For the last decade, many Apple employees working on the company’s secretive “Project Titan” electric vehicle project called it “The Titanic Disaster.” (We’d have gone with “Project Titanic.”) Amidst the layoffs, constant staffing and goal changes, and a general stench of failure permeating the effort, they knew the project was doomed to fail, The New York Times reported late last month. Now, Bloomberg Businessweek offers a behind-the-scenes look at how, for a decade or so, an indecisive Tim Cook blew $1 billion per year into a vehicle Apple never built.
Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett for Bloomberg Businessweek:
On Feb. 27, Apple told staff it was giving up on developing a car. That decision, while abrupt, was not a surprise. Over the past decade, the company toiled away on at least five different major designs, drove prototype self-driving systems for more than a million miles, hired engineers and designers only to lay them off, and weighed partnerships or acquisitions with Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and McLaren Automotive, among others. The car program cost, on average, roughly $1 billion annually (or nearly a fifth of Apple’s research and development budget a decade ago), with outside teams for chips, camera sensors, cloud services and software adding hundreds of millions of dollars more to the yearly spend.
But Apple never got close to realizing its original vision, or any of its subsequent ones. It didn’t get as far as testing a full-scale prototype on public roads. That it didn’t is partly thanks to the enormous technical difficulty of its self-driving goals, as well as the punishing economics of the automaking business. The project was also a failure, at the highest levels of the company, to settle on one thing and do it.
According to a longtime Apple executive who worked on the car, it was widely seen within the company as an ill-conceived product that needed to be put out of its misery. “The big arc was poor leadership that let the program linger, while everyone else in Apple was cringing,” they say. Asked what went wrong with the effort, a senior manager involved in the vehicle’s interior design replied: “What went right?”
[B]efore sketching out its own designs, Apple considered acquiring Tesla. At that point the electric-car maker’s success was far from assured, and its value was less than $30 billion, or a 20th of what it is today. Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of corporate development, held a series of meetings with Elon Musk. But Cook, who’d succeeded Jobs three years earlier, shut the deal down while negotiations were still at an early stage…
For [Doug] Field, [Bob] Mansfield and others on the team, Cook’s indecision was frustrating. “If Bob or Doug ever had a reasonable set of objectives, they could have shipped a car,” says someone who was deeply involved in the project. “They’d ask to take the next step, and Tim would frequently say, ‘Get me more data, and let me think about it.’”
[T]he indecision at the top of the company filtered down, sapping morale.
MacDailyNews Take: There’s tons more in the full article here.
Unfocused dysfunctional hubris is exactly what competent leadership avoids. – MacDailyNews, February 29, 2024
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.
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 — 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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Finally the world is getting that Cook is John Sculley 2.0. Just with a bigger iPhone bankroll. He was fine as a ‘transitional’ leader, but has overstayed his welcome.
Apple is now embarrassingly filled to the gills with loser bozos. Steve Jobs was FAMOUS for huge purges of bozos, after which each time, the company bloomed with huge creativity and productivity.
Apple needs to fire 90% of its work force as they are all loser bozos that stunt productivity. The stock market will love the cost savings and roar. More importantly, by nuking its loser DEI woke bozo workforce, Apple can get back to the business of delivering great technology and innovation.
Apple needs to dump Cook for a visionary leader. Elon Musk would be my first choice, but zero chance of that now because Cook blew it. But Craig Federighi is an ex-NeXT guy with deep tech chops, that went through fire with Steve at NeXT, and still joy for tech that would be my best pick for a replacement.
Apple needs a great chef, but all it has is a lousy cook.
The 10B should be repaid from Timmy’s pocket.
What an f’ing waste. But, in all those years at least we got more emojis with dildos and toilet plungers!
Personally, I never expected a car–becuase that just stupid on sooooo many levels–but I did expect Apple to create a self-driving ecosystem to sell to other manufacturers.
Apparently even that is not salvageable.
Thanks for caring more about DEI and social justice than Apple, Timmy!!
$10 billion over 10 years is less than a rounding error for Apple.
It’s a week’s profit each year.
How much of that tech ended up in the Apple Vision Pro?
How much of that tech is AI, ready to turn into other products?
How much of that tech let them create the next-gen CarPlay platform that will end up in almost every car brand’s lineup?
And one day, when truly autonomous cars are possible, how much will this work set them up to reinvent the automobile.
Yes, it was a drain on some of their best people, and yes the opportunity cost may have been high. But I’m glad they’re dreaming big like this, and I’m also glad they didn’t ship a product that wasn’t worthy of the Apple logo.
This was a small fraction of their R&D spending. What’s in the works from the rest of that budget??
Clueless Apple fanboy, how much of your post is out of touch? That would be about 99%. Nice try, but you can’t shine sh*t!!
Blowing 10 billion with nothing to show for it — FIRE COOK IMMEDIATELY!…
Close your mouth. Use your brain. If you think that every effort by every company produces a hit product, or ANY product, you need to quit your job at the grocery store because you’ve git what it takes!
Judgemental twat.
Tim took a shot at a big goal. It didn’t work out, but he never bet the company on it. He finally decided to shut it down and move on. There is no shame in that. That’s what you can do when you have a company with resources the size of Apple. I expect Apple to take chances. I don’t expect Apple to hit a home run every time. It’s shame it didn’t work out, and I was looking forward to one day driving around in an Apple car. But by putting the car idea behind them, Apple can now focus on the next big thing.
“ Apple can now focus on the next big thing”
Imagine if they did that 10 years and 10 billion dollars ago instead of wasting it on an incredibly stupid idea
Yes, I can imagine that. Had it worked out, it would have been the next big thing. Duh!
According to the article he didn’t take a shot at a big goal. They kinda-sorta were developing a car, pumping a billion a year into a project but without any gutsy decisions to set deadlines and deliver AT LEAST a driveable prototype. Pathetic.
The TCJA amended I.R.C. §174 such that, beginning in 2022, firms that invest in R&D are no longer able to currently deduct their R&D expenses. Rather, they must amortize their costs over five years, starting with the midpoint of the taxable year in which the expense is paid or incurred.
Thus, Apple spent nowhere near a billion. Seems like Apple pulled the plug at just the right time. Good management.
MDN – home of the clueless armchair CEO.
Tim Cook has the stench of stink. He’s damaged goods. Woke is no way to run a business. Start catering to your real customers instead of pretending they all come from the hood, and stop trying to fix the world for fudge sake.
I’ll feel a lot better about my stock once Cook leaves and I start seeing no more DEI hires running their product announcements.
Careful…your racism is showing…
Jdog, the only racism in Gary’s post is your stupidity. You are a fscking idiot
It’s important!
Jdog, you a delusional fucktwat
what does DEI mean?
How could Apple ever lose money on anything? With all those random loot boxes in games and those apps designed to get kids to spend money while they’re playing, it seems like they’d never be losing any cash. Just need more RNG.
I heard it was a billion dollars and one buck….
:-0
This was a smart move by Apple (to walk away): 1) They will never be #1 or #2 in this market (most likely Tesla and BYD). 2) Over the next 5 years there will be a surge in Telsa type cars . . . However, this will be followed by TAAS (Transportation as a Service), in which self driving ‘pod-like’ vehicles, run by fleet operators will take over the space — In 15 years, it will be ‘rare’ to own a personal car for must urban residents . . . . 3) In other words, for Apple there was no growth trajectory by creating a 4 passenger vehicle.
and what will power these…???
The idea is that these 1 person vehicles would be smaller in size, have a smaller battery (replaceable). Each vehicle would be 5 to 10K. Like Uber, you would hail a vehicle, it picks you up, and drops you at the park, for example. . . . Think of it this way, back in the 90s someone at Sony said, “We can’t make enough camcorders for every person on earth (think of the 8mm camcorders of that time) — and you know what, he was right — However, the tiny CMOS chip was created, which is used for 4K video in today’s phones . . . Translation: Rather than building 400 mile range 4 passenger cars (with huge batteries), the future will see TAAS with a lot of 1 person vehicles and self-driving delivery vehicles, with small replaceable batteries.
soooooo….what will power these??
First of all, it’s not a ton of money for Apple. They wanted to do a self-driving car and couldn’t figure out the tech. Move on. No one wants them to make a F’n Tesla.
Tim Cook, Steve’s worst mistake!
Its easy to criticise from the outside.
If you don’t risk there is no reward. I’m sure lessons learned will be put to good use.
PLEASE REPLACE TIM COOK AS CEO!