re: Apple Aiming to Begin Electric Car Production in 2020 (update)

Honestly, the type of people who buy VW Bugs and Priuses would probably be all over an Apple designed car. Apple does have a lot of cash, but getting into a completely different and fairly unrelated industry seems pretty far fetched. Yeah Google may be in essentially the same position, but I believe Google started down this path because it was looking for an internal way to improve the 2nd hit product they had, Maps.

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Yeah Google may be in essentially the same position, but I believe Google started down this path because it was looking for an internal way to improve the 2nd hit product they had, Maps.

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I also feel like Google is more of a company that takes on novel innovation risks. Apple doesn't take a lot of risks beyond what has been started by other companies and closely related to products they already have. This would be a deviation from their normal behavior.

Somebody posted AAPL's earnings from the last quarter on the previous page. I don't think cash is an issue for Apple. Whatever Musk spends, Tim Cook can spend 10 times as much and not blink an eyelid. Apple can buy Tesla with just the spare cash they have lying around if they wanted to.

Why is Apple hiring up automotive experts?

Well, I was talking about Elon Musk specifically, mostly joking around. That said, Tim Cook isn't anywhere near Elon Musk in net worth. Not that that matters in relation to this.

The real reason they won't catch them is because Apple is all about refining and marketing over innovation. They make people believe that they will genuinely live better lives if they buy their products. Where they suffer, especially now that they're in their "Marketing Renaissance", is innovation simply because their engineers can't keep up with what they're "selling" to the customers. This isn't an attempt to innovate and usher in the next era in the auto industry. In my honest opinion, they're not attempting to compete with Tesla at all. I believe that they're going after Google and their driverless car technology. They want to put iOS all over the interior of the car and sell a "smarter, trendier" car.

In my eyes, Tesla's a company that isn't really competing directly with anyone at this point. They seem to have a different goal. Obviously, they still want to make money, but they also have a very scientific vibe to their product. Not to mention, I've only heard rave reviews from Tesla owners. I'm sure it's all PR, but it works on me, I guess. In 10-20 years, Apple may target Tesla, but it's a bad move to just try to go into making cars for them at this point. I'm pretty sure that they're aware of that as well. They've learned from things like the Pippin, Apple Maps, and all things U2. Tesla's not even a big enough fish to target directly at this point, and Apple would be fighting from behind. I mean, Tesla's one of the only companies with cult-like worship from their customers that rivals Apple's.

This is all just their hype machine testing the waters and doing R&D to see if they have a legitimate market for an Apple foray into cars. Just like the Apple TV that is going to "change the way people view televisions", it won't see the light of day for a very, very long time.

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Will eventually be cloned and copied by everyone, especially Samsung and Google...

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Right, because Google hasn't had a self driving car roaming the streets for a couple of years already

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Nothing innovative about the iPhone, iPad or iPod... all about the marketing..

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You do know that the MP3 player, PDA, the "smartphone", and tablet PCs all existed before Apple released their versions, right? I had a Compaq iPAQ around 2001 that could do all of the same shite as all three of those products with a color touchscreen. All of those products you mentioned were more of status symbols than anything.

So I guess this is really happening.

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We can learn a lot about the scope of the research Apple is doing from the talent on the team, so we’ve talked to our sources and compiled a list of some key employees Apple has hired and assigned to the project.

A couple things we learn from the hires: Evident by this long list of automotive experts, it’s clear Apple’s ambitions go well beyond just its iOS-based CarPlay in-dash system. Well beyond software too, as many of the names below are hardware engineers coming from Tesla, Ford and other notable automotive related areas. In fact, the majority of employees on this list that are reporting to team leader Steve Zadesky come from an automotive hardware background and many only joined Apple recently or around the time Cook reportedly approved the electric car project.

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Are the otter boxes ready for it though?

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I had a Compaq iPAQ around 2001 that could do all of the same shite as all three of those products with a color touchscreen

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I...I don't even know what to say to this. I'll try anyway. You're telling me that you had a product, made by Compaq in 2001, that you could buy/subscribe to services that allowed you to download or stream HD video and music to OTA? Your iPAQ ran microsoft office apps? You could make video calls with it? Capture HD video? Take pictures? Use it as a GPS out of the box? Have an app like Waze that crowd sources traffic information? Had a full HTML browser? Had access to an app store with over a million apps?

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I...I don't even know what to say to this. I'll try anyway. You're telling me that you had a product, made by Compaq in 2001, that you could buy/subscribe to services that allowed you to download or stream HD video and music to OTA? Your iPAQ ran microsoft office apps? You could make video calls with it? Capture HD video? Take pictures? Use it as a GPS out of the box? Have an app like Waze that crowd sources traffic information? Had a full HTML browser? Had access to an app store with over a million apps?

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Come on, man, you know what he meant. Today's smartphones are little more than the PDA's of 10+ years ago with a decade of tech advancement, plus a cell radio. He is simply making the inarguable point that the iPhone was NOT the marvel of innovation that it was made out to be, but its success makes the world believe that it was.

So let's tackle your list one by one:

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that you could buy/subscribe to services that allowed you to download or stream HD video and music to OTA?

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Why are you attributing the creation/innovation of not only the tech which allows HD video to be streamed AND displayed, but also for the services and tech that makes it possible to do this OTA, to Apple?!

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Your iPAQ ran microsoft office apps?

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Yes, Pocket Office came out in 1996. I definitely had Pocket Office on my Dell Axim in 2005. How is this an Apple innovation?

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You could make video calls with it?

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The first iPhone with a front-facing camera for video calls was the iPhone4, which came out in 2010. People were making video calls on the Sony Ericsson Z1010 in 2004. More Apple innovation!

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Capture HD video?

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Blaming the real innovators for not taking advantage of technology that wasn't available yet?

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Use it as a GPS out of the box?

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First phone with GPS came out in 1999. And nice "out of the box" qualifier, as I'm sure you know external GPS antennas were available for many PDAs long before the iPhone. Again, blaming the real innovators for not taking advantage of component shrinkage advances that had not occurred yet.

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Have an app like Waze that crowd sources traffic information?

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Now Apple is responsible for Waze?

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Had a full HTML browser?

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Apple innovated HTML and the web browser? Actually, I think the first web browser for a mobile PDA was developed for the Apple Newton... but not by Apple.

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Had access to an app store with over a million apps?

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An adaptation of the innovation of the Linux software repository.




Do you have any actual examples of innovation on Apple's part in the last 10 years?