Author丨Qiu Xiaofen.
Editor丨Su Jianxun.
Today, Bloomberg reported that Apple canceled their "Titan" car-building plan that has invested more than billions of dollars for a decade.
However, Apple's investment will not be in vain, and Apple plans to shift the original team's R&D focus to generative AI.
Although Apple did not respond to this ** news, the reason for Apple's broken wrist can also be understood from the development of Apple cars in the past ten years - unlike Tesla with Musk and Xiaomi cars with Lei Jun, Apple's car project has not been firmly led by core figures.
And this has directly led to the fact that Apple has been in an unclear positioning and ambiguous route in the car for the past ten years. The turmoil at the top has caused the Apple Car business to continue to fluctuate, and there have been high-level departures, layoffs, and contractions.
Apple has also missed the best car-making node in the past ten years. But now, as generative AI takes the world by storm, Apple has finally made the right choice.
Apple's interest in cars actually stems from the Steve Jobs era. Even before 2010, Steve Jobs had considered building cars, but after meeting with some traditional automakers, his judgment was very clear that even if Apple built cars, it would also build electric cars, not cars.
However, at that time, it was a period of continuous rise in the mobile phone industry, and Apple had to deal with the siege and seizure from Nokia and Samsung to stabilize the country. In Steve Jobs' time, Apple didn't have much energy to think about how to build cars.
It wasn't until after 2014 that Apple's determination to build a car gradually formed.
The first stage of Apple's car manufacturing was from 2014 to 2016, when Apple's car manufacturing was very ambitious. At a secret base near Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Apple slowly began to gather more than 200 engineers and experts in the automotive industry, reaching more than 2,000 at its peak.
The danger of the lack of a soul figure in the Apple car gradually revealed itself in the years that followed.
At that time, Apple sent Steve Zadesky, Apple's vice president of product design, to the team. However, the person in charge did not have the means to lead Apple to build a car. In 2016, the Apple Car team experienced its first upheaval, culminating in the exit of Steve Zadesky, Apple's vice president of product design, and the laying off of hundreds of employees.
Subsequently, in order to stabilize the situation, Apple invited Bob Mansfield, a retired and highly respected former Apple executive, to return to the office.
After the first round of high-level reshuffle, starting in 2016,The Apple car project is actually moving in the direction of full self-driving, rather than actually building an electric car itself
During this time, Apple has actually been testing their self-driving software, such as cooperating with car companies to test the autonomous driving of employee shuttles in the park, and also buying a special site for autonomous driving testing.
It wasn't until 2019 that the team that didn't settle down for a long time ushered in a second big upheaval - Apple once again laid off more than 200 employees of the Titan team, and Bob Mansfield, who Apple invited to support, simply chose to retire from Apple again.
By 2020, Apple appointed Kevin Lynch, who is famous for the Apple Watch, and John Giannandrea, Apple's head of artificial intelligence and machine learning, to co-lead the automotive business, but these two executives need to juggle the Apple Watch and AI projects in addition to the automotive business.
The automotive business requires a firm investment, which has a longer development cycle and higher capital requirements than any previous hardware project, so it is also necessary to have a soul person on the team who is willing to continue to be all in. However, the several changes in the leadership of Apple's car-making business have basically chosen Apple executives without any automotive background, and these leaders have their own careers and choices, and are not firm believers in the automotive industry.
Apple's failure to build a car is likely to stem from this.
For a long time, after three iterations of senior management, Apple's internal route strategy has not been clearly formed, and there has always been a disagreement - whether to build a car or only focus on autonomous driving? Do autonomous driving, do you do L2 or L4?
In the early days of Apple's car construction, Apple also initially planned to develop a complete car. At the beginning, Steve Zadesky wanted to inherit Jobs's legacy, and Apple opened up its brains on the hardware level of car building and made countless new directions.
Judging from the patents disclosed by Apple, the car without a steering wheel, the accelerator pedal, the fully silent electric door, the better lidar display, the enhanced display technology on the car, the wheel into a spherical design, etc., are all technologies reserved by Apple's car. Apple's earliest positioning of the Apple car was to make a high-end car of no less than 100,000 US dollars.
But after the first volatility of 2016, Apple has realized the cruelty of the automotive industryIt has also slowly shifted its strategy to the direction of more asset-light autonomous driving.
In 2019, in fact, we can already get a glimpse of Apple's internal anxiety - manifested in changing its previous strategy of slow research and development, and switching to direct acquisition to spend money to buy time. Since then, Apple has acquired drive., a self-driving startupAI, and tried to negotiate a purchase of electric car company Canoo to no avail.
At the same time, this is almost the most intensive stage of Apple's digging from the industry. It can be seen from the report that around 2019, Apple also poached from Ford, General Motors, Samsung, Volkswagen and other companies. Tesla is also the talent base of Apple Auto, including Doug Field and Steve Macmanus.
However, the level of autonomous driving is also quite confused within the Apple car and continues to wander.
There have been two ways of self-driving research and development within AppleFirst, L2 level limited automatic driving functions, which support automatic steering, acceleration, and braking functions, and the driver still needs to control the car and pay attention to the ground;
The second is to develop the highest-level autonomous driving system, which does not require human intervention at all, and aims to make products that are as safe as Tesla. It has been pointed out that under this scenario, Apple plans to develop a car without a steering wheel and pedals, and passengers can sit on opposite sides of the car facing each other.
However, according to Bloomberg, both of the directions that Apple has chosen have not gone smoothly either.
L2 assisted autonomous driving has a high penetration rate today, and it is not smart for Apple to launch it at this time, while L4 autonomous driving is facing strict safety regulatory problems. Some foreign ** pointed out that one of the main reasons why Apple is considering giving up the car business is also out of fear of a ** storm and regulatory whirlpool.
And it was in the midst of this decade of swing that Apple missed the opportunity.
Musk asserted as early as 2016 when Apple had the first twist and turn in car manufacturing and the first person in charge withdrew from the projectIf Apple doesn't achieve full production of cars by 2020, it will be a "missed opportunity" to lag behind in a fast-paced industry.
The facts are unfortunately stated.
It's also a wise choice to give up. As soon as the news of Apple's abandonment of car manufacturing was released, it quickly appeared on the hot search, and various automobile circles and technology bigwigs also commented on it:
He Xiaopeng, the founder of Xpeng Motors, commented, "New entrants in the automotive industry will all play cards in 2024, and the ten years after 2024 will enter the knockout and all-star games, but I didn't expect Apple to remove such cards in 2024."
Lei Jun took advantage of the trend to advertise and said, "Apple users buy electric cars, Xiaomi su7 is definitely a better choice."
Zhou Hongyi said that all companies in the United States are all in AI, and (Apple) "will be killed if it does not embrace AI.""。Surprisingly, Musk, who has made many judgments before, did not make too many comments this time, but left a meaningful salute and smoking emoji.
From cars to AI, Apple needs to quickly make up for the time window they missed last year and this year - especially when OpenAI brought ChatGPT and Sora to blow up the large models twice, and Google and Amazon also followed up with their strongest Gemini and Olympus large models.
In addition, every major technology company in Silicon Valley has a multi-line layout, and almost every famous AI start-up has a large company standing behind it.
In the new wave of AI craze, Apple has lagged behind for a long time and is desperately catching up.
According to previous reports, Apple has deployed three Apple executives as the initiators of Apple's new artificial intelligence project, giving them high control over the project budget. These three have at their disposal up to $1 billion a year in project spending. It is worth noting that one of the three executives was the person who previously took over as the head of Apple Auto.
Cook has rarely spoken about Apple's work in cars and artificial intelligence in the past, but on a rare occasion, in 2017, Cook described Apple's self-driving as "the mother of all AI projects and the toughest challenge."
Subsequently, Apple's key point is how to integrate the past artificial intelligence achievements in the field of autonomous driving as much as possible to find a better landing caliber of AI - whether it should be on the Vision Pro spatial computing device on which they have high hopes or on the mobile phone.
What is clear is that the move to AI is not a bad decision. Vision Pro will not be able to carry Apple's revenue banner for a long time in the future, and compared with the automotive business, artificial intelligence is more profitable and has a clearer direction, and Apple also has its own hardware ecosystem advantages.
Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, made a deduction about Apple's broken wrist:
If TOC's artificial intelligence is made, Apple will become a $10 trillion company; If AI loses, Apple will become a $1 trillion company. And artificial intelligence will become the top-level entrance to all devices, services, applications, and transactions, and Apple's battle.
If the car is made and successful, Apple will increase its market value by $2 trillion, but the necessary condition for the success of the car is still artificial intelligence. The electrification of cars is the first half, and artificial intelligence is the final.
From this point of view, Apple's determination to break its wrist this time is not too late.
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