421–430 of 699 posts
FAANGs really need to expand into more and more industries if they expect to continue their hypergrowth. Apple, at 6% of SPY, especially.
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And they didn't. Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success. 3GS was the first one that approached the cult status. It tool them 4 generations to get there, and a lot of money.
> Iphone 1 was far from a commercial success. I don't think that's true. For example, less than a year after its release, the iPhone accounted for 28% of smartphones sold in the U.S. (and presumably for a greater percentage of smartphone-sale revenue): see https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/02/iphone-owns-28-perce... . And half a year after that, the news was better still: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/10/ap…
I wonder if Foxconn will have to start building the city to support this very soon. Also I wonder if your car will look so beautiful, be so shiny, that you buy a case for it... will it come in peel off plastic (actually most cars already had this on their bonnets at least when shipping...). Will it be machined out of a single block of aluminium? (More clichés welcome)
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As a company that is running mostly on brand status, Tesla is probably the easiest competitor for Apple to beat in this space. The real competition are the companies that have been building cars for decades.
> As a company that is running mostly on brand status They shipped like half a million cars this year! They own like 70-80% of every EV market they compete in. This is the kind of criticism you'd read about Tesla in 2014. The companies that "have been building cars for decades" are getting stomped by Tesla in this space, 12x more Model 3's were sold than LEAF's in the US last year. At some point the established wisdo…
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Yeah, that’s sort of what I like about the Tesla: the interactions I care about are almost all accessed through the controls on the steering wheel (volume up/down, next/previous track, play/pause, cruise control adjustments) or through sticks. The screen mostly is for setting up music when you first get into the car, navigation, car status info (speed, fsd visualization, speed limit, energy consumption). Also, when c…
Cruise control and playback control on steering wheel are not exclusive to and predate Tesla.
Would Apple be required to make their car parts interchangeable with the generic aftermarket brands and car service centers? IIRC there is a law specifically for car manufacturing. I can imagine a dystopian future with custom non-standard parts, specialist repair centers, restrictions on what you can do with it, Apple being able to track everywhere we go, what we listen to, who is with us, and establishing a network…
I can't even begin to imagine how a walled garden for a car would look like. Perhaps there are examples from already existing car manufacturers.
They started doing that with iPhones.
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One can say many things about Tim Cook, but not that he doesn't understand "business". So if Apple makes a car, they certainly have a plan on how to make a profit from it.
>One can say many things about Tim Cook, but not that he doesn't understand "business". He understands business perfectly, but does he understand product?
This is starting to make increasingly more sense even though Apple making a car seemed laughable a few years ago. Apple is fundamentally now a company that can move immense amounts of capital into new industries with the underlying ethos of user experience. Apple Card was perhaps a dipping of the toes moment. In theory, Tesla shouldn't be worth what it is because the tech behind it is increasingly getting commoditize…
Tesla has the patents. Every other manufacturer will be licensing Tesla’s IP, IMHO.
They execute superbly, had a brilliant strategy of starting as a luxury vehicle to be the beachhead for getting an economy of scale, and were risk takers, but lets not pretend they invented the market. They didn't.
No doubt they have loads of superficial patents though, but Tesla has an open patent policy and a declaration that they won't sue, so that doesn't seem to matter much.
Apple can buy a company like Magna Int with pocket change. Recall that Magna made the "Sony" electric car, bumper to bumper (Sony put in some screens demonstrating a Sony-esque UI), because that's what Magna does -- they're the maker behind a lot of automobiles, either in part or whole. And Magna has loads of patents around the engineering of vehicles because they've been doing it for decades.
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I'm a small time Apple shareholder and have the opposite reaction. Apple is sitting on 300 billion in cash - I expect them to do something with it. They need to move into some other market because their existing ones are tapped out. Cars are a great fit: 1. Big enough market for an investment of 10s of billions 2. Its international (quit a bit of that money is stuck overseas) 3. Making electric cars isn't too hard (s…
> Apple is sitting on 300 billion in cash - I expect them to do something with it. Why can't they just pay it out to shareholders and let them figure out how to invest it?
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I have an Apple Card, I'm unsure of what immense capital they're pouring into it with an underlying ethos of user experience.
RE: User experience - best card I’ve ever used. Integrates with my watch and phone in such a way that I don’t even have to pull it out to pay. Can dispute charges with a single text. Easy to see full details of spending and billing. The cash back pays for my monthly Apple One account too.
Otherwise it has some nice features, comparable to some of my other cards but more tightly integrated with the phone.