If you're asking this question seriously, I have to ask a clarification question: what are we actually talking about? Are we comparing just certain aspects of production of the whole thing? If you think about this from an engineering perspective for even 30 seconds there are so many differences that come to mind.
- Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone
- Must operate in a much wider variety of conditions than a phone
- iPhones don't need to drive themselves
- iPhones don't need to pass crash tests
- Brakes don't exist on iPhones
- Suspension does not exist on iPhones
- iPhones don't propel themselves at 100 mph
- iPhones weight orders of magnitude less than a car
- Regulatory requirements are way less stringent for phones
- Lights
- ...
I'm sort of dumbfounded by the level of conversation here given this is HN and the reputation is one of very thoughtful discourse on current events relating to technology and engineering.
EDIT: line breaks, looks like I'm further contributing to the downward spiral here.
> Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone
I don't think this is true. Most electric cars are re-charged once a day, which is about the same as a phone.
> Must operate in a much wider variety of conditions than a phone
Also, not really true if you look at the range of temperature and conditions an iPhone is rated for. (Including water resistance. Mine went through a washing machine cycle and came out fine.)
> iPhones don't need to pass crash tests
iPhones protected highly delicate components against hard impact on concrete. That requires similar engineering delicacy as protecting human meat in car crashes.
> Brakes... suspension
The complexity of the accelerometers and camera systems deal with similar engineering challenges of the same quality.
> iPhones weight orders of magnitude less than a car
Does weighing less make something harder to engineer? If anything making complex machines that are feather-weight seems more challenging. Certainly you'd acknowledge that smartphones are harder to build than mainframes, even though the latter is an order of magnitude heavier.
> Regulatory requirements are way less stringent for phones
This is true. But given Apple's unrelenting engineering excellence, there's very little chance they'll design a substandard or unsafe product. Therefore regulatory compliance is merely an issue of hiring enough lawyers. Apple has plenty of cash to hire lawyers. Certainly much more than GM.
Each of these comparisons makes sense at only the most superficial level. The automotive industry may have more in common with personal electronics than it did thirty years ago, but forced comparisons belie the unique and complex challenges in shipping a road-legal car.
And yet, that massive gulf is the whole point here.
Apple is treading in 95% unfamiliar waters, but the company has proven time and again this is its secret power. They'd never made portable music players before; they'd never made phones before; they'd never made watches before. A car is simply the ultimate expression of this, bringing to bear all of Apple's experience in entering a market where they have no experience.
I read about this a few years ago. I really had no memory of their attemps.. but what I wonder is how deep they tried to market these attempts at telephony and other devices. in the 90s. Was it more a little side game or did they claim to 'reinvent the phone' back then ? The only similar event I can remember is the newton.
Technically correct! Still, I’m not entirely sure a prototype desk phone that never shipped and a couple of promotional Think Different-branded quartz watches offered much in the way of relevant experience for getting into the smartphone and wearable markets.
Are you seriously comparing smash test on a phone with regulatory crash test on a car? Have you thought about this at all?
Do iPhones have crumple zones designed in? Do they asses performance of the chassis after 30 years of corrosion? Do they operate in 50 degree Dubai or -30 Siberia?
Do they travel at 100 m/h? How many Gs does an SSD (~100) survive as opposed to a human brain (~10)?
I am sorry for namecalling, but this post comes across as very arrogant.
I could just as easily ask you whether cars have to engineer at the scale of 5 nanometers. Or whether cars have to support thousands of third party engineers adding arbitrary add-on components. Or whether automakers worry about hardening their security against nation state actors.
I'm sorry, but do you honestly believe that automobiles are more complex from an engineering standpoint than microelectronics? How could you possibly explain why the microchip was invented 100 years after the automobile?
Every domain has its own engineering challenges. Apples has consistently shown execution excellence across a wide range of disparate areas though. And more importantly an ability to quickly and effectively spin up expertise in new areas. From silicon to machine learning to acoustics to compilers to optics. Read this HBS case study[1] to be amazed at its ability to leverage cross-functional expertise across disparate domains. No large org in the world operates like it. There's a reason AAPL has a 50 times the market cap as GM. There's zero doubt in my mind that if Apple pursues autos, within a decade they'll acquire 5%+ global marketshare.
'whether cars have to engineer at the scale of 5 nanometers'
Thats done by TSMC, but you are right, I have much higher confidence in them producing a car than I do in Apple.
> do you honestly believe that automobiles are more complex from an engineering standpoint than microelectronics?
By two orders of magnitudes, at least! Modern car encompasses microelectronics, safety critical software and hardware design, passenger safety, repairability, corrosion, and thousands of other issues phones and laptops never face. You can't just push an OTA and fix a flawed engine. You can't tell you users 'they are holding it wrong'
> How could you possibly explain why the microchip was invented 100 years after the automobile?
How do you explain that Segway was invented after the microchip?
Tesla designs its own chips, they don't use 5 nanometers but they are working on 7 nanometers. You need to have very good microelectronics to build a modern car.
Yes, car makers have to worry about hardening against nation states. Probably don't do it as well yet however.
However I agree that Apple could go into that direction.
Let me help you. I offered "Lights" as a design requirement unique to vehicles with respect to phones. Without any explanation it leaves the door open to a surface level counter point "Phones also have lights" that requires a functioning brain and the most basic level of reasoning. Lights on modern vehicles (high beams, low beams, DRLs, blinkers, brake lights) are certainly not simple components, especially those on vehicles sold in the EU where the regulatory body has taken up new technology much faster than in the US. This wasn't a dumb point, cell phone lighting requirements are child's play compared with the requirements of a vehicle lighting. It is 100% valid, but was also placed as bait as explained above. Make sense?
Lights are highly regulated but they're very straightforward regulations to follow. If you're not even going to bother to write out a sentence then it's not worth responding to it seriously, because it's hardly a reasonable objection in the first place; any random engineer could handle it solo.
I keep coming back to this in my head, thinking about how superficial this counterpoint is. Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements. In reality, table stakes are LED DRLs, high beams and lowbeams. Matrix LEDs or laser lights that can mask out other vehicles using onboard IR sensors are becoming more common. Additionally there are styling requirements, such as computationally driven welcome and farewell patterns for lock/unlock, and trends to follow like light bars, super thin OLED strips etc.
A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.
> Sure, if your requirement is that you pass regulatory muster, then lighting is "simple" in that you can buy an off the shelf bulb, socket, and housing. But those aren't the requirements.
Yes they are. You don't get to point to random fancy things and call them "requirements".
> A phone light is just a little LED you could buy for a dollar and put on your keychain.
You're taking "phones have lights" too seriously. It was a deliberately vague and useless rebuttal to a deliberately vague and useless point. The real answer is what I already said. Replicating the functionality of a bulb/socket/housing is not hard to such an extent that the only reason to bring up lights is for jokes. So the joke got a joke back.
>> Pack has to go through an order of magnitude more charge cycles than a phone
>I don't think this is true. Most electric cars are re-charged once a day, which is about the same as a phone.
A car has a much longer service life than a phone, at least 3-4x longer. The battery pack, being the most expensive components of the EV, pretty much has to last the life of the car.
> But given Apple's unrelenting engineering excellence, there's very little chance they'll design a substandard or unsafe product. Therefore regulatory compliance is merely an issue of hiring enough lawyers
Wat.
Phone safety compared to car safety is like comparing bottle rocket to Saturn V. If bottle rocket/phone goes south, you generally don't expect loss of life.
Fuck, Tesla can't seem to wrap their head around this. They used standard phone like quality components in car. Which caused stuff to stop working in regular car conditions e.g. noon left in car.
> iPhones definitely have lights.
This has about as much relevance as nothern lights do.
I simply asked a question you know, I'm neither a proponent nor an adversary of anything here.
I get you have a lot of knowledge on the matter.. but you're biased and quite emotional it seems.
You're shifting topic a bit.
You were talking about part count, not part complexity. My iPhone battery doesn't have a cooling system and my car doesn't need to fit in my pocket (<= absurd arguments for the sake or arguing outside of the original question)
How many windows are on an iPhone? Window motors? Window motor switches? Door panels to hold the window motor switches? Mechanical guides for the windows? The little weather striping to keep rain out from inside the doors?
How many doors are there on an iPhone? Door latches? Door locks? Door handles? Door close sensors? Weather stripping to keep the rain out from inside the cabin? The little sticker inside the door listing the OEM specs of tire pressure?
How many wheels are there on an iPhone? How many tires? Wheel lugs? TPMS sensors? TPMS readers? Hubs? Brake rotors? Brake calipers? Brake pads?
You do realize there are several SoC's in modern cars right? There's the ABS and stability systems, torque vectoring systems, lane keeping/driving automation, the infotainment system, and more. Sure they're not made to the 5nm level at the moment, but supply chain wise a 15nm part is about the same as a 5nm part when it comes to making the silicon. This is especially true when you're needing them to be more resilient temperature-wise and have other restrictions needed in the automotive space.
I drive a 2017 Santa Fe. Its a pretty basic car tech-wise compared to many others on the market these days. There's still the computerized ABS and traction control system taking samples thousands of times a second and making split second decisions on how to handle the car. There are radar sensors tracking the distance to vehicles around me, that data is being fed to computer systems for automatic cruise control and alert aids. The car features lane keeping features which is based off computer vision systems to track the lines on the road. The transmission system is computerized, being more like a computer controlled manual transmission rather than a traditional automatic. The infotainment system is obviously driven by some kind of computer and contains WiFi, LTE, Bluetooth, GNSS, satellite, AM, FM, and digital FM radio systems along with cameras and radar sensors.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some additional computerized systems on this list. So honestly there are several iPhones worth of computer systems on this list, all with more extreme hardening requirements to expect a longer deployed lifetime than an iPhone and all of which need to reliably talk to each other in some kind of fashion.
Car infotainment systems run ARM SoCs, much like an iPhone.
To compare the complexity of a car and a phone (any modern phone - they're all fundamentally similar inside) belies immense ignorance of both.
Phones are functionally complex, but physically quite simple. The complexity is dealt with by the chip fab and software. Electronic manufacturing processes are basically the same for every device, and so are very well understood and optimised.
A phone is a model of system abstraction. The incredible complexity of the processor and digital logic is abstracted into little black boxes which are then soldered to a PCB. The assembly is then a straightforward sandwich of all the bits.
I don't think anyone's arguing that phones are not complex, but that cars have an order of magnitude more bits to assemble, and that means manufacturing complexity that the existing manufacturers obtained through decades of iteration.
Tesla's a great example - they completely underestimated the complexity of manufacturing (building the machine to make the machine), spent billions of dollars on it and are still struggling with poor fit and finish.
Of course, any company can put the processes in place to build a modern car - it will just take time. To argue that a phone requires as many assembly processes as a car is simply ludicrous.
I can assure you that only in the instrument cluster and the central console area you have the same amount of complexity as in a smartphone. Now add the rest of the car.
I meant critical component, not seat buttons. People are getting too involved in this.
Nobody gives a damn about the infotainment or door knobs.. it's delegated to one supplier just like a phone charger or any secondary part.
The car mechanics, engine, battery and control units are what I was mostly thinking about.
If Musk keeps on going their EVs car body will be two cast parts, so in terms of supply chain management the complexity is gone into the manufacturing process.
A Tesla has 40+ Electronic Control Units. Even if you just look at that, it's way more complex than a phone. Sure, the powertrain has fewer parts in an EV, but everything else is still the same as a regular car, and all of that stuff is a lot of stuff.
> I can assure you that only in the instrument cluster and the central console area you have the same amount of complexity as in a smartphone. Now add the rest of the car.
Not only that but the regulatory standards of EV in US/EU/Asia varies so widely that I don't see how they can get a product to Market in less than 5-10 years unless they're just making EV clones of what is already out here or partner with a Manufacturer. And burned factories in India are not going to cut it on the logistics and supply chain so they'd need to work that out, too.
I can honestly see them partnering up with Nissan-Mitsubishi Motors who are in dire financial straits and want get out of their alliance with Renault-French Government after all the Ghosn corruption and are taking their entire lineup to EV and want to improve on the in-cabin AR side of things, all of which Apple could help build and have the finance to support it.
Having worked at Nissan I think its focus is on tech and still makes cars to prove and refine it's technology, they had an Aerospace division in Mountain View, and used the supposed 'auto pilot' features Tesla has on some of its Infiniti chassis (lidar based cruise control and lane staying signals) in the early 2000s.
I hope it happens, to be honest I dislike anything Apple makes and I despise their business practices for obvious reasons (Foxxcon) but I'm forced into their ecosystem as of now. I'd like to be open to their products if they it did happen.
This is such a clueless comment. Tesla, a start-up with zero experience in cars managed to make cars without any issue at all and become one of the most popular luxury car makers in the world.
So Apple, the world's most valuable company, isn't going to be able to make their own car? You're dreaming.
I doubt anyone here would say Apple couldn't make their own car, but the idea of Apple mass manufacturing a brand new car in four years is a bit crazy. In your example, Tesla took nearly a decade of focus and half a billion in capital to begin small production of the Model S.
> without any issue at all and become one of the most popular luxury car makers in the world.
I've followed Tesla since the Roadster days, and I lost count how many times they've almost gone Bankrupt. The only one here that is clueless is you if you think it was without 'issue.' Hell, I worked for Kimbal who is on the Board at Tesla and he openly talks about how many times Tesla almost went under in the few interviews/podcasts he's been on. What echo chamber do you live in to think there was no issue?
> This is such a clueless comment.
I've been in Motorsports with close ties to manufactures since I was 17, and then went on to work for Volkswagen Audi Group (the largest manufacture of cars by scale) and then to BMW and then back to VW because of Diesel-gate, then Nissan in various capacities from technician to supply chain. Then I tried my hand at Tesla during Model 3 ramp up and saw FIRST HAND why/how the delay in ramp was occurring in 2017 with 2 trips to the Fremont Factory before deciding to decline and focus on SpaceX instead.
What experience do you have in that Industry to call it clueless?
I know Apple cultists are as rabid as Elon worshipers, but the two combined are completely toxic.
> I doubt anyone here would say Apple couldn't make their own car, but the idea of Apple mass manufacturing a brand new car in four years is a bit crazy. In your example, Tesla took nearly a decade of focus and half a billion in capital to begin small production of the Model S.
In 3 years? A prototype to build hype and take pre-orders that still needs all the regulatory compliance to be on the road ahead of it, sure; a refined 49-1 street legal product that's mass produced with scaled production line, distribution channels and supply chain to accommodate domestic, let alone international, deliveries: HELL NO!
Money alone won't buy you that, especially if COVID is still shutting/delaying down so many factories, International supply lines and look at the distribution system Tesla had to INVENT because it refused to play by the dealership system.
You FAANG guys live in an unrealistic bubble and think because it works for mobile/computers, and I laugh when I say 'works' because look at India, it should work for several ton vehicles with way more complexity and red tape than you can possibly imagine.
You're comparing vastly different Industries that have little to nothing in common.
Nissan just announced that it will be making its EVs in Japan [0] instead of Sunderland, so unless Apple decides to detract from its business model built on slave labour in Asia, chances are it will not happen.
