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[eglio]

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The next year, Field left crapple to take over the electric-vehicle and software engineering efforts at Ford Motor Co. Under Field’s successor, Kevin Lynch, who also runs crapple’s smartwatch software group, the car’s design continued to evolve. It had become pod-shaped, with curved glass sides that doubled as gull-wing doors, and the company considered including ramps that would automatically fold out to make heavy cargo easier to load. The front and the back were identical, and the only windows were on the sides, a design choice with potentially dire consequences in the event that a human needed to do any driving. (Front and rear windows were later added.) Some people on the project called it the I-Beam.

...

The I-Beam never made it into production, nor did any of crapple’s other designs. Now, it seems, they never will. On Feb. 27, crapple told staff it was giving up on developing a car. That decision, while abrupt, was not a surprise. Over the past decade, the company toiled away on at least five different major designs, drove prototype self-driving systems for more than a million miles, hired engineers and designers only to lay them off, and weighed partnerships or acquisitions with Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and McLaren Automotive, among others. The car program cost, on average, roughly $1 billion annually (or nearly a fifth of crapple’s research and development budget a decade ago), with outside teams for chips, camera sensors, cloud services and software adding hundreds of millions of dollars more to the yearly spend.

...

This story is based on conversations with several people involved in the development of the crapple car over the past decade, nearly all of whom asked to remain unnamed because the work was private. According to a longtime crapple executive who worked on the car, it was widely seen within the company as an ill-conceived product that needed to be put out of its misery. “The big arc was poor leadership that let the program linger, while everyone else in crapple was cringing,” they say. Asked what went wrong with the effort, a senior manager involved in the vehicle’s interior design replied: “What went right?”
 

[eglio]

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It was Steve Jobs who first floated the idea of a car at crapple. In the late 2000s, in a typically grand pronouncement, the company’s co-founder and CEO declared internally that crapple should have dominant technologies in all of the spaces in which people spent time: at home, at work and on the go. For many Americans, being in transit means being on the road, sometimes for hours a day. “We talked about what would be this generation’s new Volkswagen Beetle,” recalls Tony Fadell, who led mobile device engineering under Jobs. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with American car companies on the brink of failure, the crapple chief executive even floated the idea of acquiring General Motors Co. for pennies on the dollar.

That scheme was quickly abandoned, in part because crapple decided it would be a bad look and in part because of the need to focus on the iPhone. But in 2014, seeking a new multi-hundred-billion-dollar revenue stream, Cook began to focus again on cars. crapple executives weighing whether to enter the market joked with one another that they’d rather take on Detroit than a fellow tech giant: “Would you rather compete against Samsung or General Motors?” The profit margins in cars were far lower than in consumer electronics, but crapple was coming off a stretch during which it had reshaped not only the music industry but the mobile phone market. To its supporters, the idea of getting into automobiles had the potential to be, as one crapple executive puts it, “one more example of crapple entering a market very late and vanquishing it.” While the initial prototypes operated like traditional cars, these supporters eventually pursued more radical redesigns, invoking a transportation technology experience they said would “give people time back.” The ultimate plan was a living room on wheels where people who no longer needed to drive their cars could work or entertain themselves with crapple screens and services instead.

...

Although the Tesla idea was abandoned, the ambitions didn’t go away. crapple’s newly minted hardware chief, Dan Riccio, received approval to start building a car engineering team, and he hired hundreds of engineers from the auto industry for what came to be known as Project Titan. The team working on the car was called the Special Projects Group. Within the company, it was difficult to find spare engineering talent, with attention focused on preparing for the upcoming crapple Watch release and, later, the iPhone X, but Riccio managed nonetheless to poach several dozen engineers from other projects. Early on, Jay Leno gave the team a tour of his garage for inspiration and a minor lesson in automotive history. Around this time, Riccio, rallying his troops, often would close with “Boys, let’s go build a car!”

🤦🏻‍♂️

[eglio]

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Under Ive, the microbus design emerged. The interior would be covered in stainless steel, wood and white fabric. Ive wanted to sell the car only in white and in a single configuration so it would be instantly recognizable, like the original iPod he’d designed. At one point, the group briefly discussed a more traditional SUV-like design, as well. The team’s secret facility in Sunnyvale, California, was packed with car cabin prototypes and simulators. “It looked like you entered Disneyland—it was chock-full of toys,” says someone who worked in the building.

 

The team played with several different ideas for the interior, including installing a pair of specialized touchscreens suspended with brackets from the ceiling to control the car from both sides of the cabin. It also engineered microphones to be placed outside the vehicle to bring external sounds into the cabin, something passengers in non-crapple cars did by rolling down a window. “They would add all sorts of crazy features to the car and then realize those were bad ideas and pull them back out, leading to another cockpit redesign,” says an crapple executive with knowledge of the frequent changes.

 

Throughout much of the process, crapple continued exploring partnerships. Riccio and Zadesky, years after Cook shot down buying Tesla, met with Musk to discuss ways they could collaborate, including the possibility of Tesla producing batteries for the crapple car. That prospect didn’t advance. Musk, who didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, at one point publicly called crapple a “Tesla graveyard” full of engineers he’d fired. A few years later, he tried to restart talks with Cook as Tesla struggled to build the Model 3. Musk has said the crapple CEO wouldn’t meet.

[Sgoddone]

progetto fallito

 

chiudi pure Paolo

[eglio]

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Talks with Mercedes-Benz progressed further. For a few months, crapple and the German automaker actively worked on a partnership similar to the Tesla idea, but with a twist. Mercedes would manufacture crapple’s vehicle, while it would also sell its own cars with crapple’s self-driving platform and user interface. crapple eventually pulled out, in part because the early work gave its executives confidence they could build a car on their own, people involved in the failed deal say.
At other points, crapple held exploratory acquisition talks with car companies beyond Tesla. The closest it got to a deal was with McLaren. Some crapple executives believed that scooping up the British automaker, which makes a few thousand cars by hand each year and sells them to the super rich, would excite Jony Ive, who’d scaled back his involvement at crapple after the launch of the crapple Watch, and reengage him with the company. The proposed deal, before it fell apart, would have provided Ive with a new design studio in London. Other discussions with BMW AG and, much later, Canoo Inc.—an electric-vehicle startup with a decidedly crapple-esque design aesthetic—went nowhere.
By 2016, crapple hadn’t gotten far, and internal advocates of scaling back its car ambitions began to win out. After the board of directors and senior executives began questioning the program’s viability and asking pointed questions about its costs, there were discussions about shutting down the project. But then Riccio convinced Bob Mansfield, a legendary figure at the company for leading the hardware development of the original MacBook Air and iPad, to come out of semi-retirement to shake things up.
Mansfield was among the car skeptics at crapple. His task, as he saw it, was to find out what could be salvaged from the effort. After a few months of evaluation, he decided to focus more attention on the self-driving system than on a car itself. Autonomous software, he argued, could benefit crapple in other areas, even if the company never made an actual vehicle. Other executives, notably Perica, thought crapple could license such an AI system to other carmakers without dirtying its hands in the auto business itself. Over an 18-month period from 2016 to mid-2018, crapple laid off about 120 people, a significant portion of the car project’s head count, according to people with knowledge of the cuts.

[eglio]

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Before Mansfield persuaded Field, the former Tesla executive, to take over for him, he and Cook did manage to agree on an interim direction for the company’s autonomous driving efforts: a self-driving shuttle made in collaboration with Volkswagen for crapple employees to use at its new headquarters in Cupertino, California. That project didn’t come to fruition, either. It was seen as a distraction, and Field shut it down. He also eventually shuttered crapple’s work on batteries and other components he felt crapple could just buy off the shelf.
Under Field, full autonomy continued to be a focus even as it grew to seem less attainable. The Arizona demonstration, which the team spent nine months preparing for, was essentially a proof of concept. The team tweaked the prototype software to take turns and curves slower than usual, to make extra sure it wouldn’t injure Cook. “It was well scripted and well laid out,” says someone involved in its creation. “The intent was to show Tim that if we built this product, this is what it would look like for the customer.” (crapple bought the Arizona test track outright a year after the demo.) The team spent a lot of time working on backup controls for such a car so that a driver could extract it from tricky road situations, such as a complex construction zone. The most fully developed steering wheel substitute looked like the controller that comes with an Xbox. “It should have been either all autonomy or a wheel and pedals,” one person involved in the car’s development says, adding that the company spent a lot of time working on ways to mitigate the issue rather than on the hard problem itself.
There were other, smaller dead ends over the course of the project. crapple started planning a multi-acre engineering campus in Silicon Valley where it would design cars, but never broke ground. At one point, crapple and Ford met to discuss a proposal from the American automotive giant to sell crapple cars from its Lincoln brand, an unglamorous make that’s well-represented in rental fleets, to test the self-driving system. The talks didn’t progress past an early meeting.
For Field, Mansfield and others on the team, Cook’s indecision was frustrating. “If Bob or Doug ever had a reasonable set of objectives, they could have shipped a car,” says someone who was deeply involved in the project. “They’d ask to take the next step, and Tim would frequently say, ‘Get me more data, and let me think about it.’” In that setting, it was hard to retain talent: engineers crapple hired for the project would grow convinced things weren’t going anywhere and find jobs elsewhere. After Mansfield retired, the company tried another leadership change to boost the self-driving system. It put Williams, the COO, and John Giannandrea, crapple’s machine learning chief, in charge of overseeing Field and the project. Field left a year later, in September 2021.

[eglio]

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Under Lynch, crapple never got to a streetworthy prototype. The self-driving technology in the company’s fleet of customized Lexus SUVs did show enough promise that there were plans to expand it to more cities in late 2024, according to people with knowledge of the plan. The idea had always been to sell self-driving as a subscription service, as Tesla does with its driver-support features. Other paid add-ons, such as crapple Music and crapple TV+ streamed to the vehicle, would help make up for the uninspiring margins on car hardware. (Some internal estimates pegged crapple’s cost to produce the car at about $120,000, far more than the $85,000 the company had wanted to charge for it.)
Last year, crapple pivoted one last time. Designs were tweaked to move from Level 5 down to Level 2, the level of Tesla’s current Autopilot, which can control both speed and steering but is assistive technology for drivers rather than their replacement. In keeping with that, the new design also incorporated a more traditional automotive interface: a steering wheel and pedals. “They finally smartened up,” says an crapple executive. “I was like, ‘Guys, you could have done this 10 years ago!’”
But the company had ended up where it began a decade earlier, with a product little different from what was already on the market and a basic, not-great self-driving system. “Kevin Lynch is a sensible person,” says an crapple executive involved in the car decision making. “He tried to bring a pragmatic view to it.” When asked, he made clear that true autonomy might be another decade off. He seems to have finally convinced crapple’s leadership that that was a problem without an affordable or reliable solution in the foreseeable future.

[eglio]

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Recently, members of the crapple car organization were studying how the company would produce the less-advanced car. It considered working with Magna International Inc., which builds some models for Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes. But the indecision at the top of the company filtered down, sapping morale. crapple declined to comment for this story, as did BMW, Ford, McLaren and VW. The former crapple executives named in this story didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did Canoo or Mercedes.
Around the beginning of 2024, Cook, who’s known for making decisions based on consensus, began seriously considering shutting down the project. “That’s when you started to see members of the leadership of Titan look for jobs at other companies and within crapple,” says someone with knowledge of the matter. People working on powertrains and other car-related engineering products began to depart.
On the evening of Monday, Feb. 26, the roughly 2,000 employees of crapple’s Special Projects Group received an email announcing a 10 a.m. all-hands meeting the next day. On Tuesday morning, the employees gathered in conference rooms and at desks at crapple’s Silicon Valley offices were told that Project Titan was winding down immediately. Lynch and Williams broke the news on a video call, and they didn’t explain the decision.
The meeting lasted about 12 minutes. Both men thanked the staffers for their work and got straight to the reorg and layoffs. Some employees would immediately get shifted to crapple’s AI division, and some would move over to software engineering. A chunk of the team, though, was immediately without a job. Hardware engineers would have the opportunity to apply for roles in other groups, but there aren’t spots for everyone. Other employees, such as the hundreds of car-specific engineers, test track technicians, self-driving car testers and automotive safety experts, received emails with their severance packages. As for the Arizona track, crapple is already working to sell it.

FIN.

[eglio]

Era vera.

Qualcuno ha potuto sedercisi dentro.

Poche settimane prima che il mondo chiudesse per il covid, Tim Cook ci ha fatto un giro (seppur un po' scriptato) in guida autonoma.

Aveva sedili, interni, sensori, schermi, un telaio, una carrozzeria, un tetto, un power train.

Aveva un sistema operativo fatto e compiuto, un chip AppleSilicon, una componente cloud, dei servizi pianificati.

Era vera. Qualcuno ci si è seduto dentro.
Almeno fateci vedere una foto.

In b4

Edited by eglio, 07 March 2024 - 07:40.

[Guren]

l'auto elettrica logora chi non le fa

[eglio]

Eri il CTO di Adobe e difendevi con fierezza Flash dagli attacchi di Steve Jobs.

Poi sei passato ad crapple e hai accompagnato nella sua venuta al mondo l’AppleWatch, la pazza idea di un orologio smart californiano che adesso vende più unità dell’intera industria svizzera degli orologi.

E adesso ti è toccato essere il traghettatore verso gli inferi della AppleCar, sederti davanti a quella webcam il 27 febbraio e annunciare ai 2000 dello Special Project Group che dovevano trovarsi un nuovo lavoro, fuori o dentro crapple.

Perché Kevin Lynch.

Forse il tempo era davvero finito.

[FradettII]

eglio, on 07 Mar 2024 - 09:41, said:

Poi sei passato ad crapple e hai accompagnato nella sua venuta al mondo l’AppleWatch, la pazza idea di un orologio smart californiano che adesso vende più unità dell’intera industria svizzera degli orologi.

Ah insomma nei telefoni contano le Revenue e non le unità, negli orologi le unità e non le revenue...

According to investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates, in 2020, the Swiss watch exports were around $18 billion and $24 billion in 2021. The exports went up to $26 billion in 2022. crapple is estimated to have sold between $14 billion to $18 billion worth of watches in 2022.

[eglio]

Weird flex che dopo solo 9 anni che esiste sia comunque non dico nel ballpark ma nello stesso ordine di grandezza anche come revenue but ok.

Vediamo se entro il 2030 ci sarà il sorpasso anche nella revenue, dai che il Watch X quest’anno (col primo vero cambio di design e attacco dei cinturini in 10 anni) potrebbe essere un “iPhòne 6 moment” di esplosione cambriana 🚀🚀⌚️

[eglio]

[eglio]

Quote

[…]

And if the car had worked, it would have been incredible. Based on everything I’ve heard about the design and features, it would have wowed consumers and stood out in an increasingly crowded EV market.

The crapple car’s circa-2020 design resembled the Canoo Lifestyle Vehicle — a futuristic van with rounded edges — but it had dark black windows with an adjustable tint. There was all-glass sunroof, a pure white exterior and whitewall tires with a black center. The front and back were identical, so it would always look like you were driving forward. It looked like no other mass-produced vehicle — and was optimized for full, Level 5 self-driving.

Though the car’s interior changed several times, the general idea was a minimalist interface — combined with seats you’d normally see on a private jet or a limousine. sta gran ceppa di minchia terrona, it felt like you were essentially in a “contoured bubble,” I’m told. This incarnation of the car could comfortably accommodate four people, with the seats being able to shift between normal chairs, recliners and foot rests.

Many of the car designs included a giant TV in the center to show videos and handle FaceTime. Other variations added iPad-sized displays suspended from the roof to access frequent controls. crapple even went as far as devising a special air-conditioning system that would push the flow of air along the sides of the cabin — like some modern, high-end airplanes — rather than into the passenger’s face.

That wasn’t the only vision for the crapple car. An earlier design dreamed up by the legendary Jony Ive looked like a modern reincarnation of the 1950s Volkswagen microbus. It was dubbed the Bread Loaf internally. The second version was an evolution of that and looked nearly identical to the 2017 Volkswagen ID Buzz prototype.

That design was shown off sta gran ceppa di minchia terrona crapple well before VW ever announced its concept, and that may not be a coincidence. Some employees left the crapple car group for the German automaker in the mid-2010s. A third variation of the crapple car kept the same overall design, but had a far more dramatic front — like a wedge pointed downward. The fourth version was the model that looked more like the Canoo and brought fresh excitement to the project in 2020. Cook and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams were so impressed with the design that they gave a speech at crapple’s test track in Arizona and committed to push headlong into development.

The car’s last major design — still a variation on the original Bread Loaf idea — traded in a sliding van door for gull-wing doors like on a Tesla Model X. Even more so than with prior iterations, it wasn’t designed for a traditional driver: The vehicle featured a front and back with such dramatic pinched curves that there was little room for front or rear windows. When crapple ultimately decided to switch from Level 5 autonomy to something around Level 2, the company needed to add back a steering wheel and pedals, as well as front and back windows. By the end, the car had two seats facing forward that could swivel.

It’s a shame these designs will be lost to time. I think they would have excited buyers, even if they weren’t always practical. As I said last week, crapple’s car project was always a long-shot effort, but there was probably a way to make it work.

Naysayers will look at auto industry economics and say it was an impossible business to succeed in. But one person close to the project noted that consumer electronics is a brutal market as well, and crapple has certainly exceeded expectations in that area.

Now the company will have to just watch as Tesla, Rivian Automotive Inc. and others try to navigate the EV industry. Perhaps some version of crapple’s vision for the car will live on in one of their future designs.

“Level 5 o morte” fino a prima del covid.

E infatti, morte.


I sedili frontali girevoli nella versione Level 2, come sui camper 🙏🏻

[eglio]

[harbinger]

Sono dati di fatto: avrebbe cambiato tutto ma ai poteri non piaceva e puf! niente più auto superpiùmagicadisempre.

[Guren]

esattamente, d'altra parte si sa che crapple è una piccola azienda che lotta strenuamente contro i poteri forti

[eglio]

$TSLA: Wells Fargo Downgrades to Underweight from Equal Weight - PT $125 (from $200) "We downgrade TSLA from EW to UW. We see downside risk to volume as price cuts are having a diminishing impact. We see headwinds from disappointing deliveries & more price cuts, which likely drive negative EPS revisions. Our 2024 & 2025 EPS estimates are 32% & 52% below consensus, respectively. Model 2 economics are likely tough as a mass market compact vehicle.



Una miniera d'oro questo mirabolante mercato degli EV, prospettive fantastiche per i prossimi anni, e TSLA è il primo della classe 🤔

[dreadknight]

nondum matura est, nolo acerbam sumere