I am still quite confused. There are tons of headlines about Apple going into the car business and the articles are less and less clear about whether they are pure speculation or if they are official statements or have reliable sources.
I don't know I it's because I missed my morning coffee, but I can't tell if this article is speculation or not.
I think it's confirmed that they have a "several hundred to a thousand" employees working on a car project of some kind.
They've also been reportedly poaching car industry employees recently.
Steve Jobs always wanted to make an Apple car, they might be doing some "honor his dream" type of project.
They might be just developing an autonomous system or a battery conversion system, or they might be building a huge fleet of mapping vehicles.
The project is only 1 - 2 years old so there likely isn't much a product yet, and pivoting is very possible.
There is a video of some person chasing a white van with something unknown on the roof and very dark windows near Apple's headquarters. That's fueling some rumors also.
I personally think they should focus on their CarPlay system and partner with manufacturers to pre-install it in cars, but they would need to allow Android phones to use it.
Apple has over 150 billion USD in cash and it doesn't seem like they know what to do with it.
Apple, why not have a large poll on what projects you should invest in?
"Tesla CEO Elon Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek this month that Apple was seeking to hire away his workers, offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases."
Dear Apple, nobody wants one of your closed-source, locked-down, inferior vehicles. Stop poaching Tesla employees you assholes, Tesla is too important for you to wage a money war with them for a side-project that nobody has ever asked for.
I still don't buy Apple is going to make a completely in-house EV. Historically, Apple only innovates in market categories in which the incumbents suck (usually through an order of magnitude improvement in the UI/UX). But Tesla doesn't suck...it's done a pretty damn good job. A partnership with Tesla makes more sense.
I don't think you could argue there were better MP3 players.
About watches, it depends on whether we are considering watches as jewelry (at which they don't suck at all) or as information delivery devices (at which they only deliver one type of information, which is typically readily available everywhere)
My Nokia 3110 was great at making phone calls and quite good at SMS'ing, so in that sense they didn't need to be upgraded. In the same vain we can say that we don't need watches that are better at keeping time. But cellphones of the late 90's sucked at a lot of things that are nice to have in your packet, such as games, news and reading.
So the question is, are there a lot of things other than time that are nice to have on your wrist? If yes, then the market fit Apple perfectly.
I agree. I think the car project is just a way to recruit smart people. What they really want a technical edge in is batteries. Apple pushes design boundaries, making everything thinner and thinner every year. I bet batteries is the biggest design constraint they face in all their products.
Tesla is a teeny tiny portion of the car industry. If Apple is thinking about incumbents, they are morel likely thinking: BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, etc. Maybe even Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc.
As those cars become more and more computerized, it's becoming clear: those companies absolutely suck at software and user interfaces. The interior of most cars today is an absolute chaos of buttons, screens, levers, dials, and indicators. It's like a wrap-around version of this:
Apple has something that Tesla does not: gigantic piles of capital. Apple has around $230 billion in cash, which is more than the annual gross revenue of Ford or GM last year. Apple is ready to scale from day 1. Whereas Tesla is following a careful growth strategy, using each model's sales to fund the R&D on the next.
>Apple has something that Tesla does not: gigantic piles of capital. Apple has around $230 billion in cash, which is more than the annual gross revenue of Ford or GM last year. Apple is ready to scale from day 1. Whereas Tesla is following a careful growth strategy, using each model's sales to fund the R&D on the next.
I don't care if you have a trillion dollars, you can only tool up manufacturing capacity so quickly. "Apple is ready to scale from day 1" is laughable. Cars are not iPhones you can outsource to Foxconn for production.
I don't know I it's because I missed my morning coffee, but I can't tell if this article is speculation or not.