While listening to the Stratchery interview with Hugo Berra, a thought occurred to me. Berra mentioned that Xaomi was building an EV. Not a self-driving one, mind you: this one has a steering wheel and peddles. He made the comment that were Apple to actually go through with releasing a car, it would look a lot like what Xaomi has built. I haven’t seen either car project myself so I’ll take his word for it.

This led to the thought that it was well within Apple’s existing capability to release a car. They would’ve had to skill up in automotive engineering, but they can hire people to do that. What they couldn’t do was all the self-driving stuff. No-one can do that yet, and it seems to me that being unable to deliver on this non-negotiable requirement was one of the things that doomed the project. Sure there were others — seems like they were lacking focus in a number of other areas — but this seems like a big one.

This led to the next thought, which is why Apple thought it was ever a good idea to actually have the car self-driving. What’s wrong with having one driven by the user? Seems like this was a very un-Apple-like product decision. Has Apple ever been good a releasing tech that would replace, rather than augment, the user’s interaction with the device? Do they have phones that would browse the web for you? Have they replaced ZSH with ChatGPT in MacOS (heaven forbid). Probably the only product that comes close is Siri, and we all know what a roaring success that is.

Apple’s strength is in releasing products that keep human interaction a central pillar of it’s design. They should just stick with that, and avoid any of the self-driving traps that come up. It’s a “bicycle for a mind” after all: the human is still the one doing the peddling.