Apple's revived Car - service only?

Apple General
#21

Apple do not usually aim for a high volume/low margin business such as the car industry, or the taxi industry. Except when they can bring some major, disruption that turns the industry on its head, and thereby create high margins.

Given that:

  • the whole car industry is moving to autonomous cars and the car-as-a-service model
  • the car makers are well versed in producing up-market products
  • the Taxi industry is almost a no margin business, even including Uber

then what disruption is Apple going to offer that will differentiate them from other luxury makes and deliver the high margins? What will Apple be able to provide that others, such as BMW, Tesla, Mercedes & Porche, cannot.

One possibility is better integration with the Apple ecosystem, but is that enough?

#22

It is certainly a huge question mark - one that Apple execs obviously have struggled with themselves given that they not so long ago benched the (full) car project, and yet now have reportedly started it up again.

My assumption based on nothing is that they would be aiming at creating fully electric vehicles that have small form factors. When the technology reaches the point that a driver is completely dispensed with, the internal configuration of a car could be overhauled. Laws that allow this however may be some time away - pretty sure every legislation on the planet still requires a driver to at least sit in the driver seat and be ready to take over if the AI fails to safely operate the vehicle.

#23

I don’t think I could be less excited about anything than I am about all the Apple Car Rumours. I just don’t care, I wish there was some kind of advanced mute button for life where you could just block all mentions of a particular topic, and this would be one of them.

I’m currently going through the process of being made Redundant at Telstra (something I am completely ready for, so not a bad thing fo me personally). Through this process I’m seeing the height of corporate bullshyte speak. For all of Telstra’s talk of restructuring and improving, as someone who has been there for a long number of years I can tell you that upper levels of management are completely clueless and have no idea what’s going on below them. These Apple Car Rumours make me think, that at least Partially, there are parts of Apple who are just as clueless as much of Telstra is. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I fear I won’t be.

4 Likes
#24

I know when I was at Qld Health I used to scratch my head a bit at middle management… Sometimes it really just felt like their job was to play chinese whispers - receive instructions from upper management then instruct the “real workers” what to do. Then - at least in my dept - when Newman wheeled his axe, it was the workers who were made redundant.

Sometimes I look at the major job role changes that MacRumours reports on (as per the start of this thread) and do wonder - have they actually hired the right person for the job?? But hey - they are the Trillion Dollar Company…