this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Why do companies feel like that have to try and do everything?
Why can't you just 'stay in your lane' and be good at what you're good at.
Publicly traded companies need to constantly grow.
Apple started out with desktop computers. So by 'staying in their lane', they'd never made ipods, iphones, Apple silicon, earpods and airpods, the watch, etc. I think they had quite the success by diversing themselves.
I'm my head, I was thinking of all those consumer products (phones, pods, pads, earbuds, etc). That is a good reminder they started with business computers.
Ever expanding profit requires ever expanding scope until it doesn't, then you can divest for profit and try again.
They are trying to insure their company survival. Imagine if they didn't put money into R&D for a car and something happened where, for example, Google produced one or EVs really took off in a big way. Or self-driving cars became a reality.
They'd be sol.
So you'll see companies like apple, meta, etc try a lot of different things as they attempt to read the tea leaves. They are one big tech breakthrough away from being irrelevant.
I've been predicting for a while though that siri will be turned into an AI that runs locally using the metal cores.
I'm genuinely surprised they haven't dropped that on us and are focused on VR.
Especially after seeing the Rabbit R1, Google putting Tensor cores in the pixels, and hearing Apple preach about privacy.
That is a very astute observation stranger!
It has all the familiar symptoms of a big apple release in the works. Theyve been putting ML cores in chips for ages, all of their stuff now has them. They've been letting Siri languish for years. It's become a running joke about how bad it's been.
Remember when everyone was upset that they were letting the MacBook line languish and weren't "putting effort into it anymore/don't care about professionals"? Then they dropped the m series chip laptops, the Mac studio etc. and its balls fast with specialized Asics for video processing etc.
It feels like that pattern to me. Like that team is heads down and apples working on it. So they say very little about it in any of their briefings but the hardware is there ( which they also, weirdly haven't been advertising as much). Seriously those ML cores outperform an old 1080ti I have in a server by orders of magnitude.
it seems like it'd go right along with their "privacy" focused branding too. And now that these other companies are doing the very public beta testing apple can tune it.
Oh and they have all of these hooks available to iOS and Mac users(Mac specifically) with their apple script stuff. Imagine Siri being able to automate a task you do by just asking her?
Anyway, could be wrong but I'd be excited to see it happen.
Of course, this is a very accurate and a good point.
When we look at companies who are trying to actually innovate something new/cool and not just produce a product that serves a known or well defined problem, it does seem that they'll do a lot of hit and miss.
It's interesting to contrast that to a company like Microsoft, where they also need to meet their Invester focused/bottom line oriented mandatory growth requirements ( which I don't like the American corporate shift in this way), their way of doing so in the computing world was to buy up everything/one and take steps a lot of people considered anti-trust/monopoly moves.
I think the market for home computers has dried up.
A lot of these tech companies got into cars because they viewed vehicles as a major new computing platform. Especially autonomous vehicles.
INFINITE GROWTH
With that strategy, there would have been no iPod and therefore no iPhone.
Hell, there would probably not even been a computer mouse since Rank Xerox would have been focusing on how to make copies of paper.
Well with that mentality Nintendo would be a trading card company and we wouldn't have Super Mario Galaxy, and my 3rd grader past self has suffered enough without having their favorite Wii game taken away on top of everything else!
😀 haven't we all. I'd change my thought to: maybe for apple cars were a 'bridge too far' 😉