It wasn't that they doubted Apple's commitment, they just didn't have the imagination. To be fair to them, Apple timed things perfectly. Even a year earlier SOCs weren't powerful enough to run something like the early iOS. They did in software what they did in hardware much later with the 64-bit transition. They pulled off a superbly executed technological coup just at the point when it became possible to do it at all, beating everyone else to the market by years.
If they're planning to do the same with cars, we have interesting times ahead.
Selling cars requires a huge dealer network rollout with huge up-front costs for training and spares. Doing it DIY would be insanely expensive, and persuading existing dealers to sign up for a franchise is going to be a tough sell considering Apple's historical treatment of resellers.
Apple under Jobs certainly had the imagination to make a good phone - but the phone industry was always fairly crappy, with very clever internals but mediocre UX.
I don't see much reason to think that Apple under Cook has the imagination to break open the car industry in the same way. The possible competitive differentials are much smaller, and Cook isn't the most creative CEO Apple has had.
If the USP is that Car is electric, looks pretty, and may eventually have some self-driving features - that won't be anywhere close to enough. It's going to need to have some wow to get taken seriously, and even if Jobs were alive and in charge there's limited wow space available.
Of course if it flies and/or teleports, that would be something else.
Apple has huge expertise in both these areas. Not electric motors sure, but electronics design and manufacturing in general and specifically battery technology on the power train side and software on the self-driving side.
But the key to their potential is software. I think the main reason for Apple's success is their super high quality OS core, code libraries and software development tool chain combined with one of the greatest software engineering culture and talent pools on the planet. They have exploited this advantage ruthlessly ever since the 90s. It underlies the success of all their best products - even the iPod if you bear in mind that iTunes was built on these core advantages. Yes iTunes is a mess now, but it made the success of the iPod possible.
The key to success in the coming car revolution will be software. Computers will control and orchestrate every aspect of the internal operation of the vehicle, and that's before you even get to external operations with self-driving. Only Microsoft has the depth of software development competence and the technology platform resources to compete with Apple in this area, but for whatever reason they just don't seem to be able to get their act together when it comes to engineering complete product stacks rather than individual technologies.
Except their distribution network, reputation/brand value, and marketing reach. And their IP in the non-powertrain components. And their manufacturing knowledge which makes the cars more reliable.
And they can fund the move to electric (or whatever) using existing profits. Whereas any newcomer has to raise money and spend time doing all of these things.
While this is probably the best time for someone to attempt to do those things.. the incumbents definitely aren't starting from scratch.. they still have advantages.
Neither actually.
Battery technology for cars is a very different area of work compared to making battery for phones.
And writing self driving car algorithms isn't exactly the same designing UI on the FreeBSD OS.
That sounds perfect for Apple, though—they've got tons of capital, excellent at supply chain logistics, and used to thriving in very competitive markets.
Tesla is trying this model, but I don't know whether anyone can makes claims as to its success yet. Right now they're pretty low volume and are losing lots of money. Maybe the no dealer model scales, maybe it doesn't.
My '69 Chevelle disagrees.
* would have lots of spare capital * would have experience building/running plants * would know how to manage a long supply chain extremely well * carries huge cachet, allowing them to stand out in a competitive market. * Is not afraid to exclusively target the high-margin side of the market. * Knows a thing or two about entire sectors undergoing a revolution. * Has lots of experience building retail networks.
Well, what do you know, that sort of looks like Apple.
As for "not enough wow space" being available - that's what people thought about the phone industry as well.
Would I bet on Apple being a success? Probably not. But if anybody were to take on that market, Apple's one of the more well-placed contenders.
Copypasta from a comment I made on reddit about Tesla, many of these points also apply to Apple, especially the battery knowledge...
"You could argue that Tesla is in the battery pack business, and only incidentally in the car business. When electric cars ultimately take off, not only will their vehicles be perfectly positioned, they can sell the know-how to the slow moving incumbent car makers who are struggling to play catch up. They already have a likely unsurmountable lead in battery pack knowledge (things like software to control charging and discharging certain batteries to extend the life of the pack, compartmentalised batteries to reduce fire risk and crucial battery cooling systems), and their fleet gathers more data daily, while the rest of the car industry makes half-hearted hybrids, or technologically inferior, range-limited cars."
"They already own the high end, and once the Gigafactory pumps out batteries in full force, they'll own the low end, at least initially. Not to mention, another industry, solar PV, is growing and growing but badly needs storage tech to reach full potential. Guess who has a market-ready, solar PV-complimenting battery pack, and will soon have an enormous factory churning out battery packs? They are going to sell these packs to the world for decades."
> Building cars is massively capital and plant intensive
Apple has buckets of cash, they need something huge to move the needle and to show the world they're still innovative, and EVs are likely it.
> heavily dependent on supply chain logistics
Tim Cook's specialty. Apple has lots of experience in dealing with a complex supply chain dealing with huge volume.
> and the market is already extremely competitive.
I would argue the market for EVs/autonomous vehicles is quite different from ICE cars. For one thing, existing car makers are only dipping their toes in the EV market, instead of going toe to toe with Tesla directly (e.g. BMW has the i3 and i8, but no high-volume EV version of the 5 series to take on the Model S directly). So it's going to be a landgrab for EV market share. Existing car markers are heavily invested in extremely refined diesel and petrol engines and the associated paraphernalia like turbos, they probably wish EVs would just go away. Also, they rely on service and repairs for a significant chunk of revenue. EVs are mechanically simpler, and will require much less maintenance. So the traditional business model will be disrupted, again something incumbents don't want.
If version II or III of the Apple car offers autonomy, then we can imagine a city car which is designed to be a taxi, which means you only ever rent it. Again, this is an alien concept to existing car makers, who rely on dealer networks selling to end customers. So this would also favour new players not bound by older business practices.
In short, with Apple's battery expertise, huge cash reserves, supply chain experience and the relatively open market for EVs/autonomous vehicles, I'd say now is a great time for Apple to get into the market. They are also betting on the trend of lithium ion batteries getting better and cheaper every year[1]
[1] http://rameznaam.com/2015/10/14/how-cheap-can-energy-storage...
In fact, when I was first sold on the concept, the guy who started the company talked me through how he imagined a "home base station" that he'd use while there, and how he wanted the device to smoothly hand off to the mobile network if he took it out of the house.
The choice of a tablet over a smaller phone was about a convenient screen size, coupled with the initial devices being tied to the home anyway. But "everyone" around us had PalmPilots, and "everyone" expected PDAs and phones to merge eventually (and they did, sort of, but to see Palm giving in and going with a keyboard was a disappointment).
The challenge was that around the time the iPhone launched, people did not believe the market was there yet, nor that the hardware was ready, largely because "everyone else" had a go too early, failed, and essentially shelved the idea for the next decade as something that was way too early.
What Apple got exactly right and everyone else messed up was the timing.
E.g. we were shopping around our tablet prototype in '99 and 2000 based on a 100MHz or thereabouts 486 clone w/32MB RAM running Opera and a custom UI w/resistive touch. It was a fantastic device at the time, but the combination of not yet being able to provide a proper GSM enabled device, too short battery life, low RAM, slow, horrible resistive touch, and it was a device that would have appealed mostly to a small niche of geeks, but to work financally it needed to be a mass market device.
With the available hardware in 2006 we'd have a great starting point if we had started around then. But when we started in '99 the discussion was never "can these hardware constraints work in a way that can appeal to a mass market?" but "this is the price we need for it to work as a mass market device, and here are the tech specs that can fit within that price" and then we tried to make something that could be mass market from that... way too early.
To be clear: I'm not trying to downplay what Apple did. They made a product that appealed to a vastly larger market because they understood. But it wasn't because nobody else believed in touch enabled smart phones or tablets, but because they approached it from a usability and marketability perspective first, while everyone else were thinking like geeks willing to sacrifice usability for a "imagine if.." ideal of devices that were ultimately quite unfulfilling.
When the iPhone came out, a lot of us were pretty much "so what?" because we still did not understand the significance of that wait. We'd seen full screen touch, and we'd seen PDA's married with touch, and we'd seen larger tablet type devices (basically laptops with pivot screens mostly), and the iPhone to many people who'd been through the first round of hype around these type of devices just seemed like more of the same at first.
Until it became clear just how much of a difference the hardware advances and Apple's design had made to the whole thing.
We absolutely agree about their timing, and I think it's important not to underestimate how important it is to understand when the time is right and not get caught up in constraints that applied last year because that's when you started thinking about it.
It's very possible that we'll see something similar with cars. A lot of people have worked on driverless cars for a very long time, and the question is how much of the current designs are based on preconceptions that seemed to make sense a few years back, but where things can be done better today.
> What Apple got exactly right and everyone else messed up was the timing.
My [perhaps mistaken] understanding is that Apple had been working on it for a while; but rather than try before the hardware was ready, and shelve the idea, they kept working on the idea until the hardware caught up. They had a solid idea of how it should work, and waited until it could, rather than have it just be a thing they tried and gave up on.
Here's an early article on our attempt [1], and you can see how far the specs were from a tolerable tablet or from being able to shrink the it down to a phone form factor (the original design actually called for a very small dumb handset for the tablet that magnetically attached to the speaker magnets in the tablet, and induction charged; amusingly Sony finally relased a handset for one of their phablets a couple of years ago - we were over a decade ahead of our time ;) )
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/freepad-norways-alternative-to-...
As someone who was there on the consumer side, with an HTC Wizard bought in 2006 -- the year before the iPhone was released -- I completely agree with this. I did make the sacrifice of usability, because having the Internet accessible everywhere on a touchscreen was awesome. I didn't understand the iPhone either. From the perspective of the hackfest that was Windows Mobile 5/6, I saw a very limited and locked down device.
At the same time, it was still a choice between finally getting a more responsive interface or giving up front/rear cameras, GPS, 3G cell radio, third party apps, multitasking, copy/paste, an actual file system I could browse, streaming audio (anyone remember Shoutcast stations? They're still around!), streaming video, hell...even changing my wallpaper or ringtone to something that didn't come with the phone.
I totally get why Apple succeeded and in many ways they deserved to: they didn't try to out-WinMo WinMo. They looked at the things that Microsoft, RIM, Palm, and the rest weren't doing and targeted those things. They saw who wasn't interested in having a miniature version of a laptop but loved simple and responsive electronics (thousands and thousands of regular consumers). That business savvy put them in a really strong position that continues to this day.
Granted it didn't help that you needed to switch carriers to AT&T and spend even more than the cost of existing smart phones to get one but clearly they improved that along with all the rest.
I'm still far from an Apple fanboy and I find using iOS on my iPad to be frustrating at least once every week or two but business/market success isn't about pleasing me. It's about pleasing enough people to make a good profit and clearly they've got that part down.
I get that I'm not representative of the market, but my pattern of using a smartphone involves a lot of email. I don't see that going away, as a lot of my communication involves people in other timezones.
I was way more productive in this when I had a blackberry, but, of course, it did suffer horribly when using the web.
It won't change, but I wish there was enough demand to keep up competition for phones with keyboards such that there was a decent physical keyboard android.
