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Comment by Gys | Hacker News Reader

It probably requires an Apple Watch to open the doors, using your required iPhone. The radio can only play Apple Music (subscription required). And do not forget to register with iCloud, otherwise the car will deny your ownership.

Not sure if am that much of an Apple fan to ever wanting to buy such car. Probably would feel like literally giving up all freedom of choice.

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I hate Apple and their shameless hypocritical promotion of corporate hegemony over the individual human as much as the next guy, but come on.

There is no chance -- at all, whatsoever -- that Apple would release a car that does any of the things you suggest. Sure, the Apple watch would open the doors, and the entertainment system would integrate with Apple Music, and iCloud would probably get a new feature called Find My Car.

But none of those things would be required in any way.

Maybe not the other stuff, but I would probably not be surprised if Apple's car required an iPhone or Apple Watch to start. Now that they have NFC it probably isn't a battery issue as well.

I'd actually be surprised if it is the other way around. The only way to kill keys is to render them non-compliant.

Why would they possibly want to limit their customers to a subset of their Apple Watch or iPhone customers? How is that advantageous for them.

If anything, they would build a car that is accessible to everyone, and have better iDevice integration to push iDevice sales. Makes no sense to do it the other way around.

At first I thought it would be silly too, but think about it: these guys are buying a car, why not give the iwatch and iphone free with the car, its only about a grand. If it all goes according to plan, the number of people who insist on using another device when the iDevices are sitting right there is going to dwindle.

Because when one is launching an already controversial, highly novel product it benefits in unimaginable ways to start extremely to a limited few customers. Let's see Apple's big, giant successes, and let's see how it benefitted them.

1. PC - Initially made for one particular store out of garage. It benefitted them to focus on just that store, because it gave them a feel of exclusive store without having one. Customers would come in, and buy there, because there was no price comparison possible with other stores. With price comparison came product comparison, and all PC companies as small as Apple lost business because of that. This was also accidentally done as Apple got a sizeable order from one single store, and they didn't have proper bandwidth to deliver even that.

2. Music - Initial iPod was Mac only. Steve mentions over and over in documentaries and books that it was the only reason he could convince music companies to let him sell music for $0.99 on iTunes. Too small a product, they thought, for tiny Mac-only player, it would be a good publicity thing. Had iTunes was a global platform from day one, it would be selling you full albums, with a complimentary CD delivered to door. Shipping and handling additional.

3.iPhone - AT&T only. And on this one people cried. But it helped Apple with becoming the OTT king, because they could always say, there is not propertization of telephony here, we only work with one carrier.

Self-driving cars will have a battle with a lot of authorities, in a lot of countries. Nobody knows how many turtles exist in that cave. So it helps starting small.

Apple would probably try to restrict where you can drive too... and if you cover the windows with tint that doesn't have the right RFID tag embedded in them, forget about it, you can't start the car.

;-)

Do not even think of trying to go fast to Google HQ...

Or how about a red light district ?! Some kind of age verification for each passenger for sure.

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