Text: Cheng Cheng Editor: Xiao XiaoDou
The Apple auto team is "disbanded" again!
Apple, which was supposed to produce apple cars in 2025, simply chose to give up.
According to industry analysts, in view of the impact of the current global epidemic, as well as a series of uncertainties such as chip shortage and geopolitical tensions, even if the Apple auto team is not disbanded, the production time of its new cars will be postponed to after 2025.
In fact, this is not the first time Apple has "disbanded" the team.
Unlike other new car-making forces that have always liked to create momentum, render, and even "draw big cakes", Apple car-making has always been in a "quiet" state. Although news of his car construction spread in the car circles from time to time, almost no one can say the specifics.
At the same time, Apple is often silent about the construction of cars, and many messages are from "well-informed people", such as the "dissolution" of Apple's car team this time, which comes from "a certain industry insider" post on Twitter.
And this well-informed person is Guo Mingxi!
According to public information, Guo Mingji has been engaged in electronics industry and securities investment analysis at DigiTimes, Kanghe and KGI KGI Securities, and is good at providing customers with complete supply chain thinking, horizontal and vertical industry context and several global market portfolio strategies.
It is worth mentioning that Guo Mingxi is particularly known for analyzing the "fruit chain", which is said to have correctly predicted multiple generations of products from the earliest iPhone 5, and his repeated revelations of information have been later confirmed to be completely correct. With such strength, his words are naturally a thousand pounds.
After talking about Guo Mingxi, let's talk about Apple Cars.
In fact, Apple's car project has undergone N restarts. In 2014, the Titan Project announced what was recognized as the beginning of Apple's car building. At that time, Apple, which had a lot of money, recruited high-end talents from Chrysler, Ford, Tesla and other car companies, and formed a car-making team with more than 1,000 people.
However, the story did not go as Apple expected.
In 2016, due to the dispute between autonomous driving and semi-autonomous driving routes, Apple's automotive team opened the first round of "cleaning", which also led to the departure of Steve Zadesky, Apple's vice president of product design. Soon after, former Apple executive Bob Mansfield took over and restarted Apple's car project and set the direction to specialize in autonomous driving.
In January 2019, Apple's auto project was exposed to layoffs, and Bob Mansfield also left in 2020. At the end of 2020, John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy at Apple Auto, succeeded Bob Mansfield in assembling a team again to implement the Apple car project.
By 2021, the team assembled by John Giannandrea was once again "disbanded". There are reports that as of June 2021, there are fewer than 12 senior executives in Apple's self-driving car team.
From this point of view, although Apple Auto has been in the project for 8 years, it has never been able to "end from one", but is constantly disbanding and restarting.
Including Apple CEO Tim Cook also said that "Apple is keen on the integration of hardware, software and services", which shows that the direction of Apple's car research and development has undergone important adjustments, and perhaps the Apple Car we originally expected could not land in the end.
Perhaps, Apple Cars may transform into a supplier of intelligent hardware and software systems for car companies, just like Huawei in China.