Elon Musk responds to canceled Apple Car with two emoji
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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