In 2012, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was asked by TV host Charlie Rose whether his e-commerce company would ever venture into brick-and-mortar stores. Bezos said shoppers were well-served by existing physical retailers and that Amazon wasn’t interested in launching a “me-too” product.
“We want to do something that’s uniquely Amazon,” Bezos said. “If we can find that idea, and we haven’t found it yet, but if we can find that idea, we would love to open physical stores.”
Six years later, Amazon landed on a revolutionary retail concept that it hoped would transform how people shop in brick-and-mortar stores. The company launched its first Amazon Go convenience store featuring a new kind of technology, called “Just Walk Out.”
In practice, customers would be able to load up their cart and exit the store without standing in a checkout line. Amazon soon brought cashierless checkout to its Fresh supermarkets and two Whole Foods locations. In 2020, the company began licensing Just Walk Out technology to third parties, signing on retailers in stadiums, airports and hospitals.
But the company has since taken a sideways turn.
In April, Amazon announced it was removing cashierless checkout from its U.S. Fresh stores and Whole Foods locations, a move that coincided with CEO Andy Jassy’s efforts to rein in costs to meet rapidly changing macro conditions.
In place of Just Walk Out, which typically requires ceiling-mounted cameras, shelf sensors and gated entry points, Amazon Fresh stores and Whole Foods supermarkets will feature Dash Carts. The carts track and tally up items as shoppers place them in bags, enabling people to skip the checkout line. Amazon continues to use Just Walk Out in its grab-and-go marts and UK Fresh stores.
A woman uses a dash cart during her grocery-shopping at a Whole Foods store as Amazon launches smart shopping carts at Whole Foods stores in San Mateo, California, United States on February 25, 2024. The smart shopping cart makes grocery shopping quicker by allowing customers to scan products right into their cart as they shop and then skip the checkout line.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
The main challenge for Amazon and other startups working on autonomous checkout is the need to scale it to enough locations and retail categories that it becomes a natural part of in-store shopping, said Jordan Berke, founder and CEO of retail consulting firm Tomorrow.
“Until that’s the case, it’s an uphill battle,” Berke said. “These technology providers, Amazon included, are going to have to subsidize and continue to invest to train the retailer, train the consumer, train the market, that this is a mainstream experience that we can all trust and not need to think about as we walk in and out of a store.”
‘The hardest problem to solve’
At one point Amazon saw Just Walk Out becoming a core part of the experience of shopping in its physical stores. The company in 2018 planned to open as many as 3,000 Amazon Go stores within a few years, Bloomberg reported at the time, citing people familiar with the plans.
Bezos had assigned top talent from across the company, including a longtime Amazon executive who built the original Kindle e-reader, to work on cashierless checkout. The technology was considered a key ingredient in Amazon’s long-running pursuit to become a giant in the $1.6 trillion U.S. grocery market.
When Amazon debuted Just Walk Out in January 2018, it was a “quake moment” for the industry, causing Walmart and “almost every other retailer” to leap into action and consider developing their own vision-based checkout systems, said Berke, who previously led Walmart’s e-commerce business in China.
Amazon and other retailers soon learned that automating the checkout process is “the hardest problem to solve,” Berke said. Cashierless checkout systems require a hefty upfront investment to blanket a store with overhead cameras and hire staff to label and review shopping data.
“It meant a store had to dramatically increase its sales in order to pay off that investment,” Berke said.
Walmart teams found as part of a cost analysis in early 2019 that it would run a retailer between $10 million and $15 million to create a similar computer vision-based checkout system for a 40,000 square foot supermarket, Berke said.
Just Walk Out became an expensive project for Amazon, too. In 2019 and 2020, the company shelled out roughly $1 billion per year, including research and development costs and capital expenditures, to “learn and scale” the technology, Berke said. He said those figures are based on discussions with a former Just Walk Out executive who left Amazon to join Walmart.Amazon didn’t provide a comment on the figures.
Many retailers have since moved on from computer vision in favor of simpler methods like mobile checkout through an app, Berke said.
While it’s no longer featuring Just Walk Out as prominently in its own stores, Amazon says it has inked deals with a growing list of customers. More than 200 third-party stores have paid Amazon to install the cashierless system. The company expects to double the number of third-party Just Walk Out stores this year, Jon Jenkins, who previously served as vice president of Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, said in a recent interview. Jenkins departed Amazon in late September to become technology chief of electric bike and scooter startup Lime, according to his LinkedIn page.
Jon Jenkins, Amazon’s former vice president of Just Walk Out technology, gives a tour of the mock convenience store where the company tests its cashierless checkout system in Seattle, Washington, on August 22, 2024.
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Jenkins disputed characterizations that Amazon’s phasing out of Just Walk Out from its own supermarkets represents a setback or a sign of the technology’s demise. He said Amazon proved through tests in its own grocery stores that the technology is “incredibly capable,” noting it deployed the system in large supermarkets with “600 people in the store at the same time.”
Other startups such as AiFi and Grabango have developed autonomous systems for supermarkets, convenience stores and other retailers, but widespread adoption has been slow, as the technology remains costly and challenging to operate in large store formats.
Inside the lab
Amazon is still fine-tuning its Just Walk Out technology.
In August, CNBC got the first on-camera look at a mock convenience store where Amazon tests the system before deploying it in third party retailers and its own stores.
The testing lab, which it calls “beverage base camp,” is located in Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. It has faux gates that mimic the experience of scanning your smartphone or credit card to enter a Just Walk Out store. The walls are lined with shelves of typical grab-and-go products like Milky Way bars, pita chips and gum, and there are coolers stocked with Coke cans and other beverages.
Amazon sets up Just Walk Out stores by first creating a 3D scan using LiDAR machines or iPads that help it determine where to place cameras so they have the clearest view.
“The goal is to have the fewest number of cameras possible, so we optimize the camera placement so that we can get enough coverage on each fixture to see what is happening in the store,” Jenkins said.
The system determines what shoppers purchased using several inputs, including the 3D scans, a catalog of product images, the video footage, and weight sensors on the shelves. Amazon in July updated the AI system behind its Just Walk Out technology to handle all the inputs in a store simultaneously.
The new “multi-modal” system can generate receipts faster by more accurately predicting which items shoppers have picked up and put back on shelves. The company said these changes should make it “faster, easier to deploy and more efficient” for retailers who install the system in their stores.
Amazon’s “primary focus” is selling the technology to third-party businesses and deploying it in small to medium-sized store formats, where the system “tends to generate a little better [return on investment],” Jenkins said. Earlier this year, Amazon also began selling its connected grocery carts to third parties.
Amazon in September announced several new third-party Just Walk Out stores at universities and sports stadiums.
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At one Just Walk Out store, inside Seattle’s Lumen Field, home to the NFL’s Seahawks, the company said it boosted sales by 112% last season, with 85% more transactions during the course of a game.
“It was awesome that we had our own stores as the laboratory to sort of build and launch this,” Jenkins said. “But over time, like many things at Amazon, the success of this project and the product will depend on third parties adopting the technology. There will always be more third-party stores in the world than there will be first-party stores.”
Amazon has used a similar playbook in in the past. Amazon Web Services, the company’s wildly successful cloud-computing unit, originated from the company’s need for IT infrastructure to support its fast-growing online retail business. And in recent years, Amazon has leveraged its logistics and fulfillment network to provide services for third parties.
With Just Walk Out, Amazon faces the challenge of convincing retailers that they can trust one of their biggest competitors with handling valuable shopper data.
In 2022, Amazon moved the team behind Just Walk Out from its retail organization to AWS. It marked one of the clearest signals yet that Amazon is serious about selling the technology to other retailers, and could help ease some fears among rivals.
“They’re clearly in sales mode,” said Sucharita Kodali, retail analyst at Forrester Research, in an interview.
Kodali said Amazon still has a “long way to go” before the technology is ubiquitous. Getting there will require patience from Amazon investors and data that shows both retailers and shoppers are embracing the technology.
“There’s almost a viral effect that will occur over time,” she said. “It’s just going to take a long time because you’ve got to cycle through everybody in America having this experience, and for the most part, it’s just Amazon fighting this fight right now.”
On the road to electrifying vehicles, cars and small trucks are getting there. Big rigs, however, pose bigger hurdles.
The trouble with electrifying tractor-trailer trucks is that the tractor component needs more power than the current charging infrastructure can handle and the necessary charging time is long.
Major truck manufacturers like Volvo, Freightliner and Tesla are introducing electric tractor-trailer trucks, but that is still a tiny and inefficient market. Big rigs make up just 10% of the vehicles on the road, but they account for nearly 30% of total vehicle carbon emissions.
Now one startup, California-based Range Energy, is focused not on the tractor but the trailer. They are introducing electrified trailers that power and propel themselves so the tractor has less to pull.
“Everything that is built into the tractor is really built to manage the load of the trailer properly, and what we’re saying is, ‘Well, why don’t we do that directly through our Range system by electrifying the trailer in a way that has never been done before?'” said Ali Javidan, CEO of Range Energy.
The Range Energy system incorporates batteries, a motor that powers one of the trailer’s dual axles and what Javidan refers to as a ‘smart kingpin’ to improve the truck’s efficiency.
“When I push this button to activate the system, the trailer follows me,” Javidan said as he demonstrated the system. “It doesn’t matter if I’m an old Peterbilt semi-truck or a brand new Tesla semi or just me pulling on it with the system activated. The trailer’s mission is to make itself feel weightless.”
The electrified trailer can also refrigerate itself as well as power onboard communications and security systems. It does all of that at a fraction of the cost of diesel.
“If we were to take one of these fleets that runs 3,000 trailers and run it through the range system and essentially incorporate the range system into their fleet, we’re looking at 100 million pounds of CO2 saved per year,” Javidan said. “But even better than that, it equates to about $50 million in fuel savings alone.”
Northern Refrigerated Transportation is piloting the Range trailers in California. The company has previously tried electric tractors but the long charging times were a hurdle, said Ricky Souza, COO at Northern Refrigerated Transportation.
Range Energy’s “trailers seem more of a natural fit because we have to load them, and we load them at night” while the trailers charge, Souza said. “So it’s not more dependent on a driver waiting for it.”
There are, however, some major roadblocks that Northern Refrigerated Transportation must overcome before the company can electrify its entire fleet of more than 300 trucks.
“There’s definitely some infrastructure challenges, like power to the buildings or properties and getting it, and the cost of the unit is more,” Souza said. “That’s part of doing the due diligence to see if you’ll make it back into fuel savings.”
Range Energy has raised $31.5 million so far, and it is backed by R7, UP.Partners, Trousdale Ventures and Yamaha Motor Ventures.
The appeal of Range Energy’s technology is the startup’s different approach to tackling the challenge of electrifying tractor-trailers, said Tyler Engh, R7’s founder and general manager.
“Seventy percent of all freight in the United States is done by trucks, and there’s no one touching a trailer, so if we can electrify the trailer, we could accelerate mass adoption for hybridization or electrification on current fleets that have diesel semis,” Engh said. “The size of what this company could become is exactly what venture capital is set up to do. It could be a humongous return for us.”
As in the EV market for cars, charging infrastructure is still not where it needs to be, but Javidan says trucking companies can leverage the power that’s available at loading docks, as Northern Refrigerated Transportation is doing. Javidan added that Range Energy is able to size the battery pack much closer to what you see in a passenger vehicle than what you see in the large commercial vehicles that are coming out from other big rig companies.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
A series of iPhone 16s on display inside the Apple store at Tun Razak Exchange in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Sept. 20, 2024.
Annice Lyn | Getty Images News | Getty Images
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple in 1997 was simplify Apple’s product lineup. At the time that meant four computers: Two laptops and two desktops, each in a pro and consumer version.
“If we had four great products, that’s all we need,” Jobs said at a product launch in 1998.
Three decades later, Apple’s product lineup is much broader. The company in 2024 launchedfour iPads, four MacBooks, two desktop Macs, one Vision Pro headset, two Apple Watch models and three kinds of AirPods. But when it comes to iPhones, four remains the magic number.
That’s how many iPhones the company has released each year since 2020, and in September, it released the iPhone 16, the iPhone 16 Plus, the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
Apple introduced the four-phone lineup because historically the company’s iPhone sales have seen the strongest growth when it expanded the lineup. If Apple can show growth from the four new phones it releases each year without them cannibalizing one another, that gives the company its best chance to see iPhone sales grow meaningfully for the first time since 2022.
The company doesn’t give sales figures for its individual products, and overall iPhone sales for fiscal 2024 came in at $201.18 billion. That’s relatively flat going back to 2022.
Unfortunately for Jobs’ company, not all of the iPhones are equally popular.
Every year since 2020, one of the new iPhone models has lagged its siblings in sales. This year it’s the iPhone 16 Plus, which lands in the middle of the lineup. At $899 in the U.S., it’s more expensive than the baseline iPhone 16 but cheaper than the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, which have better screens.
DSCC, a research firm focused on the smartphone display industry with estimates derived from the panel supply chain, has picked up on this trend. The shares of the Pro and Pro Max phones have been rising on an annual basis while the Plus model declined from about 21% of total Apple screen orders in 2022 to 10% in 2023, according to DSCC’s data for annual panel procurement through October. While it recovered somewhat to 16% this year, it’s still the lowest volume out of the company’s new iPhones, according to DSCC.
“They’re still really struggling with this fourth model,” DSCC founder Ross Young said.
Other data shows the Plus lagging, too. The iPhone 16 Plus accounted for 4% of overall iPhone sales in the U.S. in the third quarter while both the Pro and Pro Max each accounted for 6% of sales, according to survey findings by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. The regular 16 accounted for 4%, too, although early cycle iPhone sales are heavily weighted toward early adopters and the Pro models, according to CIRP.
The metric only includes a few weeks of the latest model sales in the third quarter, but the 2024 findings are in line with last year’s, where the 15 Plus accounted for 3% of total sales about a month after launch.
Apple’s iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max took the top three spots, respectively, in Counterpoint’s data for the best-selling individual smartphone models around the world in the third quarter of 2024. The Plus model didn’t make the top 10 list.
The Mini and Plus failures
Apple’s Series 16 iPhones are seen on display at the Apple Store, Regent Street on September 20, 2024 in London, England.
Peter Nicholls | Getty Images News | Getty Images
When the iPhone was introduced in 2007 there was one new model per year. The lineup has expanded quite a bit since then, while Apple keeps older models on store shelves as budget options.
In 2014, Apple introduced the iPhone 6 Plus, the first time iPhone came in two sizes, which led to three straight quarters of growth of over 27% in 2015. After Apple released the iPhone X in 2017, raising the price of the highest-end phone and creating a three-model lineup, the company saw three straight quarters of growth of more than 15%.
After Apple moved to a four-phone lineup in 2020, growth surged, hitting 54% in one quarter, although that was partially boosted by the pandemic. But since then, iPhone sales have been basically flat.
When the company introduced the iPhone Mini in 2020, it was the lowest-cost new iPhone at the time, at $699.
Apple kept the same strategy in place in 2021, hoping that the vocal minority of consumers that had previously demanded smaller phones would flock to the device. It didn’t work, and Apple no longer sells a device with a 5.4-inch screen.
By 2022, Apple shifted its approach and introduced the iPhone 14 Plus, which had the same chip and features as the company’s entry level iPhone 14 but a larger screen. That mirrored Apple’s successful strategy from 2014. Apple boosted its panel procurement for the iPhone 14 Plus up to 21% of the total screens it ordered that cycle, according to DSCC.
But the Plus strategy didn’t work as well as it had before.
Is Air next?
The new iPhone 16 Pro model is available at an Apple store in Bangkok, Thailand, on September 20, 2024. Apple now makes available to consumers its new lineup of iPhone 16 models, which are the iPhone 16, Plus, Pro, and Pro Max.
Anusak Laowilas | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Looking ahead, Apple is keeping its four iPhones strategy in place, but it may change the approach it takes to finding a successful fourth model for its 2025 lineup.
Instead of a fourth Mini model at the low end of the lineup or a Plus in the middle, Apple may introduce an Air model at the top of the lineup. An Air offering could be distinguished by a lighter-weight device and a higher starting price, according to an August report by Bloomberg News.
Despite giving it a higher price tag, Apple may have to make a trade-off on the Air device by limiting it to one camera, due to the lighter weight and a slimmer design. Apple’s current high-end phones, the Pro and Pro Max, have three big cameras that add photographic capabilities but also add weight.DSCC’s Young said he expects the screen size of the Air to come in at 6.55 inches, between this year’s Pro and Pro Max sizes.
A new high-end phone could make sense for Apple. In recent years, the Max models have outperformed the lower-end models in sales, suggesting there is stronger demand for more powerful and feature-packed phones at the top of Apple’s lineup than there is for lower-cost models.
In October, Apple signaled that the company had enough stock of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus to meet demand but that the more expensive Pro and Pro Max were still in short supply.
Outside the U.S., Apple’s more expensive models have shown more growth in recent years. In the first three weeks of iPhone 16 sales in China, the 16 Pro and Pro Max models were up 44% compared with last year’s high-end models.
Model preferences also vary across regions, Counterpoint analyst Varun Mishra told CNBC.
“In China, the Pro series is performing well, as consumers there tend to favour the Pro models,” Mishra said in an email. “In India, the Pro series is strong, partly due to a lower launch price compared to last year, thanks to local manufacturing.”
Apple has previously released thinner, lighter models of its existing products in order to raise prices and push the limits of its engineering. In 2008, Apple introduced the MacBook Air, which it marketed by saying that it was thin enough to fit in an envelope. At first, it was more expensive than Apple’s other Macs, starting at $1,799, but over the years, MacBook Air has become Apple’s entry-level laptop.
In 2013, the company did the same thing with its iPad, introducing an iPad Air, with a thinner design, although it was Apple’s flagship new iPad model released that year. Apple now uses the iPad Air as the middle option in its iPad lineup.
For Apple, a shift from Plus to Air could mean more iPhone sales, especially if the new model is priced higher than the other iPhones, which could help Apple expand its margin and continue the recent trend of a higher average iPhone selling price. It could also help focus Apple’s early adopters and fans on one single high-end iPhone model.
“Next year they’re going to try something different,” Young said.
A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives along a street on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
Alphabet-owned Waymo is removing the waitlist for its self-driving service in Los Angeles, marking its largest expansion yet.
Starting Tuesday, anyone in LA will be able to use the Waymo One app to hail a self-driving robotaxi throughout nearly 80 square miles of Los Angeles County, the company said. That includes the 300,000 Angelenos who have been on Waymo’s waitlist.
With more than 3.8 million people, LA marks the third and largest city where the company’s robotaxi service is now fully available. It follows San Francisco, where Waymo One opened citywide in June. The company opened the service in Phoenix in 2020.
“Now is an exciting time to welcome everyone in Los Angeles along for the ride,” Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, said in a news release Tuesday. “Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving. We’re so grateful to all of our first riders in LA, and we can’t wait to serve more riders soon.”
The company has been rapidly expanding its operations over the last year thanks to additional funding.
Waymo closed a $5.6 billion funding round in October to expand its robotaxi service across the U.S. The autonomous vehicle venture is owned by Google parent Alphabet, which led the series C investment in Waymo, alongside earlier backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price.
The robotaxi company now sees more than 150,000 paid rides per week across its three markets via the Waymo One app, the company said Tuesday. That’s up from 100,000 in August.
Waymo in September announced that it partnered with Uber to launch its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in 2025. The next-generation robotaxi from Waymo is a Geely Zeekr that’s equipped with custom sensors and an AI “driver.” Waymo also recently agreed to a multiyear strategic partnership with Hyundai that will add the South Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 electric vehicle to its robotaxi fleet.
The Waymo One service has been embraced by some women who have safety concerns about riding with unknown human drivers. It has also been used by parents to send their teens to school.