Author |Edited by Lu Shiming|Gale.
Recently, according to a number of ** reports,Apple has canceled its electric vehicle program and shifted its team to generative artificial intelligence, and the company is winding out a decade-long program to explore electric vehicles.
Apple's internal disclosure of the news came as a surprise to the nearly 2,000 employees involved in the car's project. It is understood that the decision was made jointly by Jeff Williams, chief operating officer, and Kevin Lynch, vice president in charge of the work.
The two executives told employees that the project will begin to phase out and that many of the employees on the team responsible for the car will be transferred to the artificial intelligence department led by executive John Giannandrea, who will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly critical priority for Apple.
Since announcing the car in 2014, Apple's hard work over the past decade has been in vain. The market competition is fierce, and it is difficult to ensure profitability due to its own indecisiveness. These are the answers that led to this result. Judging from the progress of the project and the current state of the market, Apple's decision is undoubtedly wise.
Instead of spending a lot of manpower and financial resources on a project that does not see the future, it is better to let go of the obsession in your heart and shift your eyes to the areas that you are better at and the market needs more.
But after switching to AI, will Apple be able to achieve first-mover first-come, with years of technology accumulation? Will you be able to continue your success? See.
Apple's abandonment of building cars is undoubtedly the best news for the automotive industry.
Either because the competitors felt relaxed after withdrawing from the track, or because they felt sorry for it, after fermentation, many rim bosses expressed their opinions.
Musk is the first car circle boss to "rub" the hot spot, but his opinion is extremely subtle, just tweeting a tribute emoji and a cigarette emoji.
Many netizens believe that these two expressions represent Musk's playful and mocking attitude towards Apple's abandonment of the car-building plan. The reason is that Musk said that he would give Tesla** to Apple, but Apple refused to buy Tesla.
The next day, Musk tweeted another analyst.
Adam Jonas, an analyst at Da Mo, wrote in a note: "It's all about the data: in our opinion, the Apple Car can't be a surprise ......This is a highly specialized computer vision robotics edge AI problem that must be tested and iterated upon by vehicles collecting visual data on hundreds of billions of miles of public roads.
After the news of Apple's announcement to stop making cars came back to China, Li Xiang, CEO of Li Auto, also expressed his views and output a lot of views.
Li Xiang believes that Apple's decision to give up building cars and focus on artificial intelligence is an absolutely correct strategic choice, and the timing is also appropriate. In Li Xiang's view, if Apple makes TOC's artificial intelligence, it will become a $10 trillion company, and if it loses, it will become a $1 trillion company.
"Artificial intelligence will become the top-level entrance to all devices, services, applications, and transactions, and Apple's battle. ”
Regarding the connection between cars and artificial intelligence, Li Xiang said: "After making a car and achieving great success, Apple will increase its market value by 2 trillion US dollars, but the necessary condition for the success of cars is still artificial intelligence." The electrification of cars is the first half, and artificial intelligence is the final. ”
Li Xiang said that the artificial intelligence extended by mobile phones is bits, and the artificial intelligence of cars is atoms, and artificial intelligence spans the digital world and the physical world. "There are three necessary conditions for the success of artificial intelligence: talent, data, and computing power. ”
After Li Xiang, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun also posted on Weibo and "wittily" gave a wave of advertisements to Xiaomi cars.
Lei Jun said: "I was very shocked when I saw this news! Xiaomi's strategy is "the whole ecology of people, cars and homes", we are well aware of the difficulty of building cars, and we still made an extremely firm strategic choice 3 years ago, and seriously built a good car for rice noodles! ”
In addition to the above, there are also many industry bigwigs who have also spoken out one after another, although everyone's opinions are mixed, but they generally feel sorry for Apple.
The light of science and technology, after ten years and a cost of tens of billions, came to an abrupt end. Apple's abandonment of car building is indeed shocking and regrettable.
In 2014, Project Titan was founded, and Apple planned to build an industry-changing car from scratch, just like the iPhone and iMac did.
The first director of the Apple Car project was then Apple's vice president, Steve Zadesky. During the tenure of Steve Zadesky,Spent a lot of money to poach a lot of talent from Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and other large companies, and formed a team of thousands of people.
However, in 2016, Steve Zadesky was abruptly removed from Apple for personal reasons. According to a report by Wall Street at the time, Steve Zadesky's departure put even more pressure on the Titan team, which has been faced with unattainable goals and no clear goals.
In July of the same year, Apple persuaded Bob Mansfield, a retired senior head of hardware engineering, to return and take over the Titan project.
After Bob Mansfield took over, the Apple Car project had a clear goal"Priority is given to the development of software for self-driving cars."
By 2017, Apple had obtained a license to test self-driving cars in California, and Apple's Lexus-based self-driving test vehicles were also appearing on Silicon Valley roads.
But the good times did not last long, and two years later, the Apple Car project "changed hands" again.
In 2018, Doug Field, Apple's former vice president of Mac hardware engineering, was rehired back to Apple after five years at Tesla to lead the Titan program. After Doug Field took over, the goal of the Titan Project shifted from "prioritizing the development of software for autonomous vehicles" to "complete vehicle design".
In September 2021, Doug Field abruptly announced his departure, and the Apple car project once again ushered in a new leader, with Kevin Lync in charge of Apple Watch taking over.
Since taking office, Kevin Lync has made it clear that he wants the car project to have a clearer and more urgent goal, including the launch of fully autonomous vehicles as early as 2025.
However, in March 2022, there was "bad news" about Apple's car-making project. Some analysts said that month, Apple's Apple Car team had been disbanded for some time. In December of the same year, it was reported that Apple had postponed the launch of its electric car by about a year, to 2026, and abandoned the L5 full self-driving route.
Until January this year, the Apple car project announced that it would lower its target to "L2+ level autonomous driving, launched in 2028". In this regard, Bloomberg reported that Apple's car-making project has reached a critical point of success or failure. Who would have thought that just a month later, Apple announced that it would abandon car building.
Looking back at Apple's history of car manufacturing, there are constant changes in managers, multiple rounds of layoffs, and continuous adjustment and postponement of strategies. This state of "vacillation" and "constant turmoil" seems to have long determined the failure of the "Apple Car".
Ten years of persistence, billions of dollars, and so it came to naught. It can be believed that Apple made this "right" decision for good reason.
In fact, it is not difficult for Apple to build a car, Xiaomi can achieve self-production and self-development within three years, not to mention Apple, which is wealthy, famous, and technologically advanced? The real challenge is how Apple can produce a groundbreaking product with its technological capabilities.
If Apple's cars are not epoch-making and need to be positioned at the high-end, they will not be very competitive in the face of luxury brands such as Porsche and BBA, and thus it will not be possible to occupy a huge market share and obtain higher profits.
Apple had also envisioned pricing the Apple car at $100,000, but executives were concerned about whether the ** would provide the high profit margins they were accustomed to, and that such a pricing strategy would undermine the consistently high profit margins on Apple products, especially as the car market becomes increasingly competitive.
Judging by the results so far, Apple is likely to have encountered insurmountable obstacles in some key technologies, or believes that its own technology is not enough to form a competitive advantage in the market.
Taking a step back, even if Apple has a certain breakthrough in unmanned driving technology, it must be on the basis of large-scale use before it can be commercialized. However, the reality is that the current global autonomous driving technology is not mature, and the infrastructure and policies and regulations are far from mature, and it will take a long time for players to achieve high profitability through this.
For this kind of money-burning game with no end and no way out, it is the core reason why Apple stopped the car project.
In contrast, it is undoubtedly a wiser choice to turn to AI projects that are hotter, more profitable, and more in line with the trend, and superimpose their own advantages such as talent, data, and computing power.
In fact, Apple's shareholders have also been pressuring Apple to come up with an AI plan.
According to the Financial Times, Apple's two major shareholders have put pressure on Apple's top management to disclose its plans in the AI field and demand greater transparency.
In response to shareholder pressure for Apple to disclose its AI initiatives, Apple said the required reporting was too broad and could include strategic plans and initiatives that could be detrimental to our competitive position.
However, compared with technology companies such as Nvidia, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, it is widely believed that Apple's layout in the field of artificial intelligence is relatively backward.
With years of accumulation, whether Apple can make greater technological breakthroughs in the field of AI and bring revolutionary products to mankind again may become a key part of Apple's future fate.