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I bet you'd also be real stuck on what possible value Apple could bring to building a phone. All the bits that made a feature phone valuable were also outside o

I bet you'd also be real stuck on what possible value Apple could bring to building a phone. All the bits that made a feature phone valuable were also outside of Apple's competencies. Thing is, cars are becoming more like computers.

throwawayzRUU6f 6y ago
The thing is - cars are not like computers and will never be. For most workloads a normal person performs on their computer, the hardware is ridiculously over-provisioned. Most of it is idling 90%+ of the time, the utilized portion is mostly wasted in a sea of inefficiencies. Performance improvements of 100x are not uncommon. To simplify a bit - Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish. Cars are nothing like that; they're already at their efficiency plateau. An improvement of 10% is considered astonishing. Cars are much more like gaming rigs - raw power is required there, the games are already reasonably optimized, and no amount of sleek design and UI polish would hide the lackluster price/performance ratio. There's a reason Apple is not in the gaming business. For Apple to maintain their margins, they'd have to sell something like Nissan Leaf for the price of Tesla Model S.
- tomcam 6y ago
  > Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish. So... doesn’t optimizing and polishing something make it a better product?
  - XorNot 6y ago
    You're missing the point: where are they going to find these gains in the car industry without blowing out the price? Because that's going to bat in the market that Mercedes, BMW and the like are already in. What is Apple going to uniquely improve via it's current core compentencies, as opposed to winding up where Tesla is: a fantastic on paper product that they can't deliver off the production line reliably, with fit and finish issues because they're a young manufacturer shaking out their production lines? Hyundai can do these things, but they're already doing them. Where's Apple sit in there other branding which essentially makes the product a gimmick?
- hollerith 6y ago
  >Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices You don't want to qualify that statement to reflect the fact that Apple just become the clear leader in the market segment that cares about battery life, weight and computing performance?
XorNot 6y ago
Apple weren't replacing feature phones. They were replacing PDAs with the iPhone. Which already had Win CE phone/PDA hybrids in the market, and Blackberry which persisted a good while longer due to market penetration in business. But more importantly, they were integrating something obvious: people wanted an iPod that was also a phone, that was also a PDA. Which meant they got to carry one device, and they wanted that to work well. Apple as a computer manufacturer and software company did have core competencies across these fields. Where is that for the automotive industry though? Apple have nothing to bring to the core issue of transportation which is transportation and their manufacturing expertise is in solid-state electronics, not the automotive supply chain (which is massive). They don't work with traction-scale systems, and they don't work with human enclosures or really any of the types of processes and problems which cars have. The only competency they bring is software, but as a company they don't have a safety-oriented engineering function (AFAIK) so the synergy is essentially "iOS but in the entertainment system". Apples contribution is "the head unit", and maybe that's enough, but that's not an "Apple" car, and that's a problem - they'd be trying to build up a manufacturing capability from scratch and that takes time. It puts them behind Tesla in a race to execute, and as Tesla has been discovering you can't just automate your way out of a lot of the problems there. Which leaves you at, what is an Apple car? It's rebadged Hyundai with an Apple headunit in it.
wbsss4412 6y ago
People seem to be making the point more and more frequently on HN, but it borders on revisionist history. TONS of people saw the utility of the iPhone almost immediately. Camera phones we getter more and more popular, some phones were getting basic web browsing capabilities. When the iPhone was released everyone I knew was immediately interested. The only ridicule from that era was about the price, Ballmer thought it was too high. Making the analogy of the iPhone to a car is a huge stretch.

throwawayzRUU6f 6y ago

The thing is - cars are not like computers and will never be. For most workloads a normal person performs on their computer, the hardware is ridiculously over-provisioned. Most of it is idling 90%+ of the time, the utilized portion is mostly wasted in a sea of inefficiencies. Performance improvements of 100x are not uncommon. To simplify a bit - Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish. Cars are nothing like that; they're already at their efficiency plateau. An improvement of 10% is considered astonishing. Cars are much more like gaming rigs - raw power is required there, the games are already reasonably optimized, and no amount of sleek design and UI polish would hide the lackluster price/performance ratio. There's a reason Apple is not in the gaming business. For Apple to maintain their margins, they'd have to sell something like Nissan Leaf for the price of Tesla Model S.

tomcam 6y ago
> Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices, and concealing that fact by a large amount of optimizations and polish. So... doesn’t optimizing and polishing something make it a better product?
- XorNot 6y ago
  You're missing the point: where are they going to find these gains in the car industry without blowing out the price? Because that's going to bat in the market that Mercedes, BMW and the like are already in. What is Apple going to uniquely improve via it's current core compentencies, as opposed to winding up where Tesla is: a fantastic on paper product that they can't deliver off the production line reliably, with fit and finish issues because they're a young manufacturer shaking out their production lines? Hyundai can do these things, but they're already doing them. Where's Apple sit in there other branding which essentially makes the product a gimmick?
hollerith 6y ago
>Apple's business model boils down to selling mediocre hardware at premium prices You don't want to qualify that statement to reflect the fact that Apple just become the clear leader in the market segment that cares about battery life, weight and computing performance?

XorNot 6y ago

Apple weren't replacing feature phones. They were replacing PDAs with the iPhone. Which already had Win CE phone/PDA hybrids in the market, and Blackberry which persisted a good while longer due to market penetration in business. But more importantly, they were integrating something obvious: people wanted an iPod that was also a phone, that was also a PDA. Which meant they got to carry one device, and they wanted that to work well. Apple as a computer manufacturer and software company did have core competencies across these fields. Where is that for the automotive industry though? Apple have nothing to bring to the core issue of transportation which is transportation and their manufacturing expertise is in solid-state electronics, not the automotive supply chain (which is massive). They don't work with traction-scale systems, and they don't work with human enclosures or really any of the types of processes and problems which cars have. The only competency they bring is software, but as a company they don't have a safety-oriented engineering function (AFAIK) so the synergy is essentially "iOS but in the entertainment system". Apples contribution is "the head unit", and maybe that's enough, but that's not an "Apple" car, and that's a problem - they'd be trying to build up a manufacturing capability from scratch and that takes time. It puts them behind Tesla in a race to execute, and as Tesla has been discovering you can't just automate your way out of a lot of the problems there. Which leaves you at, what is an Apple car? It's rebadged Hyundai with an Apple headunit in it.

wbsss4412 6y ago

People seem to be making the point more and more frequently on HN, but it borders on revisionist history. TONS of people saw the utility of the iPhone almost immediately. Camera phones we getter more and more popular, some phones were getting basic web browsing capabilities. When the iPhone was released everyone I knew was immediately interested. The only ridicule from that era was about the price, Ballmer thought it was too high. Making the analogy of the iPhone to a car is a huge stretch.