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I do wonder if Apple building a car would generate some sort of similar epiphany, related to batteries or not.
Not to mention when it comes to self driving technology Apple probably lags Waymo by a number of years.
FAANGs really need to expand into more and more industries if they expect to continue their hypergrowth. Apple, at 6% of SPY, especially.
When companies with the resources of a FAANG enter industries like that, they're able to make it price competitive quickly.
For example, what Netflix did to the cable industry.
The Tesla Model 3 already embodies the minimalism, software focus, and vertical integration that have driven Apple's success in the phone market. Right down to the custom SoC and capacitive touchscreen in lieu of buttons. I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be. Also, 2024 still seems aggressive to deploy self-driving for real.
There's room for more than one car company like this. If Apple brings high quality, tight fit and finish, elegant design, software focus, vertical integration (including their new M1 processor tech), logistics support (charging station network, maintenance, etc), and "next-level batteries" to the mix, then I'm sure they'll find space in the market.
If Apple can execute with electric cars as they've executed with consumer electronics, then they'll be competing not just with Tesla, but directly with Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, etc.
The Tesla Model 3 already embodies the minimalism, software focus, and vertical integration that have driven Apple's success in the phone market. Right down to the custom SoC and capacitive touchscreen in lieu of buttons. I'm really curious what Apple's differentiators will be. Also, 2024 still seems aggressive to deploy self-driving for real.
Apple has been in and out of the car game for a few years now, with executives coming and going. What I'm about to say will be as meaningful as this hear-say article, but I feel that Apple management, and its shareholders, have no idea what it means to build a car. Things like this need 100% commitment from the management, Cook just doesn't seem like the guy to do it.
Apple could outright buy GM or Ford with cash.
I guess there is a premium you pay when acquiring a public company, but still astounding numbers.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/29/apple-q4-cash-hoard-heres-ho...
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I think Apple is one company I would trust with entering other verticals especially in the hardware space. While phones!=cars, I wouldn't put it beyond their team to deliver on this.
> I wouldn't put it beyond their team to deliver on this. Or beyond their hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to hire a team needed to deliver on this.
They spent about 3/4 the market cap of Mazda to buy Beats.
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>I'm really curious what their differentiators will be Extremely good build quality? Accessories notwithstanding, most of their products look and feel like they were built extremely well. Even their failures like the butterfly keyboard looked and felt like they were built to extremely tight tolerances.
Tolerances and build quality weren't the problem with the butterfly keyboard. It was just a fundamentally flawed design that was not durable enough for real world use.
To be fair to the designers, the height budget they were working with is an extremely hard target to hit for a part that gets as much physical abuse as a keyboard. I was pretty impressed with how passable the keyboard was for typing on, given the height constraint. (However, I was not impressed with the dropped actuations, double actuations, inconsistent key feel after a few months use, broken keycap that my 1-year-old keeps removing and hiding around the house, etc. Overall it ended up being a catastrophically bad design based on poor reliability.)
The biggest problem at company scale was that they couldn't revert to something like their previous keyboard in a shorter time frame. The lesson is to avoid completely locking the whole rest of the system design around a brand new untested part for which there is no alternative. It would have been better to test the new keyboard design in a context like an external iPad keyboard where if it turned out to be a dud there would be an obvious path to an alternative, and customers wouldn't be left with a broken $2000 machine.