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If anyone buys Tesla it likely would be an established car company because Apple buying Tesla would not solve Tesla's second problem. Their first problem is mo

If anyone buys Tesla it likely would be an established car company because Apple buying Tesla would not solve Tesla's second problem. Their first problem is money. They don't have the money to ramp up their car building ability to support the III. They have delivery and market issues with just the S Their second problem is, they don't have the supplier network large enough to support the III nor the expertise to get it out on time. Apple buying them won't fix that. Apple's problem is that they are sitting on too much cash to make a good decision. There really isn't anyone worth buying, Tesla surely isn't. I would have thought Apple would be better served by making self driving cars simple through software and hardware that goes into other manufacturers cars.

cmsj 12y ago
I tend to think that buying any of the big silicon fab companies would probably be in Apple's interests. They generate the kind of cash you need to be able to invest in the huge R&D costs needed to sustain Moore's Law, and they have clearly indicated that they want to keep their iOS SoCs at or very close to the leading edge of process technology, because it gives them a huge competitive advantage. However, the problem there is that it means you really need to be buying Intel, TSMC or Samsung. Clearly Samsung is a non-starter, and TSMC seems to be fiercely independent, leaving Intel. I can't imagine a healthy world where Apple has bought Intel, so that seems to also not be an option (I can well imagine that regulatory authorities might want to block anyone from buying Intel). Maybe they could use their piles of cash to build their own fabbing capabilities from the ground up, but that seems like it would be a very risky and very drawn out task. So, yeah, not sure there isn't anyone worth buying, but they may not be able to actually buy the companies that would help them pull further ahead in owning their core technologies.
- shalmanese 12y ago
  What about GlobalFoundries?

cmsj 12y ago

I tend to think that buying any of the big silicon fab companies would probably be in Apple's interests. They generate the kind of cash you need to be able to invest in the huge R&D costs needed to sustain Moore's Law, and they have clearly indicated that they want to keep their iOS SoCs at or very close to the leading edge of process technology, because it gives them a huge competitive advantage. However, the problem there is that it means you really need to be buying Intel, TSMC or Samsung. Clearly Samsung is a non-starter, and TSMC seems to be fiercely independent, leaving Intel. I can't imagine a healthy world where Apple has bought Intel, so that seems to also not be an option (I can well imagine that regulatory authorities might want to block anyone from buying Intel). Maybe they could use their piles of cash to build their own fabbing capabilities from the ground up, but that seems like it would be a very risky and very drawn out task. So, yeah, not sure there isn't anyone worth buying, but they may not be able to actually buy the companies that would help them pull further ahead in owning their core technologies.

shalmanese 12y ago
What about GlobalFoundries?