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What if Apple bought Tesla?

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41–48 of 48 posts

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#41

Apple is such an absolutely massive company, but Musk makes them look so small. On the one hand, Apple has more brand recognition and cash than God. On the other hand, when you spend your time dreaming about electric cars, rockets, and hyperloops... who would want to play with laptops? Musk plays the game on an entirely different level. I think Sergey Brin understands this. Google is playing on that level. Self-drivi…

>>The future will be a different world, and while Apple shaped much of the last 20 years, I'm afraid that time is over. This statement is a very good example of how successful Apple's secrecy practices are. You look at Google and seeing all the "cool" shit they are publicizing. Glass, robots, NLP, and so on. You then look at Apple and see... nothing. Maybe a few speculative press release from mysterious "sources" but…

>>iPhone was released from a similar position of extreme secrecy.

Every one knew that a iPhone was coming. The surprise was just how radically different the UI was. The kind of thing they had packed in such a small place.

The surprise was what iPhone was, not if apple was building a phone. The latter was very well known.

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#42

What if Tesla bought Apple, and then Elon Musk turned out to be a pawn of the Agricultural Bank of China?

Can you elaborate? I don't get it.

Well... Apple is more or less top dog now. But sooner or later a bigger fish will swim up to them :) I found the idea of Apple buying Tesla funny, because in my eyes Tesla could very well be the bigger fish in the future. Does the Chinese reference need explaining given this context? :P

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#43

Apple is such an absolutely massive company, but Musk makes them look so small. On the one hand, Apple has more brand recognition and cash than God. On the other hand, when you spend your time dreaming about electric cars, rockets, and hyperloops... who would want to play with laptops? Musk plays the game on an entirely different level. I think Sergey Brin understands this. Google is playing on that level. Self-drivi…

Don't underestimate that Apple has a good grasp of the cutting edge technologies even if they are not building those things themselves and putting out beta after beta. What Apple have a knack for is waiting until the technology is at a stage where there is a real and legitimate consumer use for the technology and refine it down to where its practically usable. Futurist tech list google glass and self driving cars is…

Sorry but if that were true Apple would have already replaced the Google search engine.

Technology isn't what you can just search on the internet and copy paste. It takes years to continually build and tune technology that powers things like Google.

The thing about Google is the mere scale of research in AI and other areas going into building things like self driving cars isn't something your average programming team can code up in 6 months when given the requirements. There are a lot of hard problems, that take time.

Things like iPhone, iPod etc. No matter how radically different in UI aren't in the same scale of technology comparison as a search engines or a self driving cars are. The latter takes time, a lot of effort, and precious brain cycles applied to core science topics over a lot of time to achieve.

The difference is like inventing a drug to cure cancer, and comparing it with software to distribute it. No matter how difficult the latter is, there is no way you can compare it with former.

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#44
post #20

This is a great test of whether you "get" Apple. A lot of comments about what Apple should be doing, like how to take more market share from Android or Windows, actually make zero sense for Apple. This one actually does make sense. The right kind of perspective on this is -- and it will make some people apoplectic -- future cars are like iPads with wheels. They both are basically giant batteries with very sophisticat…

I'm not sure why you think to look at car sales in terms of 'how a car looks and feels'. There are manufacturers like BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari etc who have already solved those problems. And not just merely that. A lot of sophisticated software already runs in cars.

These days, nearly every car manufacturer has high end cars which have these.

Unless you have simply too radical a thing to offer, everything what you say already exists.

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#45
post #29

Is it possible the meetings were about batteries? Tesla is going to start making their own batteries. Apple uses a lot of batteries. http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24531612/tesla-motors...

Totally possible, it might be for the battery or for may be its not buying but just sharing of technology. For. e.g. give battery technology and take dashboard technology.

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#47
post #20

This is a great test of whether you "get" Apple. A lot of comments about what Apple should be doing, like how to take more market share from Android or Windows, actually make zero sense for Apple. This one actually does make sense. The right kind of perspective on this is -- and it will make some people apoplectic -- future cars are like iPads with wheels. They both are basically giant batteries with very sophisticat…

50% of the luxury market?

iCar Mini?

Re: What if Apple bought Tesla?

#48
post #44
post #20

This is a great test of whether you "get" Apple. A lot of comments about what Apple should be doing, like how to take more market share from Android or Windows, actually make zero sense for Apple. This one actually does make sense. The right kind of perspective on this is -- and it will make some people apoplectic -- future cars are like iPads with wheels. They both are basically giant batteries with very sophisticat…

I'm not sure why you think to look at car sales in terms of 'how a car looks and feels'. There are manufacturers like BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Ferrari etc who have already solved those problems. And not just merely that. A lot of sophisticated software already runs in cars. These days, nearly every car manufacturer has high end cars which have these. Unless you have simply too radical a thing to offer, everything what…

You don't get it. You're still looking at Apple as just a brand.

The iPhone didn't just have a different "look and feel". It redefined the category and obsoleted everything else overnight. That same process could happen with cars.

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