[twobitshifter]

The value of the car market is enormous. If you look at the top 10 industries, cars are the best market for Apple to branch out into. I can’t see them in financial services, construction, or oil/energy.

If you look at previous behemoth companies, like GE, they tried to hit all these industries and overextended. There was GE energy, GE Capital, GE digital, GE Healthcare, GE Transportation systems, GE Aviation, and some part of that made light bulbs. With Apple, they can’t just keep producing phones and grow so the challenge is to break into new neighboring sectors. Their goal with the car was not so much to manufacture it as it was to provide industrial design, branding, and software support as an initial foray. They were turned back by Kia/Hyundai as not bringing enough to the table.

[vineyardmike]

As others mentioned, they already have huge financial services. Plus their mountain of cash is probably not just in some bank account, surely it's invested and put to work growing too.

Apple clearly has healthcare ambitions by the Apple Watch. They're building stupidly popular medical monitoring devices, and a health data research platform. Seems like they could tip-toe their way towards medical records management software too.

I am surprised they don't offer more cloud services for app developers, but i'm guessing its hard for them to compete with the major clouds.

Apple does not have the manufacturing or sales chops to sell whole cars. While Apple Geniuses are great at fixing an iphone, they're ill equipped to service cars.

[spoonjim]

They are already in financial services big time (Apple Wallet/Pay/Cash) and that can grow.