Forget about Apple as a negative. The only stupid thing Apple could do is to make a driver's car that takes on Tesla. They may have lost Steve Jobs but they are not stupid. Losing Jobs only makes them more conservative not more adventurous. A grand adventure into sports cars at the bleeding edge of mechanical engineering is not for Apple. Apple is not the richest thing on Earth by miles and $200+ billion is not all that in the big picture. As has been pointed out here, numerous Sovereign Funds around the world are worth more than double Apple in pure uncommitted cash and the daily trading volumes on the World's stock markets dwarf it.
What Apple has going for it is near-total dominance in software, passive and interactive media content delivery and intuitive user-interfaces as a lifestyle and extending that lifestyle to a moving piece of hardware that holds you rather than you holding it is the key to Apple mobility here. All that is necessary is to strip out everything that matters to a driver or an owner and max out the passenger experience. No ownership prestige and no driving performance thrills (that stuff costs money for nothing in this context).
The opportunity space is so vast and the scope of traditional ICE manufacturers to defend its markets is so fundamentally futile that head to head competition with Tesla is an irrelevant concept and a distraction Apple does not need to bother with. An Apple sale in this space will limit Tesla's market access not one little bit while the additive effect on smashing the fortresses of Tesla's detractors will be immense - bit hard to lobby for anti-EV legislation mid Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
As a matter of fact Musk and Jony Ive appear to be buddies.
Objectively Tesla will ultimately emerge the larger EV / mobility player anyway. At the limits of market saturation, battery technology, economies of scale and experience in hardware manufacturing including "the machine that makes the machine" (both battery-cell and car) and the physics of vehicles does matter to cost per mile and quality of service and in the early days of AI EV roll out a really nice car that connects cities at high speeds and the ability to appeal to owner drivers can and will attract a market premium over cool but basic A - B transit despite the fact that flooding the A-B space is low risk and effectively offers Apple the ability to push at a virtually unlimited open-door which its resources will dramatically help it to flood.
The early days of the autonomous EV as a service will generate a service that is so much more attractive than buying a used car just to go from A to B and so much cheaper per mile to deliver that the profitability on such services for both Tesla and Apple will be immense and the internal cost per mile cost basis not really all that important. Even if Apple's costs per mile are double those of Tesla's or vice versa it would not matter - Each will come to pennies of cost on the dollar of market value experienced by their customers while undercutting a comparatively terrible quality customer experience with ICE and gasoline in a second hand car by more than 50% on price per mile. Eventually the absolute cost per mile will matter and that will favor the more advanced player but it will take many years to run out of ICE market to conquer and to expand upon to markets that have never attained car ownership due to its high costs before intra AI-EV provider price competition will start to matter.
I suspect if Apple and Tesla are the only two EV providers, Apple will overtake Tesla's early lead by volume in 5-10 years time but in 30 years Tesla will own 80% of the market by value. Naturally there will be others long before then - and the difference between Apple and Tesla is that Tesla will have a cut of nearly all of it including Apple's pie.
The fundamental value add of the automotive future is the OTA network and the battery - this is what replaces the central position of the Oil Industry of the ICE era and it would appear Tesla through its affiliation with SpaceX and rapidly approaching global dominance of the battery manufacturing supply chain is better positioned to deliver both than Apple or any other entity. The other thing to mention is that Tesla is I think better positioned than Apple to deal with the Internet of Things with an open source distributed and resilient capital structure for networks of hardware as a service each of which is or will be reliant in particular on the Tesla OTA network which SpaceX seeks to take global in low Earth orbit. Apple I suspect is more likely to seek a closed-source ecosystem that is reliant on its own capital resources and with only $200 billion to play with, Tesla will surpass it as a simple function of time and ability to deliver a higher quality product and service innovation at a reduced cost - for example integration with functional robotics to deal with tasks beyond merely transporting people in a fun environment - so for example autonomous loading and unloading and considerably beyond that i.e. doing the jobs people have to do but don't want to when they arrive at a remote location - from go fetch the shopping to go fetch the solar array components and a palette of batteries then go and build a micro-grid with them - and onward from there. Here Tesla if it persists on the same trajectory will retain the innovation advantage, continually built on the OTA network and tackling hard science connected to direct control of manufacturing.
What Apple has going for it is near-total dominance in software, passive and interactive media content delivery and intuitive user-interfaces as a lifestyle and extending that lifestyle to a moving piece of hardware that holds you rather than you holding it is the key to Apple mobility here. All that is necessary is to strip out everything that matters to a driver or an owner and max out the passenger experience. No ownership prestige and no driving performance thrills (that stuff costs money for nothing in this context).
The opportunity space is so vast and the scope of traditional ICE manufacturers to defend its markets is so fundamentally futile that head to head competition with Tesla is an irrelevant concept and a distraction Apple does not need to bother with. An Apple sale in this space will limit Tesla's market access not one little bit while the additive effect on smashing the fortresses of Tesla's detractors will be immense - bit hard to lobby for anti-EV legislation mid Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
As a matter of fact Musk and Jony Ive appear to be buddies.
Objectively Tesla will ultimately emerge the larger EV / mobility player anyway. At the limits of market saturation, battery technology, economies of scale and experience in hardware manufacturing including "the machine that makes the machine" (both battery-cell and car) and the physics of vehicles does matter to cost per mile and quality of service and in the early days of AI EV roll out a really nice car that connects cities at high speeds and the ability to appeal to owner drivers can and will attract a market premium over cool but basic A - B transit despite the fact that flooding the A-B space is low risk and effectively offers Apple the ability to push at a virtually unlimited open-door which its resources will dramatically help it to flood.
The early days of the autonomous EV as a service will generate a service that is so much more attractive than buying a used car just to go from A to B and so much cheaper per mile to deliver that the profitability on such services for both Tesla and Apple will be immense and the internal cost per mile cost basis not really all that important. Even if Apple's costs per mile are double those of Tesla's or vice versa it would not matter - Each will come to pennies of cost on the dollar of market value experienced by their customers while undercutting a comparatively terrible quality customer experience with ICE and gasoline in a second hand car by more than 50% on price per mile. Eventually the absolute cost per mile will matter and that will favor the more advanced player but it will take many years to run out of ICE market to conquer and to expand upon to markets that have never attained car ownership due to its high costs before intra AI-EV provider price competition will start to matter.
I suspect if Apple and Tesla are the only two EV providers, Apple will overtake Tesla's early lead by volume in 5-10 years time but in 30 years Tesla will own 80% of the market by value. Naturally there will be others long before then - and the difference between Apple and Tesla is that Tesla will have a cut of nearly all of it including Apple's pie.
The fundamental value add of the automotive future is the OTA network and the battery - this is what replaces the central position of the Oil Industry of the ICE era and it would appear Tesla through its affiliation with SpaceX and rapidly approaching global dominance of the battery manufacturing supply chain is better positioned to deliver both than Apple or any other entity. The other thing to mention is that Tesla is I think better positioned than Apple to deal with the Internet of Things with an open source distributed and resilient capital structure for networks of hardware as a service each of which is or will be reliant in particular on the Tesla OTA network which SpaceX seeks to take global in low Earth orbit. Apple I suspect is more likely to seek a closed-source ecosystem that is reliant on its own capital resources and with only $200 billion to play with, Tesla will surpass it as a simple function of time and ability to deliver a higher quality product and service innovation at a reduced cost - for example integration with functional robotics to deal with tasks beyond merely transporting people in a fun environment - so for example autonomous loading and unloading and considerably beyond that i.e. doing the jobs people have to do but don't want to when they arrive at a remote location - from go fetch the shopping to go fetch the solar array components and a palette of batteries then go and build a micro-grid with them - and onward from there. Here Tesla if it persists on the same trajectory will retain the innovation advantage, continually built on the OTA network and tackling hard science connected to direct control of manufacturing.
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