Launching a rocket from Earth surface looks like such a complex challenge not completely solved, and companies consider a 30-seconds journey a great success.
I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.
Why would we launch from the moon to LEO, we are building sats (and humans) on the earth?
Assuming you mean getting materials from the moon, such as ice, the problems is that it would take 100s of billion in investment on the moon to do that practically. Everything from mining robots, transport and launch infrastructure. Plus infrastructure in LEO to refine that stuff.
If you do the math, assuming you have something like Starship, for those 100 billion to pay for itself, you likely would require an absolute absurd amount of materials from the moon. And on earth we have all the materials, refining capabilities and so on. Far, far cheaper to just launch it from earth in its final required form.
Unless you really want to build a fleet of inter-generational spaceship to explore the outersolar system, this is unlikely going to be make sense.
If you really, really want to transport stuff from the moon to LEO (for some reason), as long as it is basically ice, then its better to use some kind of mass accelerator.
> would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit?
You need the rocket to get to LEO or the moon. Once you're actually in LEO your propulsion system needs relatively little thrust, but you've replaced a moderately hard problem of launching from earth with a much bigger one of assembling things in orbit using material that's already there...
there are lots and lots of proposals for doing this more cheaply. Most require megascale engineering, and would be a huge benefit to humanity if we could do it.
Some examples -- skyhooks -- large counterweighted swinging things that reach down into upper atmosphere and spin you right round baby right round -- a bunch of gravity assisted momentum ideas where you get the sun or the earth or what have you to get you really going, and then use that momentum to get a little thing up and moving more quickly. Space elevators -- hang a giant heavy thing out off one end, and drop a cable made of uninvented nanoscale tech down to earth, then just, you know, climb.
And then there's orbital construction, which requires some .. construction materials. The long standing idea has been to either go out to the asteroids and build there, or bring an asteroid or two here. Both have a lot of problems, and are a long way off. I think it's most likely that human governments will opt not to have the ability to make giant tungsten rods hanging over their countries, and will, to the extent moving an asteroid were ever viable, require they be a long way away, or alternately that we just go to the asteroids and construct elsewhere.
We are like maybe a century from all this being viable, and that's if companies like SpaceX keep moving at the clip they've been moving for that century.
But learning if those climate changes can/could be prevented is valuable lessons. If an asteroid impacted caused the changes, preventing an asteroid strike is close to possible now. Super volcano eruption would be much less avoidable. Maybe in a few hundred years someone can look back to see if the mechanization of man made a preventable difference. It just might not be man that is doing the looking.
> What if Apple would put all that money back into developing its own search engine?! That would be beating Google with its own money!
But then they would loose the $18 billion each year they got from Google.
By keeping Google as the default search engine - they get free money and send Apple users to the search engine they probably want to use, without being targeted with the flack Google gets for tracking/mingling ads with search etc.
This also makes the assumption that simply having money will equal a great product.
It takes the right engineers with the right management, and a lot of focus and iteration. You don’t just throw money in a hole and get a great product back.
A lot of companies have had plenty of VC to try beat Google and they haven’t, Microsoft has been trying forever and they still haven’t and they have billions of dollars.
By most reports I'm hearing lately, it's doing quite well, better than Google Maps in a lot of ways. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't vouch for it myself.
You can certainly pick&choose user comments, but aggregate statistics suggest that apple maps have ~10% of the maps market. Although it's not clear what that number would be if they ever released their maps for Android, it's a good indication that they are a distant second at best. Note that this is a _much easier_ problem to solve than search, and they have not been able to dominate it, 11 years after launch, despite their tight control of their platform.
Slight tangent, but I bet apple maps would have a much greater market share if maps.apple.com actually showed something useful. If I go to maps.google.com, I see maps, which is exactly why it's popular.
Do you have a citation for these numbers? I'm not at all sure how one would go about measuring that. I see some sources from 2020 claiming ~10%, but it's not clear to me where they're getting that information, and it's old info.
It’s been better than Google Maps for years for me. Not designed to sell ads (I don’t need to see every McDonald’s on the eastern seaboard) and the directions tended to be safer and more accurate on timing by relying less on dangerous moves like unprotected left turns on major roads.
I prefer these days while it doesn’t have a feature parody with Google maps. It has a much cleaner interface, doesn’t have ads and half the time gives us better search results.
Billions have been invested in making a better Google than Google by other entities but most people just want Google.
Even if Apple did make a search engine, that’s no guarantee iPhone users would want to use it, and if Google and nobody else paid Apple a penny to be the default, there’s better than even odds Google would still be the default.
Look, I like Apple too but don’t get too high on their supply.
Apple does the possible but extremely challenging, frequently. Given enough time and money, they probably could be at least competitive with Google, but how much time? How much money? What are the opportunity costs to doing this and not investing somewhere else where they are either stronger or there’s a more lucrative future business to be had (like their mixed reality headset)?
There would be an opportunity cost even without Google’s money. Google may not be what it once was but it is definitely still the best in the free-tier search engines you can use today and in 2007 it was several heads and shoulders above anything else Apple could have picked as the default on iPhones.
If payment from Google (or anyone else) isn’t a factor in what Apple uses as the Safari default, it is not at all clear that this change alone would make it worth Apple’s time to develop their own search engine. You have an easier argument with that change, but it’s not a slam dunk.
When I walk in the mountains here I am walking in a big empty green square according to Google :S Same with Apple.
Meanwhile OSM knows every little trail including surface and gradients <3 It's amazing. And I can turn on layers so I only se the things I need and not everything else.
And not just there, also when walking in the city. Little shortcuts are often not on Google maps at all. The only thing where I see Google beat it is live public transport information.
And perhaps traffic but I don't drive so I don't know how good that is.
> What if Apple would put all that money back into developing its own search engine?!
They have 50B cash on hand, I don't think the money would be the limiting factor if they wanted to do it or think they are in a position where they could do it.
It's safe to assume Apple executives look at Bing and estimate the costs and potential ROI when considering their own plans for an in-house search engine.
Also they don't have to spend it all at once, they have been crawling the web for a long time already and are not starting from scratch. So far it's just more in the background and integrated into the OS (Siri etc.)
That ~$11 billion is revenue not profit. We'd have to compare Bing's lower profit numbers to the various reports ($4-$7 billion? $18 billion?) of Apple payments from Google.
Microsoft doesn't break out profit/loss for Bing in its financial reports so we (as outsiders) can't calculate an ROI. It's probable that Apple has enough inside info from Microsoft to determine if the ROI makes sense for them.
That’s a good point to being up. Apple’s entire pile of cash is just under three years of Google payments. This tells me Apple’s been spending the money on other things. “Replace Google Search” probably isn’t high on their list of priorities, as opposed to Microsoft who seem really intent at it.
It is pretty amazing to realize Apple's oft-commented upon huge pile of cash could be entirely attributed to google payments...
And to me makes it make sense that a company with enough control over search that they can pay other companies 18 billion a year to maintain that control, may be an antitrust issue. I don't actually know much about antitrust law, but it seems like paying competitors to stay out of your business to maintain your monopoly might run afoul of it.
Your argument for control is 180° wrong: Apple has the control and that is why it can demand excessive payment.
I don't understand the stereotypical anti-Google sentiment. Clearly Apple are getting paid an excess amount here because they control the default.
Apple could swap to Bing and few people would notice the difference.
Apple 2022: $99.8 billion profit (over 1 year)
Google Q4 2022: $18.16 billion profit on $76 billion in revenue (over 3 months).
Apple App store profit: The App Store generated US$1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022, Apple has revealed. More than 90 percent of the billings and sales went to developers and businesses without a commission being taken by Apple. https://itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/apple-s-app-store...
I don't understand the stereotypical anti-Google sentiment. Clearly Apple are getting paid an excess amount here because they control the default.
I use duckduckgo which is backed by Bing. Apple doesn't use Bing because Apple can extract monopoly rents from Google. Who's the bad guy here? 18 billion a year is a lot of money relative to the profits of the companies. For comparison, Apple seems to make more from its searchbox than it does from the App Store (widely regarded as usurous).
And as we know, "free" search is really just a way to sell ads. So Apple would be effectively getting into the ads business and competing with google on that front. I hope I speak for other Apple users when I say we don't want that. I pay the Apple tax to have some of my privacy respected and a less ad-riddled OS.
Apple could theoretically use search as a way to compel people to buy Apple devices, or to become iCloud subscribers, or whatever. It doesn't have to be an advertising business. That is a manoeuvre they are quite familiar with.
In reality, I'm not sure Apple could actually create a search engine that is compelling enough against the competition to see people drawn into the Apple ecosystem, but in theory...
They would need an entire ad ecosystem to monetize that search, to make the $18 billion back.
That's a lot of work, likely far more work than building decent search in the first place. They'd rather let Google get their hands dirty, claim the moral hight ground, and take the rent.
> They would need an entire ad ecosystem to monetize that search, to make the $18 billion back.
Why? How does Apple monetize their software and their hardware today? It is not with an ad ecosystem. If Apple offers superior search on their devices, that is yet another reason for customers to purchase their hardware. Could that be worth $18B per year? That's 4-5% of their total revenue, which sounds like a lot. Development costs for a search engine can be discounted, as it wouldn't cost Apple more than a few million dollars to make a better search engine than Google.
For Apple, developing a new modern search engine will create an extremely broad array of legal, technical, ethical and political problems (think about running a search engine in China) if you want to keep the business sustainable, not even profitable! In that sense, when you can outsource this to someone else and get some sweet money even for the Apple's scale, why wouldn't you do that?
I have sincerely no intention to trivialize this, but would we ever see rockets launched from Moon or low Earth orbit? It seems so inefficient to launch like how we do now.