A few hours after Bloomberg News reported that Apple had pulled the plug on its “Apple Car,” an electric vehicle project, Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded on his X social media platform with two simple emoji:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 27, 2024
The first one was the salute emoji, indicating that Musk is attempting to commend Apple for getting into this category or paying his respects to the technology giant’s now-canceled project.
The second emoji is a cigarette, which was likely being used to describe that Musk can take a breather now that Apple is no longer working on ‘Project Titan,’ or that he knew all along that it takes more than the trillion-dollar valuation of a company to make a self-driving vehicle that is completely electric.
MacDailyNews Take: With the demise of the Apple Car, Tim Cook is now virtually assured of going out not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Again, the writing has been on the wall for electric vehicles for some time now. Even Tim Cook’s Apple can now finally read it.
What we have here is a company that was once led by a visionary who set the agenda for entire industries, now led by a reactive caretaker who heard somewhere that VR headsets and electric cars were the next big things (probably read it in Wired), so that’s what he had Apple do, while completely missing artificial intelligence, especially generative AI, and now is scrambling to catch up to something Steve Jobs would have focused on long before anyone ever even heard of OpenAI.
See also: Elon Musk says had once reached out to Apple for acquiring Tesla – December 23, 2020
Steve Jobs bought Siri in April 2010. Steve Jobs would never have ignored Siri, basically let it rot, for well over a decade and counting. Steve Jobs would have made Siri the first conversational generative AI assistant years before anyone else. And the company would today be worth at least a trillion dollars more than it is currently. (Yes, we’re lowballing that estimate.)
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
See also:
• Apple said to be spending ‘millions of dollars a day’ on generative AI to supercharge Siri – September 7, 2023
• Apple’s Siri turns ten, still acts like a two-year-old – October 4, 2021
• Former Apple employees reflect on Siri’s ‘squandered lead’ over Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant – March 14, 2018
Clearly, Apple is not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs, but the company — thanks to Jobs’ work and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure (Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro were also both conceived under Jobs) — now has more than enough money to make up for Cook’s lack of vision.
Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
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well this proves they don’t have a blunt emoji….
I’d like to say the sooner Cook departs the better. But what happens if he gets someone who’ll push his social agenda rather than a visionary products guy? Yikes 😳
Really? I would bet that there are very few who could lead Apple better than Cook. He may not be Steve Jobs, but he is by no means running the company to the ground.
Visionaries like Steve Jobs are few and far between. Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook. The company has done well since Steve Jobs passed. What more are you asking for? – because unfortunately, we are unlikely to find another Steve Jobs.
Who is this visionary that you have in mind to replace Tim Cook?
Well, open your eyes and mind and think critically.
Very few maybe, but Apple needs ONLY ONE and that man is Elon Musk!!!
He already bested Cook at cars with Apple market cap over five times that of Tesla and established the gold standard.
Cook is still selling iPhones and nursing profits and if you’re honest all the pipeline products released under his Watch (pun intended) were either envisioned or worked on by Jobs. The rest of the new releases HomePod, Goggles, AI and others are Apple me-too products entering the market late and behind. That is the legacy of Tim Cook.
Elon Musk for Apple CEO!…
The Apple I and the Apple ][ were NOT first mover products. They were just better than you could get from others when they were introduced.
The Mac was not a first mover product (others had done windowing before the Mac) but the Mac was a more consistently better version than anything else in 1984. (And, in 2024 dollars that original Mac with an Apple dot matrix printer would total well over $7,000! with the Lisa costing about $30,000 in today’s dollars.)
The iMac was not a first mover product, again, it was just better than all the other computers at being a user friendly Internet connected computer.
The MacBook was not a first mover product, but it was better.
The iPod was not a first mover product, but it was better.
The iPhone was not a first mover product, but it was better.
The list goes on.
It could be argued that the HomePod is not really better, though some might argue that it is.
The Apple Watch, while not a first mover is better than the competition.
The VisionPro headset while not a first mover, IS better than the competition — no mater what that Meta leader says.
Apple has been doing ML, difference engines, large language models, and other types of inference software for quite some time. They just had not previously jumped onto the ficticious marketing term of AI.
There is no AI right now. There just is not. No system has crossed the Singularity. AI is 100% a current fad marketing term. NO ONE is shipping true AI today. NO ONE will be shipping true AI within the next year or two.
I actually applauded Apple for using the right terms during its 2023 WWDC broadcasts. HOWEVER, the market expected Apple to use the bogus “AI” term. Apple got beat up by all the media and trade rags and trade websites — and by the stock market just because they did not proclaim in 2023 that they were doing AI and because they did not have an AI product (with that term included) ready to ship.
Now Apple is using that term. It does not matter that Apple has been doing rudimentary versions of what people are now calling AI for over a decade. Apple is perceived by the media and Wall Street as just now starting to pursue AI.
Yes, Apple is behind on large language models. Apple is behind on machine learning. The list goes on. But Apple has more than a decade of experience in these things that people are now calling AI. Apple just needs to bring the proper talent to bear to get to the forefront like it has been over the past nearly 50 years to be the leader once again.
It’s worth remembering…SJ didn’t have an exemplary record for picking leaders.
I heard the real reason for the cancellation of the Apple car was the federal government’s requirement to install Windows. 😉😉
Best reply
Car Play and whatever AI, Apple can extract from this failed project may be the only tangible benefits we’ll ever see from project Titan.
I wish Apple would invest in or purchase EV maker, Canoo. A ready made vehicle platform running Car Play as a full instrumentation UI, seems like a match made in heaven.
Musk’s emoji’s meant “Bye,bye suckers…”
Waste an incredible waste of billions. Cook should resign is disgrace
I don’t think so.
The first emoji is a salute, honoring a competitor in the same space that went defunct.
The second emoji is a smoking cigarette that signals, Musk can relax and take a break… HE WON!
Who in the World (ever) truly thought EVs were the vehicle to save us from the energy challenges? On the surface = appeared “clean.” True reality = dirty energy sourced, expensive and strategically compromising (China prime source minerals). It appears EVs have been a solid example of believe in it with earnestness (and subsides) and it will become true. So much ku-ku-ness related.
Hold on to your butts. Apple could buy Rivian or others for the change in their sofa cushions.
I have to agree with MDN with regards to Tim Cook letting Siri rot on the vine for a decade. But I think MDN is wrong in its assessment that had Steve been at the helm, the company would now be worth a trillion more. One may doubt Tim Cook’s vision, but there’s no doubt that he’s a better manager – of a large company – than the quite-abrasive Steve Jobs would have been. So, if Steve hadn’t gotten sick and hadn’t died and stayed as CEO, Tim Cook would have eventually left to become CEO somewhere else. Without Tim Cook’s operational prowess, there is no doubt that those countless cycles of iPhone releases would not have gone as smoothly and Apple would have never sold as many widgets as it has under Tim Cook. I highly doubt it would be the $3t company it is today if Steve Jobs was in control the whole time.
How did you determine there was “no doubt” that Tim Cook was a better manager of a large company than Steve Jobs was, FFS?
I don’t think history was your guide on that.
Jobs was a visionary driving innovation…Cook merely a manager.
The magic is gone….
I thought that was some French guy with a beret sitting at an outdoor cafe having a cigarette.
The big mistake was not to invest in Tesla (or buy it) when they had the opportunity. In fact, it was almost criminal considering that Tesla was losing a lot of money at the time and its survival was threatened.
Ending a project that’s going nowhere is not a mistake.
Craig Federicci.
EV are on the rise and will be the future.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57253947
EVs are overhyped!