We've been telling you thi for year — Apple Car re earch wa n't lit on fire, and the fruit of Apple' labor on it will be een in artificial intelligence performance in the M7 and M8 proce or.
Before AI u ed to be called Apple' bigge t failure, that title went to the Apple Car which wa cancelled after ten year of development and ten billion dollar of inve tment. AppleIn ider argued at the time that Apple Car re earch would pay off, but now both of the e failure are being reca t a po itive , with Bloomberg aying thi re earch i being u ed in de igning future AI proce or .
The report claim that for the future M7 and M8 proce or , Apple i concentrating more on AI upport than on i ue uch a overall peed and power efficiency. Thi reportedly mean that the e chip de ign for the Mac and Apple Intelligence erver are ba ed on the company' effort toward a elf-driving car.
When that car wa cancelled in 2024, AppleIn ider aid exactly thi ba ed on how, for one thing, Apple Car taff were redeployed to what wa then John Giannandrea' AI team. But there had long been clue and even, for Apple, clo e to public confirmation that the Car wa an AI project.
"We're focu ing on autonomou y tem ," began Tim Cook a long ago a June 2017, "and clearly, one purpo e of autonomou y tem are elf-driving car . There are other ."
Ju t aying that much wa unu ual for Apple, which normally never comment on future product or plan . Yet Cook went further and pecified why Apple wa doing a car.
"We ort of ee it a the mother of all AI project ," he aid. "It' probably one of the mo t difficult AI project actually to work on and o autonomy i omething that' incredibly exciting for u , but we'll ee where it take u ."
That wa nine year ago, half a decade before ChatGPT wa relea ed to the public. Yet perhap becau e Apple u ually referred to it a Machine Learning, the con en u in the technology indu try kept being that Apple wa caught out by AI.
Apple ha certainly been behind compared to the ma ive pending on AI datacenter , but it' meant that it al o ha n't over pent. In June 2026, for example, it wa revealed that OpenAI wa lo ing $1.25 for every $1 it earned, and inve tor are turning back to Apple.
