[baron816]

I don't like the idea of Apple (or even Google for that matter) making cars. It seems like such a weird space for a company that makes consumer electronics parts to move into. It would be almost as weird as them starting to build houses. And I don't want to buy all my stuff from one company.

Either way, I'm skeptical that any company is going to make huge, monopolistic profits from selling autonomous cars. It's something that's going to easily commoditizable. Consumers aren't going to care which company their buy their autonomous tech from, as long as it's safe and it works.

A better fit (although much, much, much harder to achieve) for Apple would be a real robot/android. Apple has hundreds of billions in cash to play with and a steady stream of income on the horizon for the next few years. I think they should accept that they don't have to come out with the next big hit every year. They should look 10+ years in advance and try to beat everyone to the last consumer electronic product.

[bo1024]

I don't like the idea of Apple making cars for the same reason I'm uncomfortable with their phones: you won't own the car you're purchasing, in most meaningful senses of the word "own". (We have seen this problem with Tesla already.)

To your second point, I'm not sure that autonomous tech will be easily commoditizable. Some companies will have much better tech than others and consumers will prefer them. Think about internet search engines: The easiest of all industries to compete in, yet (or "thus") full of huge, monopolistic profits.

[baron816]

Search engines are free. Whether you own or hire a self-driving car, you're going to have to pay for it, but all you really care about is whether it gets you from point A to point B. It's quite binary--either it works or it doesn't. There is objective and subjective factors the determine preferences towards search engines and phone. But if all driverless car tech works the same, then you're not going to care which one you use as long as it's the cheapest.

[pritambaral]

> all you really care about is whether it gets you from point A to point B

If that was really the only reason people bought cars, we wouldn't have as many variants, manufacturers, models of cars.

[kamaal]

>>It seems like such a weird space for a company that makes consumer electronics parts to move into

Actually if you think of a car as a consumer electronic device, it doesn't seem weird at all!

[wwweston]

> A better fit (although much, much, much harder to achieve) for Apple would be a real robot/android.

Either autonomous vehicle is a real robot (and not a bad place to start, given that moving things around is a great task for a robot), or I'm not sure the word has a lot of meaning.

It isn't approaching an android until it's something like KITT, but that's something else.

[manmal]

Do you believe that we will have robots as shown in movies, now that Moore's law is grinding to a halt?

[baron816]

I don't know if it's possible to build a robot like that. Or if will take a hundred years for the technology to evolve to get to the point that will make it possible. I know currently it's not even really possible to get a robot to do a simple task like folding a towel. It'll undoubtably be extremely difficult to make something that's useful and functional. But I think Apple needs to look to something that big if it wants to grow at a fast pace again.

[swalsh]

I wouldn't be surprised if the "car" part is a commodity, and the interior/exterior are where Apple builds a better vehicle. The qualcomm chipset that powers an iphone is pretty much the same thing powering an android phone.

[vlozko]

Not correct. Apple designs their own SoCs. Samsung and TSMC manufacture them. Really, the only thing in common is that they're both using ARM as the instruction set.

[murukesh_s]

"the last consumer electronic product" - loved that part..