> It seems like you don’t get Apple or their history of product development.
I get it just fine. They are improved user interfaces over things that already existed. Changing the main method of transfer of energy from the motor to the road in a vehicle is a fundamental change that has significant implications for everything else in the vehicle to the point of making it very unlikely that that vehicle will ever be completed.
People would not buy a car with spherical wheels for the 'cool factor' they would not buy it because it is untested technology with significant implications for the safety of the occupants and others on the road.
> Apple doesn’t care about incremental improvements when talking about a new product category.
Well, what is a leapfrog to you looks suspiciously like an incremental improvement to me. There were some phones that had a fair amount of resemblance to the iPhone before it launched and the iPod had a large number of predecessors as well. And without iPod no iPhone.
Arguably the iPhone could have been a success without multitouch, it's perfectly possible not to have multitouch and at the same time not to have stylus and not to have a keyboard.
As for the benefit of spherical wheels, yes, I can see some benefits, but I can also see significant drawbacks that are not easily engineered away.
A car is a device on an entirely different plane than a phone, the only time your life depends on your phone is when you're trying to call 911 after an accident, with a car you (and the people on the road around you) depend on your car from the moment you get into it until you disembark. That requires a more conservative kind of development.
Such as Tesla is showing, and which they occasionally get wrong, usually when they release stuff that isn't quite as reliable as it should be for mass deployment.