Kinda still wish they’d have made it, or at least shown some pre-production work, just to see what a radical product re-think could look like in this space. Cars of 2024, even in the premium segment, are nearly uniformly garish and tasteless, with tons of half baked features of marginal utility accreted over the years and never perfected. Apple’s take on the category could have been a master class in product design and attention to detail, if nothing else.
What if, hear me out, the wheels were on the sides and not front and back. It uses gyroscopes to keep itself balanced. Instead of twisting the handle or pushing a button like a savage you lean in the direction you want to go! This is a totally new idea and not a product that was released over 20 years ago and since discontinued.
I'm pointing out, as others have, that the bike market is highly fragmented, lots of variety for good reason. It would be hard to come put with "a" , or even "a line" of bikes. You really need a dozen
My long-standing hobbyhorse is that Apple should buy Brompton.
Miniaturisation? Check. Lightweight metals? Check. Battery technology? Check. Premium design-centric product? Check. Product small enough to be sold through worldwide network of Apple Stores? Check.
Then add in what Apple could do with UX around bike navigation and you have a perfect fit.
There was a gyroscope based motorcycle which I thought was more the Apple Style. I was imagining single person cars just like they make all their devices single user. Get one auto-driving bike for each member of the family and you would ride laying on your back so you could take a nap if you wanted.
They are! All modern cars look like Transformers toys. With their stupid mean-face grills. Design is awful.
I appreciate early cars when people didn't know what they should look like, and were just building all kinds of weird stuff. That awkwardness was charming. Now it's just generational pandering, and my generation is left out (apparently my generation is 1920's-1930's).
“Good” is subjective. My idea of a good car is something that can get me from A-B, can hold dogs and be cleaned up easily, can tow a few thousand pounds in a pinch, doesn’t get stuck in the steep and muddy hills around my house, doesn’t break the bank, and it would be nice if it didn’t spy on me and have a giant shiny console in my field of view.
One of my hottest takes: cars look dumb. Even the fancy muscle/sports cars. Watch the suspension kick in as a car drives over a speed bump and remember it’s just a box on wheels.
I think cars only look good relative to other cars. But as an object themselves, they don’t add to the landscape.
Look at all the concept renderings of future apartments or idyllic European countryside’s. There’s always only a few cars or one car. Together, they are an an invasive organism.
Coincidence, I'm afraid; I am not familiar with such a meme. Merely observing that the median American has a household income only about 75% that of the average American, and therefore spends proportionally more of the household budget on groceries, thus feeling the 25% increase in grocery prices over the last four years rather more keenly. Whether that constitutes "struggle" seems like it must be a personal judgement.
Noticing a price increase isn't "struggling." The median American could double their food budget and would be just fine.
Your analysis is all wonky. The % of average income and % increase in food price is completely irrelevant - food is a fixed cost and the median American has many times the cost of food left over in disposable income.
Imho Teslas feel very much like a car that Apple could have designed. Lots of aspects of the whole experience are fundamentally different than other cars. Maybe I'm not thinking radically enough, but then Jony Ive is pursuing other career options, too.
Teslas are the Alienware of automobiles. Flashy, ostentatious, and aimed at enthusiasts with more money than taste.
Apple would likely have made something that evoked elegance. It would have contrasted with Tesla in the same way a Macbook contrasts with an Alienware.
With the notable exception of Cybertruck I like to think of them as “conservative AF, but with fewer buttons and knobs”. Sort of like the iPhone. The visual similarity of the onboard computer to iOS design only reinforces the impression.
Apple would have made a car without keys that you open with your phone and that has a big touchscreen with UI that doesn't have multi second latencies and hardware from 8 years ago in a brand new vehicle?
Flashy? Ostentatious? I mean, regular people with no particular interest in speed or flashy interior/exterios also buy Tesla's. The Tesla 3 is pretty plain and just very functional - works great. I don't have one but I know several people with Teslas, they seem super happy with their vehicles.
Aren't Apple products also uniformly garish and tasteless with tons of half baked features too?
Glad we don't have to see what dumb ideas Apple had in store for us in the automotive realm.
The m1/m2 are good chips, but macos is stagnant, iPhones have... memojis as their new feature?
Apple has good industrial design for devices that fit in the palm of your hand. I truthfully cannot fathom how that could extend to a car, simply makes no sense. Where would they make them?
They only have like 2% of the PC/laptop market, so not many people think they're that attractive. I like my M1 MacBook itself, but hate the aluminum chassis. I find it brutally garish, sharp and uncomfortable (hurts to type on, hurts my wrists where they rest on a sharp edge, so it's basically a desktop with an attached keyboard and mouse)
Do most people buy a laptop based mainly on appearance? I always thought that most people buy a Windows laptop because that's what they need for work/school (or what they are most familiar with from work/school).
> I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone accuse anything Apple made of being garish.
Not that I disagree in general, but the Apple Watch Edition is arguably in that zone.
Most recently, he was seen wearing a solid 18k yellow gold Apple Watch on a special gold bracelet that was never made available to the public (the same one that Beyoncé and other celebrities were also rocking). The best part though? He appears to have never actually set the thing up, instead going Andy Warhol–style, wearing it purely as a piece of jewelry.
My point exactly. It is such a locked down platform, that I cannot for the life of me understand why people fawn over iphones. They were first to market, but market mover advantage is gone, Apple has not made a good iphone value proposition in years. Especially if you hold it wrong.
“Hold it wrong” was an antenna issue on the iPhone 4, released in 2010 and discontinued more than 10 years ago in 2013. Might be time to move on from that one…
It’s also interesting to point that specific one out because it’s a somewhat widely held opinion that outside of that specific flaw that the iPhone 4 was one of the best industrial designs of the time. Everything else about the design was very iconic, long lasting, and influential to future generations of devices both inside and outside of Apple
Maybe the design was iconic but the all-glass design made it fragile as hell. I replaced six screens/backs in the year I had my 4 and I was really happy when they switched to aluminum backs in the 5.
Apple deserve a lot (LOT) of credit for that one, but always with the caveat that it was incomplete in its own way - features were lacking while the experience was smooth and user friendly. Through the early 2010s (when I was also risking my cell phone store job by being on TV praising the introduction of a competitor...) it was always a toss up between the better functionality of Android and CE6 vs an interface that wasn't dropping every 10th frame even on flagship hardware.
Maybe the first bubble-shaped iMacs were? I always felt the translucency didn't pair well with saturated colors, and the plastic discolored in a gross way just like the 1980's putty-colored boxes of PC clones.
