Although Apple has never explained its reasons for abandoning car building, many sources point to one point - to make way for AI. Recently, foreign media reported that Apple's top management was shocked by the powerful generative artificial intelligence technology behind the chatbot ChatGPT launched by Open AI after experiencing it.
According to the report, Apple's top management is concerned that the development of emerging AI technology could threaten the iPhone's market dominance in the mobile phone market, or even replace iOS as the main operating system, which in turn will affect its App Store, which has an annual revenue of about $24 billion. To that end, Apple decided to cancel a $10 billion self-driving car project and reinvest resources in AI technology development.
In fact, when the news of abandoning car manufacturing came out in February this year, it was reported that Apple decided to increase AI. Despite its strengths in the AI race with more than 2 billion devices and an industry-leading semiconductor team, Apple has been slow to make AI progress over the past decade.
Apple has reportedly launched a large-scale restructuring plan and has listed generative AI as a priority project. It is predicted that Apple will show off its latest progress in the field of AI at its annual developer conference on June 10.
In addition, after recognizing the gap between Siri and ChatGPT in terms of conversation coherence and contextual understanding, Apple's executives decided to carry out a "brain transplant" on Siri to improve the performance of its intelligent assistant. The new version of Siri is expected to have stronger conversational capabilities and adapt to more use cases, while all request processing will be done locally on the iPhone to provide a more private AI service.
In addition, Apple does not seem to be completely "dead" on the matter of building cars. Recently, it has been reported that Apple is negotiating with a new car-making force in the United States to restart the possibility of "Apple Auto" cooperation. And the object of this negotiation is currently the most popular Rivian. Rivian sold 13,588 units in the first quarter, up 71% year-over-year, after Rivian was once seen as a "Tesla rival".
The outside world speculates that this time, Apple may not directly build a car, but will directly transplant the software developed in the past 10 years to the vehicles that can be used on the road. This may be the way Apple can get the results into practice in the shortest possible time. Over the past 10 years, Apple has spent tens of billions of dollars on cars.
At the same time, in this way, Apple is also able to promote the testing and iteration of autonomous driving. This "curve car" approach to entering the game through the supply chain is similar to Huawei. At present, Huawei has made a deep layout in the automotive industry in this way, and the car BU model is about to enter the stage of profitability. With the Apple brand and halo, no matter how you end up entering the car, it's still very interesting.
If the news is true, Lei Jun may be "crying and fainting" in the toilet. After all, when the news of Apple's abandonment of car manufacturing first came out, Lei Jun said in a high-profile manner: "Apple's abandonment of car manufacturing is definitely good for Xiaomi cars", and said that after Apple withdrew from making cars, Apple users buy smart electric vehicles, Xiaomi SU7 must be the best choice.