I don't know if you have found one thing: mobile phones in recent years are really highly homogeneous! Whether it is the appearance design, or the various parameter marketing selling points, it is crazy to roll inside...
Of course, the inner volume is obviously necessary! After all, if it is really a monopoly, it is certainly not a good thing for consumers. But the embarrassing thing is that this inner volume is getting worse and worse than I never expected... Slashing telephoto, IP67/68 waterproof and dustproof, experience regression, etc. This is also one of the important reasons why more and more consumers are reluctant to change mobile phones.
But in such a situation, we can't completely blame the mobile phone manufacturers for inaction. Because there are fewer and fewer points where mobile phones can innovate, they are basically close to the bottleneck of the category of mobile phones. In fact, many mobile phone manufacturers are aware of this problem: instead of forcibly engaging in various embarrassing marketing in the "Red Sea", it is better to carry out a "new track" in the "Blue Ocean" ~ such as the "Internet of Everything" of Huawei's Hongmeng system, Xiaomi's entry into the field of new energy vehicles and so on.
Of course, as the most profitable Apple, it has long targeted two "new tracks" - new energy vehicles, AR/VR ~ and according to the latest news, Apple's application for the "facial joint and head-mounted display" patent has been authorized! This means that Apple's AR/VR headset will soon be available.
However, compared with the promising AR/VR smart devices, Apple Cars can be said to be "ill-fated".
As another heavyweight product of Apple after the iPhone, Apple's car must become the top as soon as it is born. According to the latest news, Apple Cars "announced" an important black technology patent: vehicle summoning in the mobile ecosystem
To put it simply, Apple will build an ecosystem for its Apple Car in the future. In this autonomous control system, vehicle information and location information in the user's equipment are saved. Then the system will determine when the user needs the car according to this information and in combination with the custom function, so that the car will be "summoned" by the user at the appropriate location and time
Interestingly, the apple car patent was made by the friend Tesla as early as 3 years ago, although it is a "bloody version". Tesla calls it "Smart Summon", which is a vehicle assistance function ~ According to Tesla's official introduction, the intelligent summon function supports the vehicle to drive autonomously to avoid obstacles, and can reach the owner in front of the owner or the location specified by the owner. However, this feature has certain requirements for the venue and is limited to use in "private parking areas and driving lanes"...
Obviously, Tesla's "smart call" is not a black technology function, and the practicality is not high. It seems that for the "full blood version" of the summoning vehicle, it still depends on whether Apple can realize this patent and mass-produce it ~ In addition to vehicle summoning, Apple cars will also have a large number of black technology blessings. One of the most eye-catching is the fully autonomous driving system!
If you want the autonomous driving system to do well, in addition to software algorithms, hardware - lidar is also very important! With lidar, Apple cars can "observe" the surrounding road conditions and vehicles at all times, and generate detailed 3D map information to return to the chip. After its calculations, it can issue instructions and react to the automatic driving system ~ It can be said that Apple has begun to accumulate technology early in order to realize its desire for this automatic driving system.
The first is lidar, which Apple has used on its high-end iPhone and iPad Pro, mainly to improve the quality of imaging and build spatial models. Of course, Apple's more important purpose is to reduce the cost of lidar! According to supply chain news, Apple is negotiating with four lidar suppliers, and it is reported that the current automotive lidar has dropped from tens of thousands of dollars to less than a thousand dollars.
Second, in order to process the large and complex 3D map data generated by lidar, the performance of the chip, AI computing power, and data transmission speed must be super strong! It's just that these things are not a problem in Apple's view, after all, what they are best at is to engage in chip stacking ~ for example, the M1 Ultra chip released by Apple some time ago, it is simply a "glue chip" to play through! Directly "gluing" the two M1 Max chips together, Apple's original take-off chip has become doubly taken off.
Unlike traditional "glue chips", the M1 Ultra is recognized by the software as a chip. Because Apple uses its unique "Ultra Fusion" technology to exchange information and data with two M1 Max chips with a bandwidth of 2.5 TB/s! Now that Apple has the ability, dealing with large and complex 3D city maps doesn't seem to be a problem. If there is, then "glue" a few more M1 Max chips to form an "M1 Infinity"~
In Apple's fantasy, since the full automatic driving of Apple cars is so high-level, can the "redundant" part of the steering wheel also be directly killed? It's possible! According to the final regulations on self-driving cars issued by the US regulator a few days ago: it is allowed to carry mass-produced cars that can achieve completely driverless driving without steering wheels, brake pedals and other control components that are necessary for manual driving for human drivers.
Even apple cars are charged in a sci-fi way, according to Apple's registered patents: Apple will prepare many such devices, which can adjust the position within a certain range and automatically align the car charging port. With automatic driving, after the vehicle sends passengers to the destination, it will automatically find a charging pile for charging, directly eliminating the time we have to go to the garage.
For the fruit, as long as it is not the ancestral Lightnning interface + "elegant" mouse-style charging, I can accept ~ ~
If Apple cars can really be equipped with the above black technology at the time of release, it can indeed be the same as the iPhone 4 release that year - to open a new era! But as the saying goes—
The ideal is very full, the reality is very bone, I thought that Apple can rely on the accumulation of lidar, self-developed chips, advanced packaging and other technologies, can make apple cars' automatic driving system become the top level. But according to the 2021 annual autonomous driving data report released by the California Transportation Authority DMV in February, Apple can be said to have been hanged by Chinese players...
* Image source @36Kr Apple's self-driving test total mileage ranked 14th, each time away from the average mileage, 32km, ranking only 22nd... Moreover, Apple's self-driving vehicles will take over 663 times in 2021, the largest number of all companies that have submitted road test reports!
* Image source @36Kr California Motor Vehicle Administration DMV has long been recognized as one of the most authoritative regulatory bodies in the field of autonomous driving. The autonomous driving road test report and collision report released every year have also become an important criterion for the technical evaluation of autonomous driving enterprises. One of the important indicators for judging a company's autonomous driving technology is the number of vehicle takeovers and the average takeover mileage (MPI). What is encouraging is that the best performer in this report is the domestic autonomous driving company AutoX. Although the actual number of road test vehicles was only 7, it was only taken over once a year, with an average takeover mileage (MPI) of 50,108 miles.
* Image source @ 36Kr That is to say, Apple's self-driving technology is not at all as absolutely leading in the mobile phone market as the iPhone. However, this is also expected, although the news about Apple cars in recent years is overwhelming, and the outside media is also a variety of bullish expectations. But in fact, the news of the substantial progress of Apple's car manufacturing is very rare. On the contrary, the news of the great change of blood in the Apple car team is increasing.
Eight years of car dream, high-level blood change
Apple's car project, Titan, was established as early as 2014. In the past 8 years, Apple's auto team can be described as ill-fated ~ in the first few years, Apple has spent huge sums of money to dig people from Tesla, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, FCA and other companies. Even because Tesla dug too many people, its CEO Musk ridiculed Apple as "Tesla's grave"...
While digging corners everywhere, Apple also registered three domain names: "Apple.car", "Apple.cars" and "Apple.auto". For a time, Apple's ambition to build a car was revealed, and it seemed to be like the iPhone of that year - to achieve a comprehensive lead in product design, use and technology.
But soon, Apple's car-making process encountered many obstacles. One of the biggest obstacles is the disagreement within the car-making team. On the one hand, the team led by Steve Zadesky, a former head of Apple's car project, hopes that the Titan project can develop a car product with semi-autonomous driving, and the other side is desperate to do it in one step to create an epoch-making Apple car with a fully autonomous driving platform. But with Apple CEO Tim Cook turning the balance to the side of the self-driving platform in 2016, the differences have also been resolved.
Then it ended up with Steve Zadesky, Apple's vice president of product design, who had been leading the electric vehicle development business, leaving the company. Apple's team also began to lay off a lot of employees, and more than a hundred software and hardware engineers were laid off, saying they were going to focus on self-driving systems. However, just after resolving the internal contradictions, another fatal problem has come
In April 2017, Apple was granted permission to test self-driving cars, but the test results were not satisfactory. So much so that Bob Mansfield, who was the director of Apple's self-driving program, admitted that under the conditions at that time, it was almost impossible to make Apple's first model directly on the L4 level of automatic driving system.
After the road of fully autonomous driving system can not go down, Apple's car has been delayed for a long time. Cook also realized that the pace of Apple's car construction has long lagged behind friends, so he immediately accelerated further. As a result, there are more and more former Tesla executives and engineers on apple's auto team list. At the same time, it also began to negotiate cooperation with traditional car companies such as Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Kia, and invested its hopes in vehicle manufacturing. But despite this, Apple's car is still not improving. As of January this year, After seven years on Apple's automotive project, Joe Bass, head of software engineering, left to join Meta. According to Bloomberg, 6 of Apple's 13-person core team left Apple last year.
* Image source WeChat @ Car Stuff And just recently, Tianfeng International Securities analyst Guo Mingxi broke the news on Twitter: Apple's auto team has been disbanded for a while.
Fully autonomous driving, the road is still far away With the dissolution of Apple's car-making team, the debut time of Apple cars seems to be getting farther and farther away ~ According to the practice of many technology companies, it is common to cut some projects. After all, if a product is too far from mass production, no matter how much investment and research and development is wasted. For example, Xiaomi's MIX Alpha surround screen phone, Apple's AirPower wireless charger and so on
What's more, this time it is still a non-car company that wants to build a cross-border car - it must go through multiple links such as company site selection, determining manufacturing routes and models, team formation, vehicle design, software and hardware adaptation, vehicle manufacturing, safety testing and mass production. As far as the current revelations are concerned, Apple's car has not even completed the earliest and most core "team building" in this process, let alone the things that follow...
But looking at all car manufacturers and technology manufacturers: there is still a long way to go before ordinary consumers use self-driving cars. First of all, the safety of autonomous driving cannot be guaranteed, and it still needs to wait for the introduction of relevant regulations. The popularization of new technologies also takes time, and the upfront price of vehicles is certainly not for the poor. But I'm still looking forward to the mass production of fully autonomous vehicles, because that will be a big step forward for all of us! References: 36 Krypton: 2021 California DMV Autonomous Beings Phase Car Stuff: Goodbye, Apple Cars Editor: Scott Road