I wonder if they will ever offer AMD Zen retrofits to owners of cars with Intel Atom. If not, I'll never be able to play The Witcher 3 on my car.
Last I read there was an internal letter specifically saying they would not.
IIRC another bit in the thread was someone having been told by an SC the new MCU was tied to the new 16v LiION battery that replaced the standard 12v, so retrofitting the MCU wouldn't be possible right now....but SCs sometimes give wrong info so unclear if that tying is accurate (nor am I clear how difficult retrofitting both the 16v battery and the MCU together would be).
Anyone have any sense on what code it would be? Might be time to dust off the old textbooks.
Flashlight app here I come.
Current MCU is running Linux AFAIK, and on an x86 CPU (in both MCU2 and MCU3 cars) so pretty standard code.
IIRC they're running straight up MAME for all the older atari type games for example.
Point of clarification, if you please:
With respect to the ”Tesla’s App” conjecture - what kind of apps might it be appropriate for a Tesla, as opposed to a platform provider like Apple or Alphabet, to provide? Would it be likely that such apps would…could…should be available other than on vehicles’ screens? For a typical user, would it be easy to “parse” between one’s set of “phone apps” and “Tesla apps”?
A little bit separately, do any have well-founded opinions as to whether the revenues & margins Apple obtains through its universe of apps be appropriate to consider for Tesla?
I think 30% is pretty standard margin, don't see why it wouldn't be appropriate.
That said- the number of apps that make sense to buy for the car (at least before FSD is L3 or higher) is vastly smaller than for a phone.... and the amount of local storage to hold such apps is also much smaller than most modern phones.
Not to mention the entire fleet is only 2ish million vehicles. So total revenue is not gonna be THAT exciting.
Even on phones, where there's a LOT more spend per user likely, average revenue is like $100 per device or something.... at 30% for Tesla that's 30ish million dollars.
It's not nothing- but it's pretty small versus Teslas revenue these days.
Anyway regarding type of apps-
Car-while-parked apps are pretty simple....games mostly I'd imagine, and likely mostly simpler ones (since the addressable market without the hefty S/X GPU is much greater- plus folks are more likely to want games they can play in small bunches at superchargers, rather than sit there for hours playing in their car).....
Media playing apps would be possible there too- but since the car has a web browser that enables both audio and video while parked not sure the value in a seperate app for most stuff there.
The big question would be how much Tesla is willing to allow 3rd party apps to do while the car is in motion. One of the long suggested reasons for resisting apple play was Tesla didn't want to give up control of the screen while the car was in motion. And given the deep integration of the nav with some driving features that's still an issue for things like a Google Maps, Waze, or Abetterrouteplanner type apps.
But those would certainly be among the most desired if Tesla enables integration with the driving systems.... plus maybe some other travel related things for finding hotels, restaurants, etc... (though honestly, not sure what much you get out of that on the car screen vs the phone)
Media apps probably fare a lot better here- since browser isn't an option, and having control on the car is a lot better than on the phone- doubtless some 3/Y owners at least would pay for a Sirius XM app, or audible, or many others.
Now, once FSD is capable of L3 or higher where you're allowed to be "paying attention" to a screen, that changes the game a fair bit and a lot more is possible.
But we're not there yet.
Why not just make an app store compatible with android? I believe that is what Microsoft is doing on windows.
That's....SORT of what MS is doing.
What they're actually doing is having Windows 11 run an Android virtual machine along side the actual Windows 11 OS.
The new Ryzen based MCUs would be able to do this (though depending on the full specs how well they can do it AND do everything else they need to at the same time might be a question)
Atom based MCUs would likely have a lot of trouble doing this.
