Welcome back to Multicore. This is Instruction Set for the week of Monday, March 4th.
I’m back home in Tokyo after a productive, entertaining time in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress — busy in the best way. Stay tuned for a little more from the show.
I also had a story run in The Verge last week about Akihabara, Tokyo’s tech and gaming district. This was part of a package on physical media, a market where Japan remains somewhat of an outlier.
I actually took all of the photos for that piece on the Oppo Find X7 Ultra, which has turned out to be a fascinating phone-slash-camera. My full review will drop this week.
Okay, let’s catch up on the news.
Apple killed its long-rumoured car project with little to show for a decade of development.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is canceling a decadelong effort to build an electric car, according to people with knowledge of the matter, abandoning one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the company.
Apple made the disclosure internally Tuesday, surprising the nearly 2,000 employees working on the project, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the announcement wasn’t public. The decision was shared by Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and Kevin Lynch, a vice president in charge of the effort, according to the people.
…
The decision to ultimately wind down the project is a bombshell for the company, ending a multibillion-dollar effort called Project Titan that would have vaulted Apple into a whole new industry. The tech giant started working on a car around 2014, setting its sights on a fully autonomous electric vehicle with a limousine-like interior and voice-guided navigation.
But the project struggled nearly from the start, with Apple changing the team’s leadership and strategy several times. Lynch and Williams took charge of the undertaking a few years ago — following the departure of Doug Field, now a senior executive at Ford Motor Co.
I don’t have a ton to say about this, except that the fact it went on for as long as it did does not speak well of Apple leadership’s ability to assess the potential of new markets. It always sounded like a boondoggle without a clear fit or direction.
A lot of the employees will reportedly be reassigned from Project Titan to Apple’s work on generative AI, which is probably for the best. Overexcited commentators often argue that Apple “needs” to respond to competitors in various fields — smart speakers, touchscreen laptops, folding phones, you name it — but this is an area where I think they’d actually be on point.
If nothing else, it’d be a huge missed opportunity not to integrate the technology into operating systems from the top down. The kind of thing that Google has been able to do with its own Pixel phones — real-time transcription and translation, circle-to-search, etc — is what I want Apple working on for the iPhone and the Mac.
Meta declined Google’s invitation to partner on its new “Android XR” platform, The Information reports, citing Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to "own the next computational platform for AR, VR and mixed reality".
Meta’s Quest platform is built on open-source Android, but that’s exactly why this report isn’t surprising in the slightest. Meta has already got what it’d want out of Google on a technical level, so any further collaboration would be about their respective platform plays, and in that sense it’s Meta who has the leverage.
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