undefined | Better HN

0 pointsRetric9y ago0 comments

Apple can flat out buy a huge car company. Ford is worth 47.26B, GM 50B apple could buy both with less than 1/2 of their cash on hand.

Now buying Ford is probably not the way to go. But, Apple can skip a lot of the 'ramp up' if they ever wanted to get into the car business.

0 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

aetherson9y ago· 2 in thread

I agree, Apple could skip a lot of ramp-up if they buy a car company. But, then, what are they bringing to this hypothetical scenario? Does buying an existing car company make it easier for them to bring some kind of distinctive iCar onto the market? If so, what do we imagine is the distinctive iCar-ness that they're bringing?

There are two things that I hear people say Apple is notably good at:

1. "Design."

2. Controlling a complicated end-to-end extremely high-quality manufacturing process.

For 1, I'm not sure I believe that there is a transferable organizational expertise between designing phones and designing cars.

For 2, I'm not sure I believe that there is a transferable organizational expertise between manufacturing phones and manufacturing cars, and I'm definitely sure that I don't believe that they can transfer organizational expertise to manufacturing cars if they purchase an extant manufacturing process/organization.

RetricOP9y ago

What Apple does well is integrating hardware and software.

I recently drove a car with lane following and adaptive curse control and it kind of sucked. Lane following needed great road conditions so it failed miserably. But, while adaptive cruse control was nice in heavy traffic, it was also clearly tacked on. The acceleration and deceleration was felt jerky.

People can generally drive really smoothly in traffic so why suffer a machines erratic behavior when you need to focus in case it fails. Sure, do the same thing but better seems obvious but iPhone was more a response to poor completion than a truly innovative product.

aetherson9y ago

I'm also not sure that I believe that there is a transferable organizational expertise between integrating hardware and software on mobile phones and integrating hardware and software on self-driving cars.

Seriously, what does that look like? What are the attributes of a person who is good at integrating hardware and software on a phone, and who also is good at integrating hardware and software on a self-driving car? Your example was jerkiness in acceleration and deceleration. The people who are good at mitigating jerkiness in acceleration and deceleration are presumably mechanical engineers and roboticists/AI guys. I don't think that any of those people have been involved in Apple's flagship, reputation-making products so far.

As you allude to, it's easy to say "do the same thing but better." If all you needed was a product guy who was like, "Hey, we should make this better," then it would already be solved.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse