Apple pulls the plug on its electric car, killing decade-long effort

Apple is abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company, pulling the plug a decade-long effort to build an electric car, Bloomberg News reports citing “people with knowledge of the matter.”

Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
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Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public. The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people.

The two executives told staffers that the project will begin winding down and that many employees on the team working on the car — known as the Special Projects Group, or SPG — will be shifted to the artificial intelligence division under executive John Giannandrea. Those employees will focus on generative AI projects, an increasingly key priority for the company.

The Apple car team also has several hundred hardware engineers and car designers. It’s possible that they will be able to apply for jobs on other Apple teams. There will be layoffs, but it’s unclear how many.

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MacDailyNews Take: 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, now led by a reactive caretaker who heard somewhere that VR headsets and electric cars were the next big things, 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.

Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs

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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