they’d be dicks like that.

      • lilsolar@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Warning: unauthorized, non apple certified tyres detected on your iCar. Disabling airbags due to security issue.

        Setting destination to Apple Genius bar.

    • Makeitstop@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Competition usually isn’t bad. Unfortunately, Apple has a tendency to not only be terribly anti-consumer, but also tends to be a trendsetter. They do shitty things, and other companies learn from their example. Thus, the competition becomes a race to the bottom.

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      4 months ago

      Apple can’t compete in that space. Their schtick is producing moderately inexpensive nice looking goods for exorbitant prices that are designed to be impossible to repair by anybody with them.

      Tesla has already corned the market.

      Trying to block people from repairing? check, trying to block sales of used items? check. Getting rid of all the buttons for all the interfaces and making you work with a tablet in the center of the car? Check.

    • TheObviousSolution
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      Apple isn’t competition, Apple is a closed market, more anticompetitive than Microsoft and only undone by the degree of their control.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Microsoft wasn’t creating a car, and Apple wasn’t the dominant car manufacturer

        • TheObviousSolution
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          … And? Apple isn’t even the dominant anything manufacturer, at least worldwide.

          I don’t know why people are so upset. You’ve already got your closed market, overpriced, social “mine is bigger than yours (but not really)” compensation brand in the EV market. It’s called a Tesla.

          • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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            4 months ago

            Apple is the dominant manufacturer of really bad peripherals. Even cheap Chinese knockoff brands can’t quite match the utter nafness of Apple keyboards.

            • maynarkh@feddit.nl
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              4 months ago

              Monopolies are not a yes or no thing. Since Apple has a large enough market share that it is able to strangle competitors just through having that kind of market share, it is having a monopolistic effect on various markets.

              For example, the smartphone market, if the smartphone market was perfectly competitive, if I didn’t like Apple’s and Google’s business, I would be able to go to a third seller and get similar products. If I didn’t like them, I could go to a fourth, and so on until it becomes meaningless. Like the market for actual apples for example.

              Since that is not true, Apple is distorting the smartphone market with its large market share, making it have monopolistic tendencies.

        • TheObviousSolution
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          4 months ago

          Don’t worry, I don’t. … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

    • rsuri@lemmy.world
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      The fear for me was that Apple would grow quickly in the EV space due to its mainstream popularity, and then start doing the ecosystem thing so driving anything but an Apple car makes you a second-class citizen. Obviously it would only support Carplay and not Android Auto, and probably lack any sort of non-Carplay connectivity so you just can’t connect your Android phone to it at all. Presumably it would also have a proprietary charger that doesn’t work with other cars or vice versa.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      they probably would’ve had a slick UI

      Apple hasn’t had a slick UI since Apple II PC.

      • boonhet
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        4 months ago

        To clarify, I meant not just the UI itself being pretty, but also reaction speeds. IOS is still smoother than any Android distro I’ve touched and macOS, while sometimes lacking in the UI department, does nearly everything better than Windows. It doesn’t do many things better than my Gentoo install with KDE Plasma, but that’s hardly something for the common user who doesn’t need all the customization and wants a smooth system straight out of the box.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          I mainly meant that each time touching anything Apple I prepare myself for something as bad as Windows and it is somehow even more problematic to use.

    • Furbag@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I was kind of hoping that Apple and Tesla would just feud with each other for control of the “economy-quality product marketed as a luxury-quality product” market share.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      they announced Carplay 2 a few years ago and I’m hoping manufacturers will go ahead with adding that as an option so you could just opt in to Apple UI

      Yeah but you actually have to have an iPhone in order to use it because they are the world’s biggest dicks.

      Nah sod that, that we need open source UIs. The world doesn’t get better if we have more proprietary nonsense, that doesn’t help anyone.

      • boonhet
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        4 months ago

        Yeah but you actually have to have an iPhone in order to use it because they are the world’s biggest dicks.

        You also need an Android phone for Android Auto.

        What we need then, isn’t an open source UI, but rather a standard API that could be implemented by any mobile OS (or just an app, even).

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    4 months ago

    I really feel for the engineers and devs who don’t get to see their project released into the world. Especially after so much effort.

      • KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I know this is a joke about the stupid Apple mouse, but a car with a bottom (and normal) charging port would be pretty cool. Imagine just pulling into your garage and a giant MagSafe charger snaps to the bottom of your car. (Yes, I know this is unreasonable with current technology due to poor energy efficiency)

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          I haven’t looked at the bottom of my car in a while, but judging by the amount of dust, mud and ice I see everywhere else, the bottom probably isn’t very clean. During January the ice coating got so thick that I had trouble opening the back doors. Makes me wonder how the charging port would handle that.

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      As an engineer who’s spent a good chunk of his career working on stuff that got cancelled, it’s really not that bad. You’re generally paid well and looked after, learn a tonne on someone else’s dime, have good job prospects, a strong network of talented colleagues, plus most engineers are there for the team problem solving and challenge anyway. The final product release is just the cherry on top.

    • SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world
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      After all the layoffs in the tech sector, it’s doubtful it were even the original engineers working on the project.

    • invertedspear
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      4 months ago

      It’s kinda part of the job. Several times in my career I’ve put in months of effort on projects that then get canned for various reasons. One of them was 100% complete. No real big deal, it’s still a good billet on my resume.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Maybe the i-bike is more appleish? Imagine this, it’s a bike like other bikes, but you only need to pedal with one leg, and if you turn the pedal, the whole bike turns. Tilt it back to stop. Sure, you may look fucking stupid running around with only one pedal while your other leg does nothing at all. That’s it. Oh, and it’s white and smooth in gorme plastic-like design. You can charge your bike but you must remove the seat and turn it upside down using our special turning device since it’s 700lbs.

  • hamid@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Apple was hoping to white label a Chinese ev and slap an iPad in it but the trade war is too hot now for them to deliver.

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      You joke but it’s not terribly far off.

      Their real hope was to get Hyundai Kia to build EVs for them. While letting Apple act like they were the majority stakeholder of the deal.

  • badaboomxx@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Maybe they relized rhat they cannot trademark the itire and remotely lock it, and sell it for 20 times the price of a regular tire.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    4 months ago

    TFA: decade-long

    Spell-check: decade-long

    OP: decadelong

    Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen, Felicia.

  • a1studmuffin 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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    4 months ago

    Instead of trying to make a full electric car, I’m surprised Apple and Google aren’t focusing on making a smart AI “head unit” that’s compatible with third party car manufacturers. The head unit would control all aspects of the car through the CAN bus and also take camera/sensor inputs from the exterior of the vehicle, and be responsible for things like self-driving, lane assist and all those difficult AI-based features.

    This way the car manufacturers could focus on what they do best (building safe reliable hardware) and outsource all the hard AI software problems to tech companies who specialise in this area.

    • archchan@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      I’ll pass on having evil corps like Google put AI in my car.

      Comma.ai is open source and does exactly what you are describing as that “head unit”, not too mention is widely compatible with many car manufacturers.

      • a1studmuffin 🇦🇺@aussie.zone
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        4 months ago

        Couldn’t agree more, but I’m just highlighting it seems like a much more profitable and attainable commercial goal for them in the short term than trying to enter the vehicle manufacturing space as a competitor. The fact there’s an awesome open source project tackling this idea already (thanks for the link - I didn’t know this existed!) says it’s viable.

        They’ve already dipped their toes in with Car Play/Android Auto and have the relationships with third party vehicle manufacturers, so this seems like a logical next step. Perhaps that’s what they’re actually doing by shifting their car team to AI.

    • vin@lemmynsfw.com
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      4 months ago

      That’s b2b business which apple and google don’t do. Or aren’t good at, at the very least.

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      Its sounding more and more like companies are giving up on full self driving. There’s been a lot of money poured in without FSD materializing. Maybe just another lane autopilot wasn’t game changing enough for apple to justify staying in the game.

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        Honestly, people getting out of that game now are the smart ones. Our roads just aren’t set up to be able to handle FSD. It’s a money pit and a lot of companies are falling for the sunk cost fallacy.

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    4 months ago

    Oh no all those developments that they introduced all going to stop, like nothing, bugger all, and zip.

    They literally didn’t do anything, they announced the car I think they had a concept vehicle which looked very apple, and then they did nothing at all ever again.