Apple was rumored for over a year to be working on "Project Titan" — a presumably all-electric Apple Car that would drive itself and revolutionize transportation just as the Cupertino giant transformed music with the iPod and communications with the iPhone.
The project fell apart and was reorganized around software rather than an actual car. But evidence about what Apple was up to had trickled out. There was a van rigged up with some sort of self-driving or mapping tech, for example.
But the pièce de résistance was a grainy shot of the interior of an Apple training vehicle, outfitted with technology that looked like a summer computer camp project undertaken by high-schoolers.
Compared with Google's groovy little pod-like cars, this was both odd and alarming.