Apple, the elephant turned around

Visual China.

Text |Digital Force Field, Author |She Zongming.

In January 2013, "The Grandmaster" was officially released. After its release, many fans jokingly called "The Grandmaster" "The Missing Generation". There is no other reason, I have been waiting for Mrs. too long.

Now it seems that what is more suitable for the title of "Missing Generation" than "The Grandmaster" is Apple's car-building project (i.e., Project Titan).

Although "The Grandmaster" has been "missing" for a long time, it has come out after a long time, and the Apple Titan Project has been launched for 10 years, but it has repeated the fate of the Titanic - hitting the iceberg.

In the past two days, Apple's internal announcement of the termination of the Titan program has become a hot topic in the technology circle. It is understood that some employees of the car-making team will be transferred to Apple's artificial intelligence (AI) department and invested in generative AI research and development.

Between learning Tesla and Huawei, Apple chose to learn OpenAI, which is embarrassing. It is estimated that Lei Jun is indispensable in the sighing crowd. After Apple's retreat from the car-making track, Xiaomi became a "lone brave": said that you would be together to the end, but you secretly smeared oil on the soles of your feet?

From the perspective of short-term stop loss, perhaps as Duan Yongping commented on OPPO's termination of Zeku's self-developed chip business, "Correct mistakes as soon as possible, no matter how big the price is, the minimum price."

From the perspective of strategic focus, this move may pave the way for the focus to shift to AI - Li Xiang said that at the strategic level, if the new business can focus on one, it will never do two (cars and AI), "Evergrande, LeEco and other strategic farces will not happen on Apple".

But if you look at today's Apple with the Apple of more than ten years ago, it is difficult not to sigh for Apple's position change.

In the past ten years, Apple, which has opened the curtain of mobile Internet with the iPhone, is a well-deserved leader in the global technology industry.

Building a car was once Apple's most ambitious project, carrying Apple's high hopes of "rebuilding an iPhone". You know, Apple didn't want to do another Tesla and Tesla PK from the beginning, but wanted to gain a position advantage in the automotive field by "redefining the car". At this time, Apple has not given up on the "leader obsession".

But now, Apple, whose market value has been pressed by Microsoft, which has bet on "AI + cloud computing", seems to be a little chaotic in terms of rhythm: in the past few years, when the metaverse was in full swing, Apple used AR as an incision to point the metaverse technology tree, and finally launched the Vision Pro headset, but found that the tide of the times swept through the ferry of the metaverse and came directly to the port of AI.

Apple then became a follower – catching up in the direction led by OpenAI.

From a leader to a chaser, it can be said that Apple is "killing" the apple of yesteryear.

Apple is not Xiaomi.

Xiaomi made a car, and it didn't enter the game until March 2021, and the target was Tesla, which looked like "Misjie". Lei Jun regards it as "the last major entrepreneurial project in his life".

At present, Lei Jun no longer has the trouble that Xiaomi cars can't make, what he worries about is how much is appropriate, "I'm afraid that the car won't sell well, and I'm afraid that it will sell too well (tight production capacity - wait for the car to wait - users will scold)" is just a derivative of the pricing problem.

Apple made a car, but it got up early in the morning, but it didn't catch up with the late set - Apple had launched the Titan project as early as 2014, earlier than Wei Xiaoli, the representative of China's new car-making force.

The question is: why has Wei Xiaoli's car been mass-produced a long time ago, and even the Xiaomi Su7 has started the countdown to enter the market, but the Apple Car is difficult to deliver? Could it be that Apple's skills are not as good as others?

Of course not. The direct reason: Apple built the car and chose a more difficult path from the beginning.

Apple made a car, not planning to follow the path that Tesla once walked, but anchored to almost "one step to the sky" and directly focus on high-level autonomous driving technology.

When the Titan program was launched in 2014, Apple's four elders were divided over what kind of car to build: Zadesky advocated building an electric car to compete with Tesla, while others believed that Apple should make a more difficult and imaginative fully self-driving car.

Apple eventually abandoned the gradual route and opted for a radical approach.

According to professional reports, Apple's research and development direction in autonomous driving is to directly adopt the highest level of L5, that is, full autonomous driving without people holding the steering wheel and stepping on the brake accelerator.

In July 2022, Apple's Apple Car design drawings were leaked: cancel the steering wheel + face-to-face seat + liftable large screen + Beetle-style curved roof ......

In July 2022, Apple's car design drawings were exposed.

It can be seen that in making cars, Apple wants to create a "car version of the iPhone" and blow up the audience with a subversive innovation.

This is closely related to Apple's prediction of smart cars.

Jonathan Ivey, Apple's former head of industrial design, said that autonomous driving will have the same impact on cars as multi-touch gestures (tapping, scrolling, and zooming with your finger) will have on iPhones, and that the future of Apple's cars will have to be like the changes that the iPhone has sparked in the smartphone industry.

Interestingly, Su Jing, the former soul of Huawei's autonomous driving, who resigned because of the "Tesla self-driving killing" argument, also said something similar: in the eyes of traditional car companies, the base of the car is the car, and then the computer is embedded in it, "Our views are different, the foundation is the computer, and the car is the peripheral controlled by the computer." A big computer got into trouble and hung up the car. ”

If Tesla's car-making route is an upgrade of the traditional car-making model, then Apple's focus is to use the continued upgrade to achieve a dimensionality reduction blow to Tesla.

But Apple's radical route has two sides: on the one hand, once it succeeds, it can indeed crush the car companies that are still struggling to climb from L2 to L3 in terms of autonomous driving, and gain a leading advantage; On the other hand, the technical complexity dictates that the difficulty of its implementation will increase exponentially. In other words, Apple is anchoring a super difficult target.

Based on reality, whether it is Apple's lidar route or Tesla's visual perception route, it is not possible to achieve full autonomous driving in the short term. Musk has been shouting about FSD (Full Self-Driving System) for many years, and he has repeatedly "bounced tickets", and it was not until August last year that the news of a small-scale trial came out.

Cui Guilin, an expert in the automotive industry, said that unlike the electrification industry situation where the leading design of the technical architecture is basically clear and the market has reached the inflection point of take-off, the leading design of the intelligent driving technology route has not yet settled (such as the overall scheme is a single-vehicle autonomous driving AD, or a vehicle-road cooperative autonomous driving VICAD), and the era of practical large-scale networking is far from coming (no matter how many people are called, people are illegal when they leave the steering wheel), and there are still too many uncertainties in the automotive industry.

Because of this, Apple makes cars, often in a state of "a generation is missing".

Huawei, which says that it "doesn't build cars", has long relied on "curves to build cars" to pick fruits in the auto market; Apple, which has been building cars since 2014, is still "building" but not "cars", and it is 108,000 miles away from replicating the iPhone experience on the car track.

It can't be said that Apple didn't build a car and got nothing. In the past 10 years, Apple has applied for thousands of patents, whether it is electric motors, suspension systems, vehicle navigation, or autonomous driving, on-board hardware, voice recognition, etc., all of which can reflect its technical capabilities.

But this is hard to match its investment: in 2020 alone, Apple reportedly announced that it would spend $19 billion in car research and development in a year. According to professional estimates, as of 2022, Apple has invested about $30 billion in the automotive field.

put on a posture of being a scholar, but he couldn't hand in the roll for a long time, so there are always dense dark clouds over the head of the Apple Titan plan: "Apple has made cars in the past few years: changes, chaos and difficult births" "Apple has not seen a car for n years: several difficult births, Cook is cold, personnel turmoil, when will the car dream come true?" ”…

It's worth noting that, unlike Jobs's ambitions for automotive projects, Cook was more distant from the Titan project, rarely visiting the car-building project office near California's Silicon Valley, let alone making a clear strategic plan for it. What followed was Apple's vacillation in building cars: the Titan project was exposed to dystocia and stagnation several times.

It is not difficult to understand that Cook did not make cars in the case that the iPhone supported Apple's performance fundamentals, and the car building did not see the end of burning money and the inflection point of profitability.

But reality has repeatedly shown that no company can build a car well on the premise that the No. 1 position does not regard car manufacturing as the "number one project".

In January this year, world-renowned technology journalist Mark Gurman broke the news that Apple's Titan plan is undergoing major changes: the original plan to launch an electric vehicle with L4 (highly automated driving) function has now shifted to more practical L2+ autonomous driving technology, and the release time has been postponed from 2026 to 2028 or later.

Downgrading the level of autonomous driving from L4 to L2+ shows that Apple has let go of its "last stubbornness" and bowed to reality.

Considering that the new energy electric vehicle market that can reach the "L2+" level has been rolled into a red sea, what fruit can be picked from the Apple car that can only be unveiled in a few years?

In addition, the global sales of new energy vehicles have bid farewell to the rapid growth trend: data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers shows that in the Chinese market, the year-on-year growth rate of China's new energy vehicle sales has increased from 93 in 20224% to 37 in 20239%；According to UBS**, the growth rate of electric vehicle sales in the United States will slow to 11% this year from 47% in 2023.

The advent of ChatGPT and Sora has detonated generative AI, and at this time, it is reasonable for Apple to abandon the car project.

In "Let the Bullets Fly", Zhang Mazi said to Huang Shilang: You are important to me, and you are important to me without you.

The Apple Car isn't important to many car companies, but it's important to car companies without the Apple Car — who can underestimate Apple's brand appeal?

After Apple terminated its car-building project, potential competitors should have breathed a sigh of relief.

On the X platform, electric vehicle analyst Sawyer Merrrett commented: "Apple spent 10 years trying to build electric cars with $162 billion in cash reserves, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was too difficult and too small a profit – even if it was priced at $100,000." Initially Apple wanted it to be a fully self-driving car, but they didn't have a fleet, no real-world data, and no experience to make it happen. There are only two major automakers in the United States that have not gone bankrupt: Tesla and Ford. ”

Musk responded: The natural state of car companies is death. Jia Yueting, who heard that Gaohe Automobile was a "shame in the industry", was shocked.

Li Xiang, He Xiaopeng, Lei Jun and others all expressed their views on Apple's termination of car manufacturing.

Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, said in an article that Apple's decision to give up building cars and choose to focus on artificial intelligence is an absolutely correct strategic choice, and the timing is also appropriate. Artificial intelligence will become the top entrance to all devices, services, applications, and transactions, and become Apple's battle, "The electrification of cars is the first half, and artificial intelligence is the final." ”

Apple's retreat has a different impact on the automotive industry, but for Apple itself, it is an important signal that Apple in the Cook era has lost its leading edge in the strategic swing.

In the past many years, every time a new iPhone is released, many reviewers have lamented that Apple is going downhill. The reason is that Apple only has small innovations and toothpaste-like improvements in the details, but there is no big breakthrough.

pushed the bangs screen, and was complained about being ugly; Pushing the Dynamic Island, it was questioned that "it is all leftover from Honor mobile phones" ......Netizen P picture satirizes the iPhone rear camera to dissuade people with dense phobia, which goes viral on the Internet from time to time.

It's just that Apple can always use the soaring market value to slap the argument that "Apple has become mediocre" to achieve self-esteem.

However, this is not so much that Apple in the Cook era has become better than Apple in the Jobs era, but that Apple is still the king of the mobile Internet era - as the initiator of the paradigm revolution, Apple has enjoyed the biggest dividends in the development of the mobile Internet.

Now, the cycle has changed. It is difficult for Apple to use the market value growth momentum of the mobile Internet era to cover up the gradual mediocrity in the AI era.

In the past two years, under the wave of AI, Apple seems to be a little late-sighted, dwarfed by Microsoft and Google.

Cook didn't want to be Jobs, he originally wanted to shift the advantages of "software and hardware integration" from the iPhone to new energy electric vehicles and AR glasses, but the former has undoubtedly suffered setbacks, and the latter seems to have been cold.

Looking outside, the times have locked the "ticket to the next era" on generative AI, and ChatGPT has become the creator of the new "iPhone moment" with Sora instead of Vision Pro.

It is also due to this, since the beginning of 2024, Apple's market value has stagnated, and it has become the world's No. 1 market capitalization1 The company is Microsoft, and behind it is Nvidia.

After all, Apple, which dominates the mobile Internet, is only the old king of the last era, and Microsoft and Nvidia, which are stuck in the AI large model and AI computing power, have reached the new king of the AI era.

To some extent, Apple itself, which is obtuse to AI, has killed its own imagination of the future. The abortion of the Titan project is nothing more than a landmark event in which Apple lost its ability to lead.

Now, the elephant is turning.

In the near future, it is very likely that Apple will be left farther behind by Microsoft and caught up by Nvidia.

At the beginning of this year, the period drama "Flowers" directed by Wong Kar-wai became popular. It can explode, in the final analysis, because people will "look at the past from the present": the era of opportunities everywhere is over.

Apple has had its share of flowers, but the times are shifting to a new chapter.