[abalone]

> A lot of what you could have done different has already been done by Tesla.

Not at the software interface level. Tesla has done incredible work at the hardware level transitioning to electrics but the UI is still pretty old school. I.e. your parents could step into a Tesla and not know that there was anything different about it. Apart from having to plug it in, which you tell them is a Good Thing. That and some snappy performance.

If you think just a little bit ahead about where the next user-facing innovation is, it's autopilot. And the big thing to "get" is that it's not going to be some switch you hit that makes the car magically fully autonomous and you just sit back and take a nap. Rather to go beyond very limited scenarios and actually function on the real world road network and weather conditions, it's going to be about the human-computer interface.

So what does that look like? Is it just a flat panel screen in the center console next to your big steering wheel? Is that how the car is going to deliver safety-critical information to you that you need to supervise and potentially respond to within seconds? And how are you going to respond to them, through taps on screen dialogs?

Probably not. And there is where Apple will compete with Tesla, in the human-computer interface, as it did with the Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc... Even though they all had great hardware too, it was software that made a 10X breakthrough.