Do you really think Apple has given up on building cars?

Visual China.

Text |Damask.

Do you really think Apple has given up on building cars?

If you are convinced of this, it largely reflects the vague understanding of Apple, smart cars, AI, autonomous driving, and even the business logic of future technology.

Let's start with the conclusion: Apple is not giving up on building cars, but finally clarifying the planning and development path of "Apple-style" smart cars, the so-called turn to AI, it is inevitable that different paths will end up together, within two years, Apple's "icar" prototype will surface.

iMac, iPod, iPhone are in the front, just copy Tesla, Porsche, Apple is not Apple. Steve Jobs is gone, but the company's ethos, based on its aesthetic philosophy, still governs the spirit of the company, a culture that does not allow to be followed, and does not allow its product leadership to reach the level of "symbol".

In this regard, you might as well think about the Vision Pro, although the original generation was not commercially successful, or even a failure, but from an aesthetic point of view, it is so "Apple", so difficult for peers to match.

"Aesthetics" is a fictitious word here, the core of Apple-style aesthetics, and we will try to say our understanding in future reports. Let's go back to icar:

Therefore, at the metaphysical level, the first nature of ICAR must be to make a smart car in the cutting era.

Just like the iPhone is to feature phones, a new product standard and the beginning of a commercial era. And this is Apple's fate, and it is also the "curse" that Jobs left to Apple.

If only the appearance, hardware parameters, and driving experience are the benchmarks, this will not be an icar, but a Porsche. At that time, "the fruit will not come to fruition".

Combined with the basic facts of the previous Apple Titan project, and following the basic business common sense, we can judge that the first landing point of the new era of intelligent cars, that is, the first nature of the product, is anchored in: full autonomous driving.

Why is it autonomous driving, and it must be fully autopilot, in a word: this is equivalent to iOS to iPhone - Android is not bad, but fate, and it is the fate of the world that can cut the largest market share of the industry, must be "closed" in their own hands.

In other words, in the idea of the Titan project, the use of ICAR automatic driving - no steering wheel, no mechanical braking device, and global intelligence brings the feeling of not only "seeing the mountains at a glance", but also "returning without looking at the mountains".

Such an aesthetic is very Jobs. But in the post-Jobs era, Apple overestimated its talent for breaking through no man's land, and also underestimated the inertia of general technology in the industry.

For autonomous driving, the industry has long defined itself as the basic functional standard of "L1-L5". In order to run to 99999999% of reliability, including Apple and Tesla, are trapped in Infernal Purgatory.

This is the essential reason why Apple has been unable to ask for iCar in the past 10 years: before 2022, the path of the entire industry to fully autonomous driving has been wrong.

Looking back at this time, no matter how passionate the debate between vehicle-road collaboration and bicycle intelligence about the divergence of autonomous driving was at the time, and how lonely it is now.

This self-driving dream woke up at the beginning of 2022, and the thunder of ChatGPT-3 sent a thunderbolt to the entire 1The autonomous driving industry in the 0 era declares: to achieve autonomous driving, it is not up to human engineers to write for endless small probability scenarios, but to hand over to machine intelligence with "exponential computing power + transformer" to flatten.

The curse of Steve Jobs and the thunder of Transformer are the essential reasons why Apple completely ended Titan, and it is also the beginning of ICAR's imminent path of research and development.

For Transformer, so far the entire human society still owes it a recognition of its important historical position in the history of science and technology. Because it may be the most significant technological breakthrough in commercial technology made by mankind in the past 50 years.

Regardless of ChatGPT, or the current popular SORA, without the publication of Transformer, we can't imagine their appearance.

If Transformer were 20 years late, Ultraman would be at most a Silicon Valley star investor, while Huang would be at most a successful gaming or mining chip entrepreneur. With the advent of Transformer, Ultraman began to get closer to the reputation of the "father of contemporary AI", and Huang Jenxun became the unparalleled "king of computing power".

The historical significance of the Transformer will eventually be understood by the world, and there will be a real industry leader who looks forward to the sea of stars and will later give it a name. Naturally, we don't have that qualification.

But it must be said that its emergence has truly saved the autonomous driving industry, pointed out the future path of intelligent cars, and is about to evolve into an intelligent society that is unimaginable to human beings

Its significance lies in the fact that it is the first time to realize the self-evolutionary and self-maintenance digital restoration of transistors to human neural networks, and based on this, it is about to derive the "superbrain group" of non-living organisms.

The intelligent car based on the "XPU+Transformer" package of software and hardware integrated autonomous driving will be the first major family branch of the entire superbrain group in the next 10 years.

In other words, the door to fully autonomous driving has slowly opened in 2022. The opening of this door also means 1The end of the era of 0 autonomous driving - that is, the end of the era of autonomous driving relying on tens of thousands of human software engineers + convolution algorithms.

As a result, we are gradually seeing that not only Apple, but all major manufacturers are shrinking their autonomous driving divisions, and changing lanes and starting again has become the only choice.

If so, Apple's end to Titan, All in AI, is not the end of building a car, but only the beginning of building a car. Because, AI, that is, autonomous driving, that is, iCar, is the absolute center of the new cycle of human social economy.

It should be pointed out that the sunk cost of Apple's car building this time is not only the Titan, but even the M series chips that it is proud of. This chip is essentially a precaution for the new business cycle, but it was not expected that in the 2020s, mankind has irreversibly entered the era of complete "parallel computing" of XPU computing power.

Mankind has a hundred years of history. The head of the city is constantly changing, and the king's banner is constantly changing. As long as the field of view is long enough, we will know that it is never too late to enter at any time. The key is who you are, who you will replace, and who you will become.

One of the key reasons why iCar is destined to appear is this: the current electric vehicles, as well as the so-called smart electric vehicles, are still in the wilderness, but the transfer and continuation of mobile Internet technology on different hardware bodies.

The decisive battle of the real epoch-making means of mobility - even intelligent objects that break through the constraints of space and time - is destined to be based on the basis of "xpu + transformer", so not only Apple, but also Tesla, has not yet entered the finals, and is even far away - because they have been wandering on the detour road before.

In other words, a truly epoch-making smart car, that is, a smart car in the sense of iPhone to the mobile Internet, that is, a smart car in the sense of "XCAR" in the sense of AI, has not yet appeared.

For China, we are not in awe of Transformer enough, we have not yet had a clear understanding of the integration of software and hardware, and it will take time for a large-scale breakthrough in intelligent computing power. For the United States, perhaps it should be said that for the camp of American technology companies, computing power and algorithms are advantages, but the manufacturing industry chain is also a shortcoming. But in terms of heart, the innate endowment of the latter, mainly in the option of being closer to AI capabilities, is visible to the naked eye to be more powerful.

This basic fact means that Apple still has a relatively sufficient time window to achieve a real breakthrough in autonomous driving technology in the next 2 years by combining computing power with parallel computing algorithms - just like high-process external chips and self-developed M series chips + iOS. Once this happens, it means the breaking of the "Jobs curse" and the nirvana of ICAR.

Here again, I repeat the previous point: AI, that is, autonomous driving, or ICAR.

Above, emptiness is color, and color is emptiness. The cognition implicit in this logic lies in the fact that we are not afraid of Apple making cars, but we are afraid that our Chinese colleagues have not yet explored what Apple sees and what its potential logic is in the future on the automobile track, but only cares about feelings and regrets.

And such a regret is the biggest regret of China's smart car industry.