“Driving an automobile is not natural,” Neil Cybart writes for Above Avalon. “We need to teach ourselves the art of navigating a heavy machine, composed of thousand of little parts, through the world. Is the driving learning experience focused on suppressing intuition in order to adapt to a machine that hasn’t changed much in decades? Is it possible to make an automobile more intuitive that someone with no driving experience can hop in and get to where they want to go in a much more enjoyable way than what exists today?”
“By entering the automobile industry, Apple would be rethinking what an automobile should and shouldn’t be in today’s society, moving past the ideas that we have been relying on for decades, which now represent barriers to making the automobile more natural and easy to use,” Cybart writes. “Apple doesn’t appear to be following any rules as it takes its product-focus mantra into industries ready to be disrupted by a new experience created from combining software innovation with revolutionary hardware capabilities and design. Apple wants to rethink the automobile.”
“While there continues to be an ongoing debate whether autonomous vehicles will be a reality or not within the next 10-15 years, the much bigger focus should be that the automobile represents a device (albeit a big device) in our lives that in one way or another will be involved in society for a very long time. The auto industry is in a natural position for technology to play a much bigger role in going forward. Why let automakers with little to no technological experience continue to make suboptimal products?” Cybart writes. “Using a structure and mission statement created over the past 15 years, Apple is focused on creating a product worthy of an Apple logo. Only then will the real adventure begin as the automobile is still in the beginning stages of its long journey. Apple’s ambition knows no bounds.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote earlier today:
A Mac is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An iPod is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An iPhone is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An iPad is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An Apple Watch is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An Apple Car would be custom hardware packed with custom software that does X.
Related articles:
Rethinking the Apple Car. Rethinking Apple. – February 18, 2015
Forget the rumor: Apple will never build cars – February 17, 2015
The real battle Apple is waging in autos – February 17, 2015
O’Leary: Yes, give me the Apple car – February 17, 2015
Will Apple become a car maker or a platform/content aggregator? – February 17, 2015
An Apple Car is exactly what investors want – February 17, 2015
Apple’s electric car dreams may bring auto industry nightmares – February 17, 2015
Jean-Louis Gassée: The fantastic Apple Car is a fantasy – February 16, 2015
Apple is already positioned to be a car company in many ways – February 16, 2015
Why Tim Cook would want to build an Apple Car – February 14, 2015
Apple working on self-driving electric car, source says – February 14, 2015
Apple’s project ‘Titan’ gears up to challenge Tesla in electric cars – February 13, 2015
Apple’s next big thing: The Apple Car? – February 13, 2015
Apple hiring auto engineers and designers – February 13, 2015
The sooner we can get to the reality of the visualization in the video link below, the better – though it may take 50 years, I hope it is Apple that gets us there and not GM of Google (or Ford /w MSFT)!
BTW, the video drags a bit at first at gets good around 2 mins in…
Where I live, these very lovely prototypes would be blown off the road and would have not-a-chance of making it up the hill where I live. Very lovely! Very impractical except in an idealized city where the roads are never slick, there’s never any snow, and the wind speed never gets above 5 Km per hour. IOW: These are fashion catwalk cars.
Apple is building a car. Apple is buying Tesla. Excuse me but….
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH! OS X Yosemite calendar server just crashed on me, data is lost, and I’m backing it out to Mavericks which I felt was unreliable.
There are things I need from Apple right now, much more than a car.
Things Apple should reinvent:
– Desks. Desks should curve around us not be rectangular, they should have smart touch surfaces and super-wide curved screens to match, and allow work to be really spread out. Apple Cinema Display Pro + Touch Desk.
– TV. Give us 1000 reasons to use a big shared-viewing screen at home and at work that have nothing to do with traditional passive TV watching. Room wide FaceTime. Real gaming. Shared control of photo viewing, map searching, etc. AppleTV version of Continuity and Handoff. Don’t just reinvent TV, reinvent AppleTV.
– Real Doll. Seriously, this product isn’t 21st century at all.
Each of these dumb devices desperately needs to be reinvented with smart software.
They also all reduce the need for cars.
YES! I paid Apple for what it was when I bought the products and not for what else they COULD be making.
Perhaps the car, the only thing left for the blind to conquer, will finally be ours from Apple.
Sent from my iPhone
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If “driving an automobile is not natural,” try a motorcycle. In a car, pressing a pedal to accelerate makes some sense, because you aren’t using that foot for anything else. On a motorcycle, the throttle is on the handle, where you are also using your hands to steer and brake.
Maybe Apple should first create a motorcycle-class one-passenger vehicle.
Beleaguered DMV 😉 All your transportation administrative needs thru iTunes and Apple Pay. Driver’s Licenses optional.
Now we’re going to start seeing articles about how Apple could do away with the steering wheel and go to a touch screen, blah blah blah. The fact is so much of what must be in a car, like a steering wheel, is dictated by law/regulation that you can’t avoid it no matter how much better your design is.
Plus, we really don’t want people picking up their new Car at the Store and trying to figure out how to drive it in the parking lot. It’s not like Apple is really good about providing instruction manuals . . . .
Just a couple things in the tip of a very large iceberg that the Apple car could do:
In an Apple car you could use your feet to steer as well and accelerate and decelerate, which would be a natural of what your feet do now. This would free up arms to communicate intent such as activating a turn signal, to select destinations, or to reroute around a traffic accident.
Apple cars could communicate with each other through a common wireless standard. Speed, acceleration, deceleration, distance to next turn, and unique characteristics such as mass (weight) including the auto, cargo and passengers, could be broadcast to all nearby vehicles, which would allow them to calculate the safest speed at any given moment.
It will make sense for Apple to make a car after we have reordered our society.
Until then… won’t happen and if it did, it would be a bad idea.
The vaporous Car rumor mongering knows no bounds. Hopefully the disease will have burned out by next week. I can dream. *yawn*