The Ledger, every show

“So anyways, it'll be Ternus or Sabi or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. So we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are turning towards Ternus.”

“The big AI thing for Apple is the revamped Siri coming out in the spring. They're using a Google Gemini model to power it, which I think is going to make it pretty top tier.”

“Anthropic wanted multiples of billions. I believe starting in a billion in year one and doubling every year thereafter, at least for the next three years.”

“It's for sure not going to be Craig. It's not going to be Deirdre. It's not going to be Eddie. It's not going to be Jaws.”

“First, on the perplexity, when I was the one who broke that, that was real. That did not come from perplexity. The idea there was Apple was sort of scared out of its mind that it was going to lose this Google search deal. It was a very real possibility the jud…”

“I do believe they continue to be on the hunt for smaller AI M&A deals. In addition to perplexity, they looked at Mistral which developed their own LLMs and related technology out of Europe.”

“And he made the decision ultimately to recommend that Apple winds down this car program. He thought it couldn't be done. He didn't know, ah, when they'd be able to pull off autonomy, and so him alongside Williams, you know, ultimately wound down the Titan proj…”

“And so they set themselves up for a pretty nice upgrade cycle, and you're gonna see that with their first hundred forty billion dollar quarter. When they report at the end of January, early February.”

“I don't think they're gonna make a name change, but they should.”

“Apple is paying Google.”

“You can also bet, at some point, they'll probably figure out their own model to replace the Google thing, so I don't think it's a long-term bet.”

“What they haven't talked about Is AI web search. And so the new Siri is also going to have a chat GPT perplexity competitor for things like deep research and summarizing search. That is going to be an Apple built, an Apple powered system.”

“The first version won't have displays, like the older metal Ray-Bans or the base level metal Ray-Bans. Those are coming out in twenty-twenty-seven.”

“You know, they've also been working on AirPods like I'm wearing with cameras in there as well, and so I think there's actually a bake-off going on internally too.”

“The current Meta's, they have one screen in them. The second generation version will have displays in, in, in both eyes.”

“What you're going to see is Google come into this space, too. They're going to launch, you know, their smart glasses with Samsung in a few months, their glasses with Warby Parker and a few other glasses brands in a few months, and there's going to be a lot of …”

“And so the decision was made to delay their planned release date a couple years to the twenty-twenty-eight, twenty-twenty-nine time frame, so about five, six years from now, and re-architect the car around a level two, two-plus design.”

“And this was clear admission of failure and admission of a need to disperse some of the resources from that program to other projects at the company, such as the work going on in generative artificial intelligence.”

“Initially, the first part of the car project was examining what it would take to acquire Tesla, integrate Tesla, and take Tesla to a new level under Apple ownership. And so they spent a lot of time exploring the possibility of acquiring Tesla. Apple's head of …”

“They had ideas about not having windows that can open. And so instead of that, they put microphones outside the car with a, you know, a high tech spatial audio system inside the car that could present The user with the feeling that they have open windows.”

“There were other strange ideas, such as not having windows on the front or the back of the car, and the idea being that the front and back look identical, so the car could drive in either direction, and it's always driving forward.”

“There was talk of having a game controller-like interface in the car to be able to drive the car, because the big idea was having no pedal or steering wheels, of course. The other idea was being able to call into a 24 seven Apple Command Center and have them d…”

“So certainly they were thinking and putting an incredible amount of time into fallback options for the autonomy because they were Till about two years ago, very much all in on the lack of pedals or steering wheels.”

“He implemented a lot of the fail safes for the backup to the autonomy, but he ran into issue after issue related to disagreement, Indecision from top Apple executives, including Tim Cook and really a desire to bring something to market while having this inhere…”

“He was making a hundred million a year a few years ago. Then everyone flipped out, and he had no choice but to cut his pay because they were kind of sick and tired of the backlash, right?”

“They're not taking that away. They're not taking it away.”

“When this new Siri starts working, when it has those upgraded technologies that mean that I can call an Uber for my phone and know that it's actually going to happen, then they'll be able to come to those financial agreements because people are going to start …”

“They're trying to get this consumer version of the glasses out on the market next year.”

“And I think that the very core of the car looked something like the Volkswagen ID Buzz, Which is their, you know, new generation concept reimagining of the 19 fifties, 19 sixties micro bus, right?”

“The Vision Pro went on sale in February, 2024, so a little bit earlier this year. But development of that project kicked off around the same time as the Apple Car project, and you can argue the Vision Pro was an eight, nine, year, 10 program as well.”

“Flew throughout the world to meet with different car manufacturers. They held discussions with Mercedes, Volkswagen, BMW, McLaren, self-driving company called Canoe. If you can name the company, they thought about working with them in some fashion.”

“The big disagreement that, that Apple was facing from the get-go of the project was the level of autonomy to work through, right? Would it be something close to no autonomy? Would it be something like level two, like you see in a Tesla? Would it be level five …”

“Well, certainly the first embarrassment started to come out around 2016, 2017, when they had to do the first major pivot of the project, which was refocusing around that autonomous driving system, paring back some engineering and operations related to the deve…”

“The first time that I caught wind that Apple was developing an electric vehicle was probably about eight or nine years ago when I had found out they have started to hire people from the automotive industry and from the AI industry related to autonomous driving…”