Regarding leaks, yes, there were rumors of battery pack replacements due to corrections on welds and a separate production issue with ground terminal bolts.[1]
These issues could be due to the different composition of the 3 compared to the S and X - more steel, less aluminum - or with them trying to build a denser automated production line, or just general gremlins setting up new production.
Is anyone inside the plant talking about what's wrong? That's what I meant by "leaks".
(Back when newspapers had real reporters, some reporter would go to a bar near the plant, buy some of the guys a few beers, and listen. The recent stories about Tesla are all from press releases or CEO interviews.)
We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. Imagine if they had just partnered with existing phone manufacturers rather than trying to build a magic touch slate.
Wait, we do know what would have happened - the Motorola ROKR, which everyone should be forgiven for forgetting.
> We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious.
When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market.
They took something which existed and was awkward to use, and re-did the UI layer of the whole thing. They refined something else which was already proven. They didn't invent something original from scratch.
Here Apple is clearly trying to design a new kind of a car, where every part is different from what's already out there in the industry. Where none of the new bits has been invented yet.
They are trying to do original discovery in addition to refining things, in an industry where they have absolutely zero experience.
> Project Titan looked at a wide range of details. That included motorized doors that opened and closed silently .... Apple, as always focused on clean designs, wanted to do away with the awkward cone.
That they were even considered things like this important in a self-driving car when they hadn't even solved the self-driving bit (or even car-bit) yet tells me all I need to know about the realism of this project. There was none.
Also, the iPhone was preceded by years of producing iPods, which at least gave them expertise in portable electronics. What has Apple produced that is remotely similar to an automobile? It's not just design expertise, but the supply chain and manufacturing. Auto parts industry is massive. Is controlling the parts for a computer on the same scale as for an entire automobile? I suppose if Tesla can do it...but Tessa's cars so far don't seem as ambitious as what Project Titan was looking at.
Remember Tesla's first car? It was not the Model S. The Roadster was based on a Lotus chassis. They built a car on an existing vehicle platform before venturing into producing their own.
>When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing...
That's what it looks like from the outside, but listening to interviews with current and former Apple people that's not at all how it looked from the inside.
When they initially developed the OSX derived core OS, System architecture and UI libraries they weren't thinking about phones at all. It was intended to be a tablet computer OS. It's only fairly late on in development that Jobs pivoted the team to adapt the technology to a phone form factor and tacked on a phone app and cellular radio. It was not at all developed from the starting point of looking at existing phones and going from there. Things like touch swipe to scroll and pinch to zoom were taken straight from contemporary touch UI research, not Palm or any other existing commercial products.
Interesting what-if: would the iPod touch have been significantly less irrelevant in absence of the iPhone?
Could the iPad have been a success without the iPhone paving the way for apps?
I remember the last generations of high end feature phones as quite capable media consumption devices, who knows what could have come from that strain of development had they stayed in the limelight a few years longer.
iPod Touch sales were about one quarter as many as iPhone sales. That came to 100 million units in the first 6 years. Given their lower ASP that's a bit less in revenue but it's still pretty significant.
Sure, without the iPhone they'd probably have sold a lot more, but it's not a very compelling counterfactual. Palm started off selling PDAs, but a smartphone is really just a PDA with a cellular radio and a phone app. By the time the iPhone came out standalone PDAs were already dead.
I don't think it would have made a lot of difference to the iPad. It is what it is. It might have had more of a 'wow' factor rather than the 'just a big iPhone' jibes, but even so it sold, and is still selling in very large numbers. Sure sales are down, but they're still selling about 40 million a year. That's more than Dell's annual PC sales and twice as many as Apple's Mac sales, it's also one sixth of global PC sales. So bear that mind when people say it's a declining business. It's slowly declining from spectacular success.
Or you know, the have multiple teams, and they don't just want to put out a "self driving car" out, but a great self driving car that rethinks what a car should be like -- on top of "self-driving".
But does that even make sense? That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet. Wouldn't it make more sense to just go for the self driving car first and then, after you are sure that you can build that, creating teams which make it better?
>That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet.
At Apple don't do basic research and leave it at that.
They are trying to build a commercial product.
In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).
So that, if the self-driving research pans out, they have a complete product, not just some run-of-the-mill car design that basically sells for its self driving capability.
And even if their self-driving thing doesn't pan out, they can always enter the car market licensing some other self-driving technology (like they license/buy batteries, ssd, cpus, etc) but with their own spin on the general product.
> In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving).
No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.
They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.
>No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.
They are not the same teams doing each, so there's no opportunity cost involved.
And whether it might or might not actually "take decades", if Apple considered it would "take decades to solve" they wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. The idea was that we are close to a breakthrough and commercial applications, not that we'll have something in the market by 2040, maybe.
So, for Apple it was more like "can we get something out in 5-10 years at most? Oh, and if it just self-drives, nobody will care -- by that time there would be 10 more self-driving cars from Google, Tesla, Audi, GM, etc. We also want it to be great/different in other aspects".
>They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.
There's nothing backwards about it -- given that the car will need a LIDAR (which I don't think their self-driving researchers where doubting), they should explorer the design space for placement/hiding it etc.
I'm not sure why you're arguing with the person that keeps responding to you. I think you've clearly made the point that Apple feels like they don't need to work off of existing design or technology methodologies and yet this person seems to think that Apple's entire predicted failure is that they're not working off of existing processes and technologies. He seems to be arguing a straw man of your argument rather than your actual argument and part of me feels like he's being willfully disingenuous in doing so. It's "Apple can't possibly do it different than everyone else because everyone else has only been able to do it in this one way" without any room for the possibility that the "best" (subjective, of course) solution may be one that doesn't exist yet because it requires the very paradigm shift you're referencing.
What you are suggesting is like designing how a hotel will look before you know where it will be or how big it will be.
It's completely backwards. You can kind of do it, but it's a huge waste of time and money.
Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something, anything.
>What you are suggesting is like designing how a hotel will look before you know where it will be or how big it will be.
Well, you know most things. You know you're making a car, you know it will have LIDAR, you know it will be self driving etc. You are free to (and if you want to win time, you pretty much got to) design the car, the interior, materials, displays, etc -- even the transmission, engine and wheels -- independently of the self-driving algorithms.
If and when those self-driving algorithms are ready, you don't then have to spend another 1 year to design the rest.
There's not any real dependency between them -- so much that you can even test your self driving algorithm in ANY random car as almost all companies do. It's not like being a self-driving car dictates the car form and the latter has to be designed around that property.
(That said, before even Google's car and the self-driving hype, a lot of rumors insisted on Apple merely making an electric iCar -- Tesla competitor, not some full self-driver type 5).
>Apple did not do that because they "knew what they would need, so let's get started", they did that because they had no clue how to make a self driving car, but despite that, the team needed to show something, anything.
I, for one, have no doubt that Apple got some top notch researchers in ML and driving car technology. I also have no doubt they got some top notch car guys (plain car). I also have no doubt that there's nothing to know about "how to make a self driving car" that the Apple team doesn't know (or any team for that matter), apart the ML/self-driving algorithm aspects. So there was nothing about the form of the car holding them back.
I don't agree with everything you said, but let's assume you are right - for the sake of the argument.
So what's the plan? Design a car, then let the designs sit on a shelf for 10 years (or more)? In 10 years tastes will change, and the people who made the designs will no longer have them fresh in their mind - if they are even still employed by Apple.
> They took something which existed and was awkward to use
This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone. The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades.
Everything unpleasant about cars is happening to the outside. Not just to pedestrians, cyclists and residents, but also to other drivers: just imagine how much nicer your commute would be without all the other commuters. A Lada on an open road would be more enjoyable than a Rolls Royce in a traffic jam. It's a commons problem, one that cannot be designed away with cute UI and expensive surface finishing. Even self-driving won't really solve that, as anyone who has been a passenger in gridlock should know. The only way to significantly improve transport is by making it more space-efficient by cooperation. Public transit with the Apple doover? Could be amazing, but it's just not in the Apple DNA. Autonomous cars with extreme platooning? Massive potential, but just like with public transit, the biggest benefit goes to those who refuse to cooperate and stick to individualistic reaping of the benefits of lower congestion.
> This is the key difference: people already love their cars, more than they love their home and more than they love their iPhone.
I'm part of that (seemingly ever shrinking) demographic that does indeed love cars; I love their shapes and their looks, the roar of an engine (or the thrust of an electric, both hit me in different places), but even I have to admit that people like me are going away. The vast majority of people want a way to get from point A to point B relatively quickly in some measure of comfort; they don't give a shit how cheaply the car is built, as long as it comes with a warranty and the cabin is spill proof, and they don't care how ugly or bland the outside is as long as it keeps the rain out. There's not nearly the same appreciation for cars and driving as their once was, which is why I firmly believe a lot of people these days can't drive very well nor take decent care of their cars; they don't care. Driving is a means to an end, whereas to me, driving is half the fun of doing anything.
> The enjoyable smartphone was an unsolved problem, the enjoyable car has been comically over-solved for decades.
I'd say the enjoyable car and the enjoyable smartphone (iPhone, yes I know, my opinion) have about the same market share these days. :)
I don't mean to say Apple was on to something: I think it was doomed from the start for many of the reasons listed here. I just think you're misreading the market is all. That being said, I do hope the self driving revolution leaves room for enthusiasts who truly love putting the hammer down and seeing what our machines can do; I'm willing to pay more for manual mode or even a much higher fee to continue to have a license to operate; I understand what being put into an enthusiast market means and I'm willing to put up the cash.
There is no such thing as a UI layer. UI and function are inextricably linked.
For example, see iPhone's voicemail. Or the touch screen. Or the app store. None of those things could have been executed by UI teams at any other device manufacturer at the time.
Only when you're talking about software, which is arguably the "UI layer" of a physical computing device. Hardware needs actual things which do the things, independent of interface.
Palm OS apps were using swipe to scroll for several years before that. As far back as at least 2002.
That doesn't take away from what Apple did. They really took all of the best ideas (and in many cases hired the engineers who made them in the first place) and put them into one incredibly tight and delightful package. Just about every individual feature can be traced to Palm, Symbian, or a host of other systems... but the magic is making the whole thing work.
Still, it's important to remember that the iPhone was largely a logical evolution more than something invented by Apple wholesale. The iPhone was not the first touch screen slate phone that I ever saw FWIW. That honor belongs to an internal project at Nokia (based on Series 60) that died under it's own engineering weight.
Which again is meant as a compliment to Apple. They actually were able to execute on the thing where others failed.
That is seriously laughable how bad that is. The parent to your comment either doesn't remember what things were like prior to the iPhone or they're intentionally ignoring the differences.
Capacitive screens were less responsive than resistive screens.
The difference was that you used your physical finger instead of a stylus. Personally speaking, I preferred resistive screens for their responsiveness and accuracy.
The capacitive screen was needed for "pinch to zoom" and other gestures of the modern era. The delay in the UI compared to resistive screens (as well as the higher-CPU time required for processing) turned out to be a smaller deal than multi-touch technology.
Is there some more information on that? I believed so far (or the industry made me believe) that capacitive screens were much faster than the resistive ones.
I don't have like, hard tested data. But the delay is enough that experience was all I needed to convince me.
Nintendo DS / 3DS and Wii U are all resistive screens. I also have experience with resistive screens of Palm Pilot and Palm phones of the early 2000s. And all of those were more "responsive" than a 2007-era iPhone, despite the iPhone's significantly higher processing power.
Play a serious game like Monster Hunter (very timing intensive) and compare it to a serious timing-intensive game on a capacitive screen (I know I've seen people play Marvel vs Capcom 2 on an iPhone emulator...). The lag and delay is noticeable even in the modern era.
But people wanted multi-touch pinch to zoom. Capacitive sensing also requires a microcontroller to literally "charge up" the screen over and over.
When your finger is on the screen, it "charges up slower" (because your finger changes the capacitance at that location). Innately, that "charge and discharge" cycle requires a measurement over time.
And to make sure that power isn't wasted, only one part of the screen is often tested (there are grids and stuff that then calculate where the fingers or multiple-fingers are located). So innately, there's a delay as the "scan-lines" of the sensors test each point of the screen.
Resistive screens instantly tell you where the stylus is without any such delay or processing. So it just makes sense.
I don't have any direct links, but the latency on processing touch input from a capacitive display can be as high as 40ms, remember there is a lot of filtering going on and spurious crap that has to be filtered out.
Think how crazy the trackpad goes on a cheap laptop when you plug in a knock-off power supply with poor power conditioning.
No. Apple invented the smartphone. There were no smart phones before the iPhone. There were PDAs and feature phones.
People like to pretend Apple never invents anything and to do so they always point at vaguely similar things that aren't nearly as good as if they support the point.
Someone one here once told me that Apple didn't invent multi-touch because it existed in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey
> When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market.
Isn't a car a proven thing? All apple is need to do is re-invent it and slap a nice AI on top of it.
They have no clear visionary at the top vetting things for quality user experiences. Had Jobs still been with us we might actually have beautiful 3D Touch experiences. We might be seeing a beautiful refinement of the driving experience. Instead they're flailing. Hopefully this is a realignment and rededicated effort to do what they do best: make cool, proven tech perfect and accessible.
there is a 20+ year history of PDAs before the iPhone. For all intents and purposes my 1998 Windows CE Casio PDA looks and acts like a first gen iPhone. It's home screen has a grid of 3x4 icons of apps and general works very analogous to the iPhone. Apple did an amazing job of polishing the PDA but they made an incremental jump being at the right place at the right time with affordable cellular data and capacitive touch and an amazingly well designed ui
it sounds like they we're doing much more with their car efforts
> For all intents and purposes my 1998 Windows CE Casio PDA looks and acts like a first gen iPhone
I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari.
Because that is what you are saying. I owned that PDA as well as the Treo 650 which was far better and the iPhone isn't an incremental jump. It was a complete revolution.
> I assume you also think a Hyundai looks and acts like a Ferrari.
He argued against an assumption that apple reinvented smartphone. If you want to use this argument, you have to show that people think that Ferrari reinvented the car.
Only if Ferrari came into the market with a bunch of innovations that every manufacturer then adopts. I would call that a reinvention and more or less what Apple did.
People were using styluses, the phones were blocky and thick, the UI was confusing and adopted from desktop instead designed for mobile, hardware keyboards, small screens, business focused
I had every "smartphone" and internet tablet back in day running on Palm, Symbian, Blackberry. All of those OS's are completely irrelevant today because of how far Apple pushed the envelope. Though I thought Palm was headed in the right direction with the Pre.
You can call it an evolution but it was such a major leap it was essentially a redefinition.
That's like saying that the first mobile phone used technologies that were all proven and that the inventors just combined them in a much better way because radios and phones existed. The combination itself is exactly what made it an invention and a revolution. Nearly every technology right now that's a revolution (Uber, for example) is a revolution precisely because it did something that's never been done before by standing on the shoulders of what came before it. The difference is that the combination and or features gained from that combination allowed the invention to leap frog over what existed before it.
reinventing the wheel and more changes to how current equipment works, in particular viewing aids, would bury this car in regulatory hell. it would take years to get permission for it to be on the road. figure it this way, if it takes many years just to get permission to change headlight technology can you imagine the time it would take to adjust to what Apple was proposing?
phones are dead simple compared to cars because phones NHTSA and Insurance issues to face up to
If they're faced with a low probability landing scenario, such as the fastest re-entry velocity to date, and they need to "test" their control algorithms, which first stage would they choose? A near end-of-life used booster or a late block booster from which they would hope to get another several good launches? - assuming all others characteristics support the current launch parameters.
They're amazingly deliberate in how they mingle bleeding edge R&D and commercial activity. Something that fascinates me. And rockets.
Kapor Capital, investors in Uber, apparently also invest in "People Ops" startups. They're actively trying to feed a problem child into their own opportunities. Smart.
Give me a break. When a successful tech executive says, "It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate," the Gates Foundation or the US Digital Service come to mind. Getting another highly paid job is not at all in the same class.
> Give me a break. When a successful tech executive says, "It has always been a priority for me to give back to people who are less fortunate," the Gates Foundation or the US Digital Service come to mind. Getting another highly paid job is not at all in the same class.
Says you.
If you have the opportunity to make a bunch of money moving on to a new gig, hire your old co-workers, and work on new technologies like self driving cars[1], I'd say that's going to have a much larger impact than picking up a hammer and building houses Jimmy Carter style.
Also, using the Bill Gates, who's probably 2+ orders of magnitude wealthier than Singhal, as a comparison point isn't fair either.
[1]: Guessing on this one as I have no clue what projects he personally oversaw at Uber.
> Also, using the Bill Gates, who's probably 2+ orders of magnitude wealthier than Singhal, as a comparison point isn't fair either.
You don't have to be Gates-wealthy to be a philanthropist. Hell, I did some philanthropy when I was earning only $35k a year - I saved up $2k and sent out an invite to a dozen friends for them to do any short course of their choosing up to $150 and I'd pay for it. And that's small potatoes - there are thousands upon thousands of people out there working long-term as volunteers for good causes despite also being on or near minimum wage.
The idea that philanthropy is only the domain of the ridiculously wealthy is just bizarre.
I'm not saying you have to be Gates-wealthy to do philanthropy, I'm saying dropping your career to do nothing but philanthropy doesn't scale or sustain if you're significantly less wealthy.
Taking a high-paying job, hiring your already well-paid ex-colleagues, and working on toys for the upper-middle class wouldn't strike most people as 'giving back to the less fortunate'.
I recommend watching the Hosted Webcast on one device and the Technical Webcast on another. Either mute the Technical Webcast or have it on lower volume. They're both easily found on YouTube under SpaceX.
I did this for the previous launch, Iridium-1, and was treated to unbroken views live from the first stage on the technical stream, while the hosts narrated and switched views more frequently on their stream.
I believe the comparison was not with text-based debuggers, but with the more mainstream Node.js debugging options that also provide Blink or Chrome DevTools UIs:
1. Node Inspector (https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector), the most prevalent Node.js debugging tool, at least until Node v6.3.0. And which also happens to be mentioned by Jam3/devtool in the Comparisons section.
Thanks for pointing these out. I tried using the --inspect flag like your article pointed out but I couldn't get it to work with Chrome 54.
I can't really give a compare and contrast between what I'm using and the --inspect flag. From the article, I feel like I'd like --inspect better if I could get it to work.
These issues could be due to the different composition of the 3 compared to the S and X - more steel, less aluminum - or with them trying to build a denser automated production line, or just general gremlins setting up new production.
[1] https://electrek.co/2017/09/29/tesla-model-3-production-ramp...