[PhoenixWright]

A couple of takeaways from this article:

Apple has a problem with leadership. When managers aren't buying into a vision, mostly because it's murky at best, that is a big problem.

SV hubris believing you can go into any industry and disrupt the incompetent incumbents is laughable. FB found this out with phones and it sounds like Apple and Google are now figuring it out with cars.

The Netflix idea works here too: Apple and Google have to become more like GM and BMW before GM and BMW become more like Apple and Google. GM will have an awesome electric with a better range than a Tesla Model 3 this year! If they ever figure out aesthetics and software they will win.

Finally this article highlights what Musk has done at Tesla. They are the closest SV company to actually figure out manufacturing. It still remains to be seen but if they do it Tesla will be the market leader in cars.

[coldtea]

>Apple has a problem with leadership. When managers aren't buying into a vision, mostly because it's murky at best, that is a big problem.

That's the inverse of what would actually be a big problem: managers BUYING into a "murky at best" vision.

>SV hubris believing you can go into any industry and disrupt the incompetent incumbents is laughable.

Isn't that what people said about music players and then about phones? Heck, they are already the #2 watchmaker in the world in profits too...

>FB found this out with phones and it sounds like Apple and Google are now figuring it out with cars.

Neither Google nor Apple have ever released in car. If anything, their setbacks are related to the advanced self-driving stuff they aspire to make, not some issue competing with existing car tech or distribution or anything.

Besides, tons of companies have entered the car market and gave established car companies a run for their money already. The Japanese obliterated the established Detroit order for example, and new Chinese cars are as good as anybody's for general use. Tesla also come out of nowhere and cornered a niche of the market. Heck, traditional car companies are so complacent and derivative that if anything it's the inverse of hubris to believe one can do better.

Nowadays, when most of the manufacturing the expertise is in assembly lines in China and the like, creating a new car to compete with existing models is laughably easy -- especially if you have $500 billion lying around.

[skybrian]

You're comparing entirely different things.

Chinese cars are barely being imported in the U.S. (Three models so far). It has taken many years to get this far, and will take longer for them to have a similar reputation as, say, Korea.

Tesla has done well in the luxury car market, but they've been late and had quality issues. The Tesla 3 is not out yet and there is still a big risk they'll fail.

So, "laughably easy" is a major exaggeration. It's possible to launch a new car company but nobody finds it easy.

[coldtea]

>Chinese cars are barely being imported in the U.S. (Three models so far). It has taken many years to get this far, and will take longer for them to have a similar reputation as, say, Korea.

Yes, but the US is a mere 5% of the global population and about 20% of global GDP (down from decades ago). You can be a huge player and not even play in the US market. The Chinese are already selling their cars in many global markets.

>Tesla has done well in the luxury car market, but they've been late and had quality issues. The Tesla 3 is not out yet and there is still a big risk they'll fail.

Tesla doesn't have Apple's half a trillion in the bank though. And which established car maker didn't have quality issues at various times (and still today)?

[serge2k]

> Isn't that what people said about music players and then about phones?

No.

[coldtea]

You'd be surprised.

Palm CEO in 2006 Ed Colligan, about the upcoming Apple iPhone: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Dell CEO Kevin Rollins, after Dell had released the Dell DJ Ditty (lol) mp3 player: "So this [the iPod] might be an interesting new product but I’m not really believing this is going to turn the industry upside down." (...) ""Apple's created a niche. If you look at the grand scheme of things, this quarter we are supposed to achieve something like $13.5 billion in revenue. Apple's in the $2.4 billion (region), so the size and scale is not even in the same league."

Creative's CEO about Apple's iPod new model circa 2005: "I think the whole industry will just laugh at it, because the flash people — it’s worse than the cheapest Chinese player. Even the cheap, cheap Chinese brand today has display and has FM. They don’t have this kind of thing, and they expect to come out with a fight; I think it’s a non-starter to begin with."

[mikeash]

Phones is a really weird example here, considering that the two dominant phone players are both SV companies that went into that industry and crushed the incompetent incumbents.

I see no reason to think that Apple could do with cars what they did with the iPhone, but that particular example doesn't make any sense.

[csydas]

I can name a few differences, even if I don't think it's impossible.

Phones were ready for a natural complete upgrade from brick phones to smartphones. The mobile environment was there, all the network components were coming online to make it a really useful device, processors were getting to a good stage for mobile usage where it made sense to make the jump and the jump was right into what Apple already knew pretty well. The phone part of smart phones is pretty minor, quite honestly. Smartphones weren't so much an evolution of dumb phones, they were a complete redesign and replacement thereof. The technology that puts an OS in your hand just did the job of being a phone better than a brick phone did[1], and it came with a bunch of extra features that people didn't know they wanted.

Cars are a little different. Fundamentally, a self-driving car is still a car with an OS attached. It's not so much just figuring out the OS part of it, it's also getting the engineering on a vehicle right, and I'm guessing with autonomous cars there's a lot you have to take into consideration when it comes to the mechanical aspects. It's not quite like the phone situation where you just replace brick phone with smart phone - a smart car is fundamentally the same as a dumb car except that you don't drive the smart car (and in some models, you do). There's a lot more to take into consideration, a much larger spectrum of rules and regulations, and honestly the car part of smart cars is pretty involved. It's not that Apple doesn't have the money to throw at car R&D, it's just it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to do it.

Again, I don't doubt they could do it, but the barrier of entry just seems higher here, and it's not as natural of a segue for Apple either. They're not just building a tiny computer with an iCar, they'd be building a car with an Apple computer.

[1]I realize that many prefer the brick phones to smart phones and that smart phones are pretty bad at the phone part of being a phone, but ultimately between the myriad of communication apps available, you have more communication options available in your hand than you do with a brick phone, and more ways to do the communication thing.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Apple Car was and is a fundamentally bad idea.

Limited/no cross-sale synergies with other products

Massive up-front costs to establish a manufacturing network

Massive up-front costs to establish a dealer and maintenance network

Strong existing competition which will only get stronger with time

No clear USP ("Made by Apple" is not a USP)

The only way to crush the market would be to make a car that flies and to set up the infrastructure to make flying cars usable for domestic and work commuting.

Since that's not going to happen, the absolute best anyone expects from Apple Car is a me-too car that looks a bit nicer and rounder than the rest. And is available in white, black, pink, and gold. And it absolutely has to self-drive, because that's where the competition will be.

Me-too isn't enough to win in that market.

[snowwrestler]

Apple is undoubtedly looking to change the car market.

If you imagine that people will buy, own, and sell cars the same way they do today, forever, then sure--an Apple car makes no sense. But it's pretty likely that the relationship between cars and people will change at some point, and that is the point at which Apple wants to be ready.

Or rather, just beyond that point--when the new direction is clear, but the early products still suck. That's when Apple likes to get into new markets.

[georgespencer]

> Apple Car was and is a fundamentally bad idea.

Given that the range of possible ideas you're talking about extends from better software to power autonomous cars, through to an entirely autonomous electric car which Apple manufactures in its entirety, and also incorporates potential partnership with another brand such as BMW, it seems hard to believe that someone could dismiss Apple car as "a fundamentally bad idea".

> Limited/no cross-sale synergies with other products.

CarPlay is a fairly good example of this not being true. And if cars become fully autonomous, there's unending cross-sale opportunity for Apple (since people will be doing in cars what they do with Apple products outside of cars).

> Massive up-front costs

Apple has not incurred, as far as any of us know, any costs related to manufacturing, dealer, or maintenance networks.

> Strong existing competition

Strong by what measure? AI? UX for in-car systems? Industrial design?

> No clear USP ("made by Apple" is not a USP)

It is when for many people that's a byword for simplicity, smart features, and elegant design. In any event, it's hilarious that someone's arguing that a car the company has never acknowledged existing "has no USP".

> The only way to crush the market would be to make a car that flies and to set up the infrastructure to make flying cars usable for domestic and work commuting.

Apple has never sought to crush a market. They seek to have the highest share of profit in a market.

> the absolute best anyone expects from Apple Car is a me-too car that looks a bit nicer and rounder than the rest. And is available in white, black, pink, and gold. And it absolutely has to self-drive, because that's where the competition will be.

Yeah, if you arbitrarily cut out user experience and the integration of hardware and software as a competitive advantage, then Apple's car will just get people from A-B in the same way as any other car.

> Me-too isn't enough to win in that market.

Nobody except you is arguing that the Apple car would be "me-too" and completely devoid of any unique advantages which other car manufacturers would seek to emulate.

[mikeash]

I completely agree, however people were saying pretty much the exact same things about Apple's phone efforts about ten years ago. In hindsight, it's clear that smartphones lined up just about perfectly with Apple's core competencies, but before they proved it in the market, people were saying just this sort of thing: the engineering is tough and different, the stuff Apple is good at isn't the stuff that's hard, regulation is far more difficult, it's not just a tiny computer, etc.

Now, just because they were wrong to say it then doesn't mean you're wrong to say it now. I think you're right. I'm just saying that phones are a terrible example to bring up if one is arguing that SV companies can't take over industries with entrenched incumbents.

[csydas]

Please excuse typos as I am on phone in the metro

I appreciate that a lot since I was one of the naysayers. Admittedly I was a bitter PPC Mac user upset that we weren't getting attention on the desktop side but I was still worried.

However, even if hindsight is 20/20, I do feel that a lot of the infrastructure and resources necessary for an iPhone were just there already and apple seized an emerging market. With cars I feel that the regulatory, technical, and physical infrastructure for smart cars isn't there yet for anything disruptive. Driverless cars still appear to need a lot of hand holding, and while there will be an investment payout eventually for folks in the game at the moment, I'm not sure it's as great as they are hoping it as soon as they are hoping. In my mind it makes more sense to have an apple iOS port for cars than an iCar. Or set up the infrastructure that driverless car folk are going to want. Siri taxi for example. Siri pizza delivery. Siri breathalyzer and/or drunk talk analyzer and safe delivery to home.

Basically whereas I feel that in the mobile space controlling the hardware 100% make sense, with the cars maybe it makes more sense to just get the software right. Maybe Apple sees the writing on the wall and figures very tightly controlled hardware so not much testing needed/similar performance.

I do this the differences are great enough Between the car and phone research to warrant the move. But maybe once again I'm just bitter Apple isn't paying attention to their desktop line. :p

[mikeash]

I don't even think the naysayers were particularly wrong. Apple succeeded by fundamentally changing what a smartphone was, not by beating Blackberry and Nokia and such at their own game.

The biggest challenges were being extremely energy efficient to get acceptable battery life out of a tiny battery, and being extremely data efficient to get acceptable costs from expensive cellular carriers. People pointed out, and rightfully so, that Apple wasn't good at either.

They didn't anticipate that Apple would build a phone that was basically a thin shell around a (relatively) huge battery, or that they'd manage to convince a major carrier to offer an "unlimited" data plan. Suddenly, the stuff that the incumbents were good at didn't matter that much.

I don't see any way to do an equivalent move in the automobile industry. I don't think there are any areas that everybody is failing to fundamentally rethink, the way they were with energy and data usage a decade ago, where Apple could jump in and change the whole game. But I wouldn't bet money on it....

[twoodfin]

The biggest challenges were being extremely energy efficient to get acceptable battery life out of a tiny battery, and being extremely data efficient to get acceptable costs from expensive cellular carriers.

I'd reword your first challenge as moving what had been theretofore a desktop OS onto a handheld device with acceptable performance/power consumption. Once that was done, it provided massive leverage for Apple over any of their competitors due to the maturity and flexibility of their toolchain, as well as a wealth of developers both inside and outside the company who could exploit it.

[honkhonkpants]

The industry did not jump from dumb phones to iPhone. Blackberry pioneered the market and had a stranglehold on it until Apple came along and stomped them.

[samfisher83]

You could say the iphone was the evolution from the ipod, and I would argue samsung is quite important to the android growth.

[samfisher83]

For all the hate GM get the EV1 was way ahead of their Time. Its sad that GM didn't have the leadership that supported that effort. We would probably have viable low cost EVs by now.

[maxerickson]

What's the path they would have followed? The battery in the EV1 was crappy and expensive, is the thesis that billions of automotive dollars would have accelerated progress in battery research? Is it useful to lose money producing electric vehicles while doing that research?

[samfisher83]

Usually you have to spend a lot on research to make advancements. You have to experiment with different materials.

[Animats]

Which GM did. The Chevy Bolt is the result. Pre-orders start today.[1] $37,495 before $7,500 Federal tax rebate. Claimed range 238 miles. Delivery in about 10 weeks.

This will change the auto landscape drastically. This is a product of the Chevrolet Division of General Motors. They're good at making and selling large numbers of cars. It may not be as cool as Tesla, but there will be millions of these things soon.

[1] http://gas2.org/2016/10/14/chevy-bolt-pre-ordering-begins-ca...