Linked List: November 6, 2021

Saturday, 6 November 2021

Apple Hires Tesla Autopilot Software Director ★

Mark Gurman and Dana Hull, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc., bolstering its car-development efforts, hired a former engineer from Tesla Inc. who drew controversy this year for remarks about that company’s Autopilot feature.

The iPhone maker tapped Christopher “CJ” Moore for its team working on a self-driving car, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Moore is working on the effort’s software, reporting to Stuart Bowers, another former Tesla executive who joined Apple at the end of last year. Bowers had led Tesla’s Autopilot team before departing in mid-2019. [...]

At Tesla, Moore implied that Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk had overstated the capabilities of the Autopilot software. Earlier this year, California Department of Motor Vehicles officials interviewed Moore as part of investigations into the self-driving software. The department asked Moore about Musk claiming that Teslas would be capable of fully autonomous driving this year. Moore signaled in response that Musk’s statements didn’t “match engineering reality,” according to a DMV memo summarizing the conversation.

Apple’s car efforts continue to mystify.

Sometimes the Claim Chowder Cooks Quickly ★

Dylan Patel posted this piece on his SemiAnalysis site two months ago, just after Apple’s iPhone 13 event. The headline, to say the least, was eye-catching: “Apple CPU Gains Grind to a Halt and the Future Looks Dim as the Impact From the CPU Engineer Exodus to Nuvia and Rivos Starts to Bleed In”.

His post garnered a lot of attention, and set a pessimistic first impression regarding the A15 Bionic SoC. But Patel’s speculation — based on Apple’s sparse performance information during the keynote — didn’t pan out when reviewers actually got the iPhones 13 into their hands. And it looks even worse now that the M1 Pro and Max are out. And we still haven’t seen Apple’s pro desktop silicon.

Is brain drain going to be a problem for Apple’s silicon efforts years down the road? Could be! But retention of talent across the entire company has long been Apple’s number one concern.