Apple exploring cars, medical devices to reignite growth | Hacker News Reader

Apple exploring cars, medical devices to reignite growth

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41 pointscpeterso42 comments

I don't think Tesla has anything to gain from Apple. The last thing Elon wants is useless execs butting heads with him on critical design decisions. Tesla is a product company, and any interference with the product will kill them instantly.

Furthermore, Tesla's entire software ecosystem is already mature, so there'd be no gain from Apple on that front.

All that's left is cash, which they can get from Wall St. or any other investor on the planet right now.

>> "Tesla is a product company, and any interference with the product will kill them instantly."

And Apple is one of the most successful product companies of the last decade.

One big thing they would get from Apple is international experience/operations experience. From Apple's perspective I read today that Tesla is working on a facility to double the worlds lithium ion battery production - that would benefit Apple.

>> "Furthermore, Tesla's entire software ecosystem is already mature, so there'd be no gain from Apple on that front."

Integration. Integrating peoples smartphones, tablets, computers, cars, TV's. Tesla doesn't have the best designed software either - something critically important if you're accessing it while driving. I'm sure Apple's expertise would be useful there.

I'm afraid that in the useless and stupid quest for "ease of use," this would happen to the automobile:

http://assets.yodawgpics.com/hashed_silo_content/silo_conten...

Apple isn't fit to make vehicles. They're a whole different league from consumer electronics. It isn't realistic to expect a very clearly function-follows-form company to design a viable, aerodynamic, fluid, and well-engineered car.

Apple also isn't in any position to design a vehicle either – they outsource parts and are more assemblers with some in-house design going on.

> the useless and stupid quest for "ease of use,"

> a very clearly function-follows-form company

Your opinions about Apple are, to put it mildly, non-mainstream. I am a frigging software engineer, perfectly able to handle complexity, and I prefer Apple products precisely due to that "useless, stupid" ease of use. I also question that "function follows form" is their design ethos, but even if it is, the result is still better than anyone else's.

And that's the stupidest "yo dawg" I've ever seen. If there's anything that's too easy to use, it's online meme generator tools.

>>"And that's the stupidest "yo dawg" I've ever seen. If there's anything that's too easy to use, it's online meme generator tools."

This "Yo Dawg" meme is a joke about those infuriating one-button mice that Apple released a few years ago.

Apple is a consumer electronics company with supply chain expertise for sourcing a bunch of components from various manufactures. Aside from maybe sourcing battery cells, those skills do not meaningfully transfer. Perhaps their design expertise transfers. But, at least in terms of their industrial design, curved aluminum is pretty common for the automative industry. Indeed, one might argue that Apple was applying such design concepts, beautifully and with great skill,to electronics.

The software might help, but 1) isn't something Tesla need to differentiate themselves on further at lest yet and 2) excluding android may not be something Tesla is willing to do.

Tesla could learn a lot from Apple. The touchscreen UI is extremely dated. It reminds me of Windows Media Player.

http://i.imgur.com/Gsqslrd.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3ZfHi1b.jpg

And windows media player worked fine until it had competitors. Realistically, while Tesla's UI might be awful, it's better than a lot of them and moreover, not a major point of competition: few people buy cars for the UI.

Dealing with the additional organization overhead doesn't seem to offer much of a gain.

Smartphone UIs do not map to cars well at all. All those slidy transition effects? Distractions. Icons? Useless - you need icons and text. Long presses? Unusable.

Apple can bring nothing to the table here, and importantly there is no "Apple Inside" branding which will affect whether someone buys a $60,000 vehicle. Apple is used to prodicts with a frequent model swap, not big capital outlays.

Ugggh---So. Glossy.

I don't really have the time to dig up a link, but I recall that Elon mentioned in an interview that his goals for Tesla were to get it up and running and then hand it off to someone else. He wasn't particularly specific about this, but I think long term, he would rather focus on SpaceX. So while I agree that Tesla doesn't really need anything from Apple at this point in time, it's worth keeping this point in mind.

Well, here's somewhat of a counterpoint:

Forgot to say one thing at Tesla annual shareholders meeting: just as my money was the first in, it will be the last out.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/statuses/342107352041922560

So I believe he expressed his sentiments (that I brought up in the parent comment) in the Pando Daily fireside chat[1]. Its over an hour long so I am not going to re-watch it to confirm this. But keep in mind that when this interview was conducted TSLA was trading at $30 a share and was finally starting to look promising after a few years of near bankruptcy and failure, but wasn't quite the Wall Street darling that it is today. More recent comments indicate that he will be with the company for at least another 5 years[2]. The talks with apple appear to have happened somewhere in between these two interviews. It's entirely possible that Apple and Elon were simply discussing partnership opportunities. But it's not too far fetched to think that after 8 years of near failure, Musk was considering cashing out. Tesla's recent momentum might have given him a second wind, but in the end, SpaceX is his real baby.

As an aside, after hearing the Pando Daily interview, it never occurred to me that Elon would sell out his stake in Tesla. He feels more like the type to either sell the company entirely, or keep his stake but pass the reins off to someone else.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uegOUmgKB4E [2] http://www.treehugger.com/cars/elon-musk-how-long-hell-stay-...

That doesn't say anything about him running the company though

If anyone is going to throw cash into Tesla, it'd be Google. Tesla, combined with Uber (who GOOG already threw ~$250MM into), aligns pretty closely with where Google X wants to take mobility/transportation.

Google's software / systems would work just as well with gasoline cars as electric. Strategically they want the complements to the stuff they sell to be as cheap as possible, which means having a somewhat generic / commoditized ecosystem around them (cf Android). Running their own car company is antithetical to that.

It's not necessarily antithetical. They already operate a small fleet for the purpose of StreetView mapping. Imagine having an entire fleet of sensors all over the world gathering data all the time. Traffic data, weather data, etc. The cars could also serve as a way to show people local advertisements. If I pay for a trip from A to B, Google can advertise for all the small businesses along the route from A to B. It would be like having billboards in the car tailored to each user.

Furthermore, it would be super interesting if Google also took interest in Liquid Robotics as well if they see value in a global sensor network play.

Also, what if cars could be used as a last mile wireless play? None of this would be trivial, but they wouldn't have the cost of acquiring plots of land for antennas like telcos do. Pairing of a cellphone with a mobile car antenna could be done by comparing the directional vector of the vehicle with the the directional vector of people needing to connect to an antenna. i.e. if I'm driving along side a Google car, that's the natural choice of antenna to connect to.

You need to look at each car in the fleet as an asset with potential instead of purely as a capital expenditure limited to known revenue streams.

>"Imagine having an entire fleet of sensors all over the world gathering data all the time. Traffic data, weather data, etc."

What you've described is already, in part, reality. Android phones already gather traffic data for Google Maps. http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/07/how-google-tracks-tra...

If they own the car company, integration will be easier and they can prevent from being locked out by other auto manufacturers. Electric vehicles will continue to drop in price, and they have a much lower total cost of ownership. The price of oil will be continue to increase, while the cost of electricity will continue to plummet. Lets not even talk about how electric cars only require tire rotations every 5K miles and battery replacements every ~100-150K/miles (which, by the way, can be handled by automated systems like Tesla's pack swap station).

Tesla provides turnkey low cost mobility. Google just needs to integrate the intelligence.

All evidence suggests that the opposite is true as well. Apple does not buy large companies. They don't buy unless it fits their strategy very well. So you cannot expect them to blindly buy Tesla for the sake of it.

Exactly. It's very unlikely that the UI that I want in my car is going to come from the company that once banned a dictionary app for containing dirty words.

Can you imagine the list of crippled, Naderized, and just plain missing key features that Apple would bring to your car's dashboard?

Apple has utter mastery of one of the largest supply chains in existence. That's not nothing.

I'm most interested in the medical stuff Apple is reportedly pursuing with the iWatch. The M7 in the iPhone is the one thing holding me back from a Nexus 5. I use the Runkeeper app and it can track my activities automatically now and is quite accurate (e.g. I set it to record any walk/run longer than 15 mins). I also use the Moves app to track my steps throughout the day. It's quite accurate and with the M7 I haven't noticed any battery drain. If Apple can add sensors to measure several more data points that I can improve upon over time (as I have been trying to do with steps taken daily) it could impact my health quite significantly.

That's consumer health, not medical. Medical is a very different type of thing. You can slap 'not for medical applications' on lots of things to deflect liability, but that's just the same market as Fitbit and whatever.

No one with an insulin pump cares about whether Apple made it, and the requirements of important medical devices scale in a way which blows branding and even UI out of consideration.

Type 1 Diabetics have been asking for an insulin pump "as simple as the iPhone" for years. I would know, I've worked on insulin pump designs.

Branding certainly is not important, but UI is incredibly important in a number of medical devices, insulin pumps among them. Back in the early 00's a startup company won significant share in a few short years against the behemoth near-monopolist in the market by differentiating only on UI.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple got into something actually medical (and not just consumer health) given the team they're assembling, a couple of whom are ex-colleagues of mine who have 15+ years in medical device design.

Buying Tesla at its current insane valuation would be a huge mistake for Apple and completely out of character for them. They didn't get their cash pile by being stupid with money. Following Google and others into the narrative of "acquisitions = innovation" is short sighted and will be seen as stupid once the current cycle is over.

Fortunately there's no chance of Apple buying Tesla.

Google could though. They have a ~400 billion dollar market cap, compared to TSLA's 24 billion. You don't even need to buy them outright; just buy a controlling interest.

If the articles I've read are to be believed, Apple has at least $150B in cash just lying around. Tesla wouldn't be a huge chunk of that if they were so inclined.

Most of that $150B is sitting in overseas tax havens. Just repatriating it to buy Tesla would cost them a bundle.

Would it need to be repatriated to Apple Inc? Say for arguments sake Apple Sales International in Ireland (or any global subsidiary company) has enough cash on its books to buy Tesla. ASI is a separate legal entity from Apple Inc, albeit owned by it. Couldn't ASI de jure buy and control Tesla and Apple Inc de facto control it by virtue of controlling ASI? What counts as repatriation? I'm not sure, but it's very interesting.

They'd likely take out loans if they needed the cash, rather than repatriating it as they'd get a better rate.

Taxes won't stop any company from using their cash if they think the acquisition is important enough (using debt is also an option as well). That doesn't say anything about whether it's a stupid acquisition or not.

Tax havens such as Germany, the UK, Sweden, Switzerland and dozens of other countries where Apple operates?

Eh… Goog is smaller than Aapl wrt. both market cap and cash. So if Google can, so can Apple ;-)

I would have thought that the meeting with Musk would have been about Tesla's plans for battery production (with partners) more than anything else:

http://electrek.co/2014/01/15/elon-musk-confirms-tesla-gigaf...

Anyone else on mobile have the site menu obscuring the right side of the page?

They missed the chance to get a good deal on Tesla. It's too late Apple. Move on.

Why buy Tesla and screw up the current iPhone / Siri integration strategy?

iTravel and iFeelGood :D

I'll give my money to Apple for a couple of 60" TVs and a pair of iWatches, iTags are the future.

So there, shut up and take my $5k.

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