Apple Lays Off 200 Employees from Autonomous Car Unit

Maybe Apple doesn&#x27;t want to pursue a dream which, as far as we know, can only have a limited outcome? They don&#x27;t really like such compromises in products. Check this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;story&#x2F;self-driving-cars-will-always-be-limited-even-the-industry-leader-admits-it-c5fe5aa01699" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;story&#x2F;self-driving-cars-will-always-be-...</a><p>&gt; Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change.<p>Or read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spectator.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-dream-of-driverless-cars-is-dying&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spectator.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-dream-of-driverless-...</a> or any number of &quot;sobering up&quot; articles from last year.

&gt; Of late, Apple CEO Tim Cook has touted his company&#x27;s initiatives in health as the key to its future growth. &quot;I believe, if you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, &quot;What was Apple&#x27;s greatest contribution to mankind?&quot; it will be about health,&quot;<p>Make sense, they&#x27;d rather concentrate on health. There&#x27;s an obvious inroad there with wearables.

I don&#x27;t think Apple has advancements in machine learning tech as much as its competitors. For example, take a look at how primitive Siri is. It struggles a lot in comparison to its competitors even for some basic commands.<p>Or, take a look at Apple Music&#x27;s recommendation system in comparison to Spotify&#x27;s discover weekly.<p>Now, take a look at Amazon and Google. They both have their own cloud infrastructure (which ironically Apple uses) with machine learning built right into it. Both have state of the art image recognition systems (proprietary) for various applications (Eg. Google Image search, Amazon shopping, etc.)<p>I am not saying Apple can&#x27;t do it, I just think they&#x27;re lagging behind and this move totally makes sense.

My list so far: Apple, Tesla, Buzzfeed, Verizon&#x2F;Yahoo&#x2F;CNBC, HuffPost, SpaceX<p>Doesn&#x27;t look like the layoffs will be ending soon either. If it was just one or two that would be one thing, but this is forming a pattern. What do all these companies know?<p>I keep hearing word of a potential recession or downturn. Is anybody here more keyed in than myself and can provide an explanation?

I wonder if this autonomous driving thing has gone off the boil across the industry. Years ago fully autonomous was only just around the corner - as in five years away - but now nobody is talking of much more than improved lane keeping assist grade safety features, stopping if someone walks in front of the car rather than navigating a whole city including small streets.<p>The scale of autonomous has been misleading. Either something is autonomous or it isn&#x27;t. &#x27;Level x&#x27; autonomy is marketing speak.<p>I am quite happy with incremental improvements in driving aids, e.g. how Intel MobilEye is advertised. Spaceboy Elon sold it all to us as an impossible future. I reckon that Apple probably got on board the electric autonomous driving bandwagon but can&#x27;t perform the required magic. You can hire all the engineers you want to build magic things but after a while there is no point paying them if the magic is not going to happen. They may well have pivoted to a car type of thing that has great UX instead of &#x27;magic&#x27;.

I really wish companies chasing this far-fetched dream of an autonomous car instead invested in their local transit authorities to make public transit free for all.

Any stats on how many employees they had to start with? If it was a team of 500 vs 2500 that changes how I&#x27;d view this heavily.

A lot of negativity here. Hey maybe Apple has figured out autonomous car and no longer needs that 200 employees!

It always seems odd that huge tech giants like this lay off certain sectors. Are they dumping them because they don&#x27;t have anywhere else that they&#x27;d be useful to Apple? Surely recruiting is harder than moving someone laterally in the company.

In dense urban environments, like say FiDi areas - why not have sensor and car-control infrastructure integrated into the city streets&#x2F;curbs&#x2F;sidewalks.<p>One doesnt have to realy on the most amazing sensors in a car if the city can be responsible for driving the vehicles down its pathways.<p>Let the car enter a given area and relinquish a certain amount of control from the car to the environment it is in.<p>Let the traffic light system dictate what cars are movingg in which direction.<p>Ensure that the cars never enter a crosswalk or bike lane etc.<p>once you leave the area - you then have whatever control of the car you would normally.

Although they aren&#x27;t shutting down, I was thinking that even if they did, Apple can just wait for the dust to settle and buy one of the existing&#x2F;growing players once the technology is proven out (they definitely have the cash to do it).<p>Spending a lot of money and trying to catch up to Waymo&#x2F;Zoox&#x2F;Cruise etc is also kinda hard, even for Apple, because of all of the pieces of the stack they need to work on and access to a very competitive&#x2F;small talent pool.

Did they get laid-off or reassigned? The article is vague.

Right now roads are designed for &quot;human sensors.&quot; At some point we&#x27;ll need to redesign the roads for new kinds of sensors. I have no idea what this will look like, maybe all the roads will have RFID in them or some other tech. I think that&#x27;s the hurdle we haven&#x27;t gotten past yet, recognizing we need new roads.

How can 200 employees have any significance when talking about such a huge project as autonomous Car ?

The autonomous car community is learning the same lesson the aviation community found. Autopilot is a very powerful tool that increases safety, but it doesn’t replace pilots. Similarly car automation will increase safety but it won’t broadly replace drivers.

In what is being billed internally as a restructuring effort, Apple this week released more than 200 employees from its &quot;Project Titan&quot; group, a secretive branch of the company focused on developing self-driving car technologies.

At the risk of offending some folks, let me offer some conclusions based on living near the Waymo facilities for 4+ years. Their autonomous cars are already driving better than about 30% of the licensed people on the road in my town.

haven&#x27;t seen those cars in Sunnyvale for something like a couple months. The cars are really heavy on sensors, so Apple shouldn&#x27;t have issues with detailed 3d scene acquisition, it is probably understanding of the scene is where they struggle - not surprising giving that they are hardware company and for example behind the likes of Google in the AI dept.

The couple of now former Apple Titan employees I know all took new jobs in the last six months. This has been coming for a while.

Making room for that TSLA acquisition..

I wouldn&#x27;t trust an Apple self-driving car. If i saw one i would start running.

All the best Apple for your future endeavors.!!

Well, that was quick.

When you can&#x27;t make a laptop with reliable screens or keyboards, or an iMac lineup that has CPU&#x27;s 2 generations behind.. Maybe it&#x27;s time to shut down the stupid vanity projects and focus on your core business instead?

Welcome to the trough of disillusionment.

I can only imagine Apple selling cars like they currently do their hardware. They ship a product that had multiple design defects. Then deny the claims or blame it on the users, until the users start suing them. Having people beta test your phones is one thing. But in no way do I trust a vehicle made by Apple on the roads.

Let&#x27;s be honest, Apple hasn&#x27;t been able to ship a decent, non-defective computer in many years, now.<p>I would be extremely scared of driving a car where the steering wheel or breaks got stuck from dust particles like their keyboards (but the break pedal is over 85% thinner!).<p>Apple is still able to sell stuff because they&#x27;re milking the successful products of the last years when Steve Jobs was still alive, but the situation is quickly shifting. Personally, I switched from Apple to Linux and just bought an absolutely wonderful Surface Book 2 (yup, EUR 2000), and it&#x27;s the best computer I&#x27;ve ever owned. Compared to my last, defective, keeeey-repeeeating MacBook Pro it has a detachable screen so that it can turn into a tablet or you can fold it for presentations, touchscreen, awesome design, and the screen is 3:2 so I can see more text. I had been a customer for over 10 years.