The more I hear about Apple making a car, the more it seems inevitable.
Apple's revenue is 180 billion dollars. If they enter a new market, it has to be big. How many high margin billion dollar industries are there? The entire watch market is just around $50 billion dollars a year. If Apple wants to continue growing like it did in the past, the watch is a distraction. They need to aim for something much bigger.
Besides the financial reasons, I think it's the perfect time to break into the market. The switch to electric motors levels the playing field, giving newcomers an edge if they can move fast. But the most important part is the integration of all the systems in the car, most importantly the digital user interface. Todays cars have horrible interfaces. Manufacturers are too busy covering every possible niche with dozens of models, which makes it impossible for them to make a single great car. And even if they tried, they are too dependent on component suppliers to create a single, integrated experience of the kind Apple does.
There are two questions I wonder about:
1. How will Apple be able to make use of their experience in electronics when they move to a completely new industry?
2. What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve? The iPod had hard drives and the click wheel, the iPhone had multitouch and a SoC that enabled a real browser, the watch had force sensitivity, haptic feedback, and a pulse meter. What will the car have?
"How will Apple be able to make use of their experience in electronics when they move to a completely new industry?"
Completely new industry?
Who is the biggest user of lithium batteries in the world? Hint: It is a company with a fruit as a name.
They started talks for collaboration with Tesla because if Tesla creates a Megafactory they HAVE TO use it or their battery prices will be higher than Tesla's. If they can't use it, they will create their own Megafactory.
The electric motors in a electric car are incredible simple compared with internal combustion engines.
The batteries are the most expensive item in a car by far.
"What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve?"
They know abut batteries, they know about recharging batteries. More free capital than any other company in the world, access to the best electronic components and battery manufacturers, very important for power electronics.
"What will the car have?"
A good price. It will be expensive, like anything Apple does, but a very good price because of mass production that only Apple could afford(because they can invest billions on factories).
Think on aluminum Apple computers, they sell at $1000, other companies compete with aluminum computers with a similar price. Apple earns 30% margins or more but competition could barely survive, because Apple was the first to sell those and sell in the millions and competition in the thousands.
Car interiors are full of plasticky knobs that remind me of cell phone keys from 1995-2006. I think that Apple will have a lot of fun creating a new interfaces for everything inside the car, and I think they're wise enough not to try to replace all physical controls with a gigantic touch screen, unlike Tesla.
>> The switch to electric motors levels the playing field, giving newcomers an edge if they can move fast.
It doesn't exactly level it. Any new player in the auto industry will have an enormous learning curve and spend billions just to bring their first car to market (I hear Ford spends a billion to bring a brand new model to market and they're established) and get production going. The shift to electric cars may be significant enough to consider it a new industry (replacing the old) where a new entrant could become a dominant player and hold that position even as everyone else slowly migrates. I guess in that sense it is a level playing field.
I originally wondered why Apple would want to do a car until I thought about the above opportunity. That, along with the enormous amount of cash they have, go together. They need to aim really big to have a meaningful impact on the company. They could have bought Facebook, Twitter, or other startups all day long and it wouldn't have the same impact on their bottom line as becoming a dominant auto company. In fact Apple and Google DO buy small tech companies and I have yet to see one have the impact they could get from going big in electric cars (assuming those become a thing, which is not an unreasonable gamble IMHO).
>> What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve?
At this point they don't need any. Make an affordable electric car and they win. If the price is right, people will buy every iCar they can produce. What apple brings to the table is money. IMHO all the other ones (except Tesla so far) have failed because they didn't have deep enough pockets to go all the way.
That said, if it is a car, why the hell do it from CA instead of MI? That's the part I don't fully understand. I have some ideas, but I've never heard an official explanation. Of course they never actually said they're making car either have they?
The apple car will happen. That doesn't mean it will work in the long term. And it doesn't mean that Apple will be a market leader. See the iWatch, AppleTV and the iMac. Not all of their products are market-changers.
Watch the car companies. If they thought the days of personal car ownership were over they would be in total panic. There is a strong Freudian association with cars ownership in north america. People are very proud of their cars. That isn't going away anytime soon.
As I have said in other threads, if everyone wants diverless cars, why is there not a single car on the market hardwired to obey speed limits? I'll believe people ready to have their steering wheels taken away when I first see them give up control of their accelerators.
> "Manufacturers are too busy covering every possible niche with dozens of models"
I agree. It amazes me how many models and variants there are. Look at Volkswagen, they have ~20-25 active Basemodels (Polo, Golf, Passat...) with each Basemodel having a addtional 15-20 variants. You can buy a Golf anywhere from 15k Euro to 40k Euro. But even a much smaller manufacturer such as Porsche has 9 Basemodels with nearly 200 variants.
Who _really_ needs that?
Granted, i never worked in the automobile industry, but the overhead with producing, developing and maintaining so many different models really seems insane.
Speaking of a high margin billion dollar market, I'm surprised Apple doesn't get into high speed fiber. Maybe Apple feels they are mostly product development, idk.
This seems like a weird market for Apple to be pursuing because they’re such a consumer oriented company, but it seems likely that the future of transportation will be less oriented around individual car ownership.
Additionally there’s a good argument to be made that we hit “peak car” several years ago, so consumer oriented automobiles may not be a real growth industry.
I’d seriously question any business plan that assumes that the transportation mode share of cars, especially individually owned cars, will be greater than it is now.
It's interesting to see new entries into such an established and manufacturing-heavy industry. Tesla had a fairly slow and methodical strategy, that they're still executing on before they can really hit a mass audience (I'd say the Model 3 is the next evolution in that). Apple has not, at least since Jobs took over again, really been slow and methodical in entering big markets.
However, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, they were the first to try and align those device types with a mass audience that hadn't really been addressed yet. With cars, that audience has been well addressed for over a century!
I'm curious to find out what price range Apple is coming in at, what makes the Apple car better than alternatives, and how/where they're going to manufacture it at a cost similar to competitors.
One guess about what the car could offer: The main issue with current technologies is that they only drive automatically in specific situations - and that they legally require you to always stay alert and don't let you play with your phone , etc. But this is extremely boring , hence hard. So this reduces a lot of the value of half-automated driving.
But let's say we have a fun interesting friend in the car, talking to us whenever we want, but knows when to shut up or to simplify the conversation when the road demands more of our focus.
Suddenly half-automated driving becomes much more valuable. And possibly ,if you control that and have a large customer base with half-automated cars ,you have a very good path to full self driving.
I would guess they're specifically targeting the brand new market of autonomous cars specifically.
Edit: Nevermind, it sounds like it will not be autonomous starting out, so they really are entering the mainstream car market.
Maybe the same thing is happening that happened with phones: Apple software on other phones sucked, just like Apple software in existing cars sucks. It's ambitious, but they have the resources and the market is clearly ripe for disruption... why not.
There's an old thing, from Bob Young, founder of Redhat, about proprietary software being like a car with the hood welded shut. Perhaps the latter will actually become reality.
>John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
>Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DMCA is a vast 1998 copyright law that (among other things) governs the blurry line between software and hardware. The Copyright Office, after reading the comments and holding a hearing, will decide in July which high-tech devices we can modify, hack, and repair—and decide whether John Deere’s twisted vision of ownership will become a reality.
> Perhaps the latter will actually become reality.
How far is it from the reality now though? I buy cars with very high reliability (usually Honda) just so I don't have to deal with it.
I grew up fixing cars, motorcycles, and snowmobiles with my dad, but these days much of what we did is no longer possible to fix (or even necessary with the case of fuel injection).
Let's not call out Apple as some evil locked down hardware platform company. How user serviceable or after-market modifiable is a Model S? Tesla cars get over-the-air software updates and you sure as hell can't modify it yourself in any non-"illegal hacking" capacity.
I think the real question is whether the car will be gold or rose-gold. Place your bets.
Joking aside, I do think that under Tim Cook, Apple has changed how it thinks about its products from being "beautifully designed premium products" to being "fashionable", and I'm seeing this trend more and more in Apple products lately, which I find a little worrying (for the company's core values and culture, too).
Even though it's hard to imagine Apple making a car, there is an awful lot of smoke around this. There has to be a fire somewhere. Lots of people are wondering how Apple can differentiate in the car market - I think (surprisingly) it comes down to price. Few people may remember this, but when Apple announced the iPad, people were shocked at how cheap it was. People knew the iPad was coming and were predicting it would start at $1000, easily. It cost $500.
Leaving out driverless car tech, which I'm not sure whether Apple will have ready for launch, I think the Apple Car will look and function like a $100,000 car - but will cost significantly less. Say, half the price. Ive, in a recent interview, spoke about how he hated so many cars on the road. Not because they were cheap, but because they were poorly designed and put together with such little care. I think, unless he's gone off the deep end into the luxury market (which he very well may have!) he would want to produce a car that is really great - but still affordable enough that lots of people will be able to afford it[1].
All of that being said, and no matter how much Apple cares about the mass market, Apple will want to keep their high margins. They'll need to bring down manufacturing costs considerably. However, if anyone can do it, it's Tim Cook. He's well known for being a wizard at managing supply chains. Perhaps it'll be their first product assembled entirely by robots, who knows.
We'll see what happens but if Apple are able to produce a very high quality car at a reasonable price, I suspect that it will be extremely disruptive. In the UK at least, pretty much every car under £30,000 is utter garbage. I'd love it if Apple could change that.
[1] I suspect, as with Apple Watch, there will also be a high-end version of an Apple Car. It will probably have the same functionality (i.e. it won't just be a super-car) but will have extras, like a Hermès leather interior. I, for one, look forward to customising a car like a new Macbook - current car customisation screens are a pain (besides Tesla, actually, theirs isn't too bad).
I am very interested in what this car will look and behave like. Until Tesla, automobile interface design was pretty stagnant; Knobs and switches for everything!
Apple has been very focused on virtual interfaces lately, I wonder what their return to physical will look like.
This is fantastic news. I wish more companies would get into this. Google, Facebook, Microsoft. Every company that has a ton of cash should consider doing it. Tesla proved that it's viable, so the hard work has been done. And building an electric car from scratch is not nearly as daunting as an ICE car. The car companies are heavily incentivized to not do it, so to me it's a great opportunity to get in early in a high-growth industry.
I wish that some companies would get into making cheaper, smaller, better medical diagnostic devices. That would be revolutionary in treating people because the body is still a black box right now. Or treating age-related diseases because it affects so many people, not just the patient.
I have a hard time believing that Apple would manufacture an electric car, especially one, according to the article, that had an initial design resembling a minivan.
It's well known that Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson are "car guys"[1], so perhaps it will be a vehicle similar to the Cube[2] - meaning it will have a very low production run - while the underlying technologies, such the batteries, are sold to other manufacturers.
The more real this becomes, the more it starts to feel like the R&D sprawl of the Michael Spindler years. Yet it's not: This categorically isn't sprawl because it's focused on one hugely ambitious thing, and unlike the Apple of the early 90s, even if Apple literally puts ten billion dollars into this project and it fails, they come out with 190 billion left to continue running a successful consumer electronics business. And if it succeeds, of course, Apple becomes a major player in a socio-technological revolution for the third time.
Pro-tip: You can generally take any paywall blocked article, copy the URL into the Google search bar and click the first-result to get a non-paywall blocked version. Works for NYTimes, WSJ and a few others I can't remember.
[+] [-] jakobegger|10 years ago|reply
Apple's revenue is 180 billion dollars. If they enter a new market, it has to be big. How many high margin billion dollar industries are there? The entire watch market is just around $50 billion dollars a year. If Apple wants to continue growing like it did in the past, the watch is a distraction. They need to aim for something much bigger.
Besides the financial reasons, I think it's the perfect time to break into the market. The switch to electric motors levels the playing field, giving newcomers an edge if they can move fast. But the most important part is the integration of all the systems in the car, most importantly the digital user interface. Todays cars have horrible interfaces. Manufacturers are too busy covering every possible niche with dozens of models, which makes it impossible for them to make a single great car. And even if they tried, they are too dependent on component suppliers to create a single, integrated experience of the kind Apple does.
There are two questions I wonder about:
1. How will Apple be able to make use of their experience in electronics when they move to a completely new industry?
2. What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve? The iPod had hard drives and the click wheel, the iPhone had multitouch and a SoC that enabled a real browser, the watch had force sensitivity, haptic feedback, and a pulse meter. What will the car have?
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|10 years ago|reply
Completely new industry? Who is the biggest user of lithium batteries in the world? Hint: It is a company with a fruit as a name.
They started talks for collaboration with Tesla because if Tesla creates a Megafactory they HAVE TO use it or their battery prices will be higher than Tesla's. If they can't use it, they will create their own Megafactory.
The electric motors in a electric car are incredible simple compared with internal combustion engines.
The batteries are the most expensive item in a car by far.
"What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve?"
They know abut batteries, they know about recharging batteries. More free capital than any other company in the world, access to the best electronic components and battery manufacturers, very important for power electronics.
"What will the car have?" A good price. It will be expensive, like anything Apple does, but a very good price because of mass production that only Apple could afford(because they can invest billions on factories).
Think on aluminum Apple computers, they sell at $1000, other companies compete with aluminum computers with a similar price. Apple earns 30% margins or more but competition could barely survive, because Apple was the first to sell those and sell in the millions and competition in the thousands.
[+] [-] pazimzadeh|10 years ago|reply
I'm hoping that many functions won't need a UI any more, such as adjusting the mirrors: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=118796...
[+] [-] phkahler|10 years ago|reply
It doesn't exactly level it. Any new player in the auto industry will have an enormous learning curve and spend billions just to bring their first car to market (I hear Ford spends a billion to bring a brand new model to market and they're established) and get production going. The shift to electric cars may be significant enough to consider it a new industry (replacing the old) where a new entrant could become a dominant player and hold that position even as everyone else slowly migrates. I guess in that sense it is a level playing field.
I originally wondered why Apple would want to do a car until I thought about the above opportunity. That, along with the enormous amount of cash they have, go together. They need to aim really big to have a meaningful impact on the company. They could have bought Facebook, Twitter, or other startups all day long and it wouldn't have the same impact on their bottom line as becoming a dominant auto company. In fact Apple and Google DO buy small tech companies and I have yet to see one have the impact they could get from going big in electric cars (assuming those become a thing, which is not an unreasonable gamble IMHO).
>> What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve?
At this point they don't need any. Make an affordable electric car and they win. If the price is right, people will buy every iCar they can produce. What apple brings to the table is money. IMHO all the other ones (except Tesla so far) have failed because they didn't have deep enough pockets to go all the way.
That said, if it is a car, why the hell do it from CA instead of MI? That's the part I don't fully understand. I have some ideas, but I've never heard an official explanation. Of course they never actually said they're making car either have they?
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
Watch the car companies. If they thought the days of personal car ownership were over they would be in total panic. There is a strong Freudian association with cars ownership in north america. People are very proud of their cars. That isn't going away anytime soon.
As I have said in other threads, if everyone wants diverless cars, why is there not a single car on the market hardwired to obey speed limits? I'll believe people ready to have their steering wheels taken away when I first see them give up control of their accelerators.
[+] [-] sauere|10 years ago|reply
I agree. It amazes me how many models and variants there are. Look at Volkswagen, they have ~20-25 active Basemodels (Polo, Golf, Passat...) with each Basemodel having a addtional 15-20 variants. You can buy a Golf anywhere from 15k Euro to 40k Euro. But even a much smaller manufacturer such as Porsche has 9 Basemodels with nearly 200 variants.
Who _really_ needs that?
Granted, i never worked in the automobile industry, but the overhead with producing, developing and maintaining so many different models really seems insane.
[+] [-] heimatau|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tiktaalik|10 years ago|reply
Additionally there’s a good argument to be made that we hit “peak car” several years ago, so consumer oriented automobiles may not be a real growth industry.
I’d seriously question any business plan that assumes that the transportation mode share of cars, especially individually owned cars, will be greater than it is now.
Maybe I’m thinking too long term here.
[+] [-] ssharp|10 years ago|reply
I'm curious to find out what price range Apple is coming in at, what makes the Apple car better than alternatives, and how/where they're going to manufacture it at a cost similar to competitors.
[+] [-] petra|10 years ago|reply
But let's say we have a fun interesting friend in the car, talking to us whenever we want, but knows when to shut up or to simplify the conversation when the road demands more of our focus.
Suddenly half-automated driving becomes much more valuable. And possibly ,if you control that and have a large customer base with half-automated cars ,you have a very good path to full self driving.
Well, Apple wants Siri to be that friend.
[+] [-] aik|10 years ago|reply
Edit: Nevermind, it sounds like it will not be autonomous starting out, so they really are entering the mainstream car market.
Maybe the same thing is happening that happened with phones: Apple software on other phones sucked, just like Apple software in existing cars sucks. It's ambitious, but they have the resources and the market is clearly ripe for disruption... why not.
[+] [-] wiremine|10 years ago|reply
Depends on how you look at it:
- They've been fairly slow to enter the TV market.
- Homekit is out there but hasn't received a lot of attention in recent keynotes.
- Healthkit and related medical technology isn't something they have been extremely quick on.
[+] [-] davidw|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diogenescynic|10 years ago|reply
>John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
>Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DMCA is a vast 1998 copyright law that (among other things) governs the blurry line between software and hardware. The Copyright Office, after reading the comments and holding a hearing, will decide in July which high-tech devices we can modify, hack, and repair—and decide whether John Deere’s twisted vision of ownership will become a reality.
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
[+] [-] arnarbi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobu|10 years ago|reply
How far is it from the reality now though? I buy cars with very high reliability (usually Honda) just so I don't have to deal with it.
I grew up fixing cars, motorcycles, and snowmobiles with my dad, but these days much of what we did is no longer possible to fix (or even necessary with the case of fuel injection).
[+] [-] seiji|10 years ago|reply
Let's not call out Apple as some evil locked down hardware platform company. How user serviceable or after-market modifiable is a Model S? Tesla cars get over-the-air software updates and you sure as hell can't modify it yourself in any non-"illegal hacking" capacity.
[+] [-] tantalor|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorenjan|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_A2#Service_Hatch_.28Servi...
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|10 years ago|reply
Joking aside, I do think that under Tim Cook, Apple has changed how it thinks about its products from being "beautifully designed premium products" to being "fashionable", and I'm seeing this trend more and more in Apple products lately, which I find a little worrying (for the company's core values and culture, too).
[+] [-] kaolinite|10 years ago|reply
Leaving out driverless car tech, which I'm not sure whether Apple will have ready for launch, I think the Apple Car will look and function like a $100,000 car - but will cost significantly less. Say, half the price. Ive, in a recent interview, spoke about how he hated so many cars on the road. Not because they were cheap, but because they were poorly designed and put together with such little care. I think, unless he's gone off the deep end into the luxury market (which he very well may have!) he would want to produce a car that is really great - but still affordable enough that lots of people will be able to afford it[1].
All of that being said, and no matter how much Apple cares about the mass market, Apple will want to keep their high margins. They'll need to bring down manufacturing costs considerably. However, if anyone can do it, it's Tim Cook. He's well known for being a wizard at managing supply chains. Perhaps it'll be their first product assembled entirely by robots, who knows.
We'll see what happens but if Apple are able to produce a very high quality car at a reasonable price, I suspect that it will be extremely disruptive. In the UK at least, pretty much every car under £30,000 is utter garbage. I'd love it if Apple could change that.
[1] I suspect, as with Apple Watch, there will also be a high-end version of an Apple Car. It will probably have the same functionality (i.e. it won't just be a super-car) but will have extras, like a Hermès leather interior. I, for one, look forward to customising a car like a new Macbook - current car customisation screens are a pain (besides Tesla, actually, theirs isn't too bad).
[+] [-] jbob2000|10 years ago|reply
Apple has been very focused on virtual interfaces lately, I wonder what their return to physical will look like.
[+] [-] gniv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blazespin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|10 years ago|reply
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/09/21/apple-has-target-s...
[Update]
Actually, the WSJ also reported. Guess other sites are reprinting.
[+] [-] 127001brewer|10 years ago|reply
It's well known that Jonathan Ive and Marc Newson are "car guys"[1], so perhaps it will be a vehicle similar to the Cube[2] - meaning it will have a very low production run - while the underlying technologies, such the batteries, are sold to other manufacturers.
1: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/shape-things-co... 2: http://www.macworld.com/article/1153341/cube_10thanniversary...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mortenjorck|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jreed91|10 years ago|reply
http://www.asymco.com/2015/03/11/the-critical-path-143-movin...
[+] [-] sixQuarks|10 years ago|reply
Without the vision of Steve Jobs, I'm afraid they don't have what it takes to pull this off.
[+] [-] leeleelee|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gress|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] inmyunix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6d6b73|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] worik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pragone|10 years ago|reply
Edit: Mass-reply: Thanks all! Learn something new every day.
For those looking for the same thing, go here, click first link. Should bypass the paywall: https://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
[+] [-] trca|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doughj3|10 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] melling|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaffeemitsahne|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShakataGaNai|10 years ago|reply
Also per the other comments saying "dump the link into google". You can fake it with something like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...
[+] [-] deegles|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] greentree9612|10 years ago|reply
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