Despite all the glittery rhetoric that "a car is just a computer on wheels", this always seemed like a bizarre move for Apple and I've never seen anyone explain what the strategic vision was supposed to be. Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist? Big monitors for watching TV+ in the car? That wouldn't have been remotely enough.
I think it’s a lot more simple than that. They’ll probably buy an existing EV company when they’re serious about entering the market. That’ll give them a head start and they won’t be reinventing the wheel. The acquihire will help bring in talent as well.
Before they released the AirPods, they bought Beats. It would along the same lines but with a way more complex machine.
>Even with full lv5 autonomy, what's Apple's unique twist?
Same as the rest of apples brand: "it just works". The seemless, polished integration of their products gave them a devoted fanbase that pays a huge premium over competition.
Not my point. Why doesn't Apple start manufacturing airplanes that "just work"? Fridges that "just work"? TVs that "just work"? (they did try and give up on TVs because it made no sense) Their brand marketing focuses on creative people; why don't they start making grand pianos? Those make as little sense as a car, and are just as far from Apple's competencies, competitive advantages, and market as a car. Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.
>Companies don't enter random industries just because they can.
Sure they do. Facebook was so confident in VR they rebranded their entire company. Elon Musk got his horrible bluff called out and he owns the largest social media site (for now). It's not business related, but the CEO of Amazon owns a national newspaper.
Apple car didn't come out of nowhere. They and Google were working on Car Os's for years and we both know Apple cares hough about vertical integration to shun off Intel and Nvidia in order to make their own chips. Regardless of my confidence in the idea, the act itself is consistent with Apple.
No one thought they would compete with Netflix and their movies are winning awards now.
No one thought they would cannibalize the iPod with a phone and they did.
The state of US tech companies is that they will also go into new markets. When Netflix came out, did you really think Amazon and Apple would get into that market? To Apple, cars are an untapped sector they'll want to tackle when their existing sectors are saturated.
Its strange to me you have a list full of "no one thought" statements that were all things that most of the people around me at least seemed like things Apple would do. Especially the movies and TV stuff, they already had a big marketplace for movies and hardware for watching movies and TV, other competitors in those spaces were producing original content, it seemed absolutely logical for them to do so as well.
The launch of the iPhone was rumored for a long while and seemed obvious to me and a lot of other people who paid attention to the smartphone space that they'd release something. More and more phones were being sold with music capabilities and were starting to get popular. If Apple didn't release the iPhone within a few years, competitors selling better all-in-one kind of devices (like the modern smartphone today) would have been there. Its just flash memory at the time was still rather expensive for a lot of songs, and even the first generation or two of iPhones had pretty weak storage compared to a regular full-fat iPod.
Apples strategy is to wait and see they are rarely first to put money into something where they can't learn from mistakes of others. iPhone wasn't the first mass produced smartphone and I'd argue Apple is a software company first and foremost, the hardware part is just the means to lock you in.
Cannibalizing your own product is an achievement when done correctly. You don’t see Apple running to add a touch screen to MacBooks because that would cannibalize the iPad.
Let’s take iTunes. People were clowning Apple for releasing Apple Music because they had millions of people buying Music on iTunes. Spotify showed it could work but they weren’t exactly making money over fist.
It’s been like a month. Seriously. That’s a ridiculous hurdle to clear.
“The new Samsung ring came out this morning. At 11:30 the entire management resigned in unison apologizing and cancelled the project due to low sales.”
