Yes and:
Riding Wright's Law.
> I'd argue the M1 is a revolutionary product on the same level as the first iPhone.
This was first obvious with Apple's move to 64-bit for mobile. And should be more obvious with the Apple Watch. While M1 is quite the competitive advantage, there's nothing on the horizon to compete with Apple's wearables; Apple dominates both the profits and marketshare.
I don't know what superlatives to use. Nor do I know how to summarize, much less describe, Apple's strategy. But it's working.
Apple focused on profitability. Capture the highest margin market segments, then ride the price curve down. This sucked all the oxygen out of the competition.
Similarly, Apple's monospony strategy repeatedly boxed out competitors.
Most infuriatingly, Apple laser focused on select differentiators and competitive advantages to the exclusion of many others. For example, thinness for thinness sake. At the expense of reliability and repairability. Why? Because they could and copying them was prohibitively expensive. Again, boxing out competitors.
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Contrast and comparison sometimes helps understanding.
Two other examples of Apple's Druckeresque strategy are Tesla and SpaceX. Capture the profits, plow the capital back into R&D, relentlessly drive Wright's Law.
My hunch is the core strategic focus is on lowest cost of capital. What moat most protects the dominance of AWS, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX? I think, compared to their competitors, it's their lower cost of capital?
Duh, right?
So while I think it's fine to speculate and cheer. But it's hard to get excited by competitors who a) don't have cheaper capital and b) aren't driving Wright's law for crucial competitive technical advantage.
Toyota used to have these advantages. But somehow lost the narrative. I think the case studies will argue that Toyota missed two opportunities. First, they punted on owning their own digital hardware and software, whereas Tesla treated the car as an iPhone on wheels, a new platform. Second, most importantly, Tesla jumped into EVs at the very moment Li-ion became feasible, and decided to relentlessly drive Wright's Law for battery tech. The other manufacturers simply waited too long to jump in. Tesla's Li-ion flywheel (access to capital, scale, Wright's Law) will kick in within a few years, cementing their dominance.
Of course Tesla's story isn't finished. Like all hard driving efforts, balanced on a knife edge, Telsa could implode. But if they avoid a cash crunch, it's hard to imagine any EV competitor catching up. In that way, Apple's access to cheap capital is great deal more robust.
FWIW, I anticipate Starlink will become SpaceX's Apple style money printing machine. And once that revenue kicks in, the existing cell and cable carriers will be buried. The Mars mission and national defense parts of SpaceX's story are fun and legit. But unlike all their competitors, SpaceX will be self-sustaining on Starlink.
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Thanks for reading this far. I write to understand. And this narrative has been eluding me.
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PS- The outlines of next technical turf battles are pretty obvious.
Apple's next big challenge is baseband chips. They know this, of course. But for whatever reason, eliminating their dependence on Qualcomm is very hard. And whoever productizes the successor to 5G, whatever the satellite uplink chipset shapes up to be, will be sitting very pretty.
The Li-ion story wrt BEVs now seems pretty obvious. Everything from light trucks to skateboards will be almost fully BEV by around 2030. Tesla will produce about 1/10th of the world's batteries; and maybe a 1/10th of the Model 3 sized automobiles. And like Apple, they'll capture most of the profits.
The next frontier will be hydrogen. The hydrogen story today looks like Li-ion around 2005, +/- 3 years. Hydrogen's first use cases will be all the stuff BEV missed. Like trucks, transportation, utility scale energy storage. Someone like Toyota could survive long enough to see their hydrogen bet pay off. But I think it's more likely new entrants will access to cheap capital will prevail.
Any way.