While the Apple Car project may be dead, Apple isn’t going to lose a single dime on the research it did to make a fully self-driving car, given how the industry is going.
While the Apple Car project may be dead, Apple isn’t going to lose a single dime on the research it did to make a fully self-driving car, given how the industry is going.
The last few years have been the time of AI. Things have grown in leaps and bounds, with more steps forward than back.
Through it all, mostly stock analysts have been screaming about Apple being behind the eight-ball on artificial intelligence. Those same analysts have downgraded stock forecasts — which are supposed to be valid for the long-term, not the next six months — because Apple lacks a public and cohesive strategy for it.
Anybody who can’t see that the Apple Car was the launching pad for most of these projects hasn’t been paying attention.
Apple’s roadmap has had AI on it for years
Rumors started about the Apple Car project about a decade ago. The “machine learning” and “computer vision” buzzwords weren’t prevalent, and popped up between now and then — but both were obviously part of the equation that would lead to a fully self-driving car.
In March 2015, AppleInsider had Apple dead-to-rights, after we visited offices in Sunnyvale, California.
Even after that, it took a few years for Apple to say anything at all about the project. It had been telling analysts for years consecutively that “we don’t comment on unannounced products.”
Almost seven years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook finally made it abundantly clear that Apple was working on autonomous systems behind fully self-driving cars.
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in an interview in June 2017. “And clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems are self-driving cars. There are others.”
In hindsight, he was clear about why they were doing it, beyond car hardware.
“We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects,” Cook added. “It’s probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to work on and so autonomy is something that’s incredibly exciting for us, but we’ll see where it takes us.”
If that wasn’t clear enough that the company was working on artificial intelligence then, he also said in that interview that “we are being straightforward that it’s a core technology that we view as very important.”
These are transferable skills.
