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Apple Gives Up on Building its Own Car

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-make-cars-from-fruit dept.

"exec" writes:

http://jalopnik.com/apple-gives-up-on-building-its-own-car-because-the-enti-1787875242

-- submitted from IRC

1st Gear: The Apple Car Is No More

Building cars is hard. Tesla knows that. Google learned it the hard way too. And the latest tech giant to discover limits to its car-building ambitions is Apple, which according to Bloomberg , has given up on making its own car.

Granted, I've always thought that Apple's ultimate aim was to develop software or technology it could use to partner with existing automakers, rather than its own vehicle, but now that definitely seems to be the case. Now Apple is focused on creating autonomous systems for other companies.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @11:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 19 2016, @11:19AM (#416082)

    They have been pretty smart the past 5-6 years with their strategy.

    1) Announce, or hint at (by patenting things) entering a new market by making a new device.
    2) Let the me-too market scramble as fast as fucking possible to get something in that market before you do.
    3) Watch those competitors destroy each other in being first-movers releasing buggy shit product that nobody likes just so they can say they beat Apple to the market.
    4) Use the feedback from these failed offerings to improve the product that you were originally going to release, ***OR*** just abandon it altogether.

    Apple has effectively OUTSOURCED the R&D risk to their competitors, and they get free feedback in return. It's really fucking genius, on the levels of late 80's Microsoft business sense where they just toyed with WordPerfect, Lotus, OS/2, Apple, and DR-DOS.

    They did this with the iPad. They did this with the fingerprint reader on their smartphones. They did this with the watch. All three of these categories, Apple hinted at releasing, let the me-too's (Samsung, Motorola, LG) beat them to market in those categories, and then Apple entered the game once those "first" devices had been obliterated by the market and reviewers. To date, nothing in Android is as integrated as Touch ID despite two rewrites of the fingerprint API since Lollipop, the Android Wear market has fallen through the floor while the codebase for those devices hasn't been touched in almost two years, and there is nothing on the market that has the third-partysupport or longevity of the iPad.

    And now we see the same behavior in driver-less cars.

    It wouldn't surprise me to see an Apple car on the market in 4-5 years.