Nothing will happen. All these three will stay as niche player.. making 50-100k cars a year. All electric cars are getting sold because of tax subsidies. Once the subsidies are gone, the sales will fall sideways. You can look at Prius and see how much the sales tanked once the oil price went down. Also in Cali, once they stopped giving out the carpool stickers to Prius, the sales went down further.
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Apple Reportedly Running Secret Car Lab in German Capital
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Nothing will happen. All these three will stay as niche player.. making 50-100k cars a year. All electric cars are getting sold because of tax subsidies. Once the subsidies are gone, the sales will fall sideways. You can look at Prius and see how much the sales tanked once the oil price went down. Also in Cali, once they stopped giving out the carpool stickers to Prius, the sales went down further.
You are not going to make a car if you haven't even made a TV yet*... its not going to happen, they will cancel it.
(*If you are a small electronics devices company and not a car manufacturer..)
If they where not bold enough to get into the highly competitive TV market, I dont think they ever will be bold enough to get into the ultra competitive Car maker business..
And you could lose a lot of money in car manufacturing pretty quickly.. That bank account will not look so full after a while.
Pie in the sky..
edit: Lol, of course there are no margins, and there will be no margins for 5-10 years in both (TV/Car) of these businesses.. if they do it it will be mostly a PR move to promote "smart living" etc.. and promote the Apple Lifestyle etc.. They could have went into the TV business cirka 2005,6 but if they go into the car business they will have no margins for 5-10 years.. probably massive initial losses and no profits for 5-10 years
The TV/Car business/markets are not exactly like the smart watch market where you can make good margins and probably a profit in the first year. Although I still think Apple watch are a plus minus zero brand building exercise..
The profits are suppose to come later.. after the initial investment.. and then they could add premium brand overhead, margins like they do with the smartphone, PCs etc.. that people will pay extra for Apple. They could never compete with the margins that for example Samsung Tvs have.. thats not Apples play, you pay extra for the brand/image with Apple.
(*If you are a small electronics devices company and not a car manufacturer..)
If they where not bold enough to get into the highly competitive TV market, I dont think they ever will be bold enough to get into the ultra competitive Car maker business..
And you could lose a lot of money in car manufacturing pretty quickly.. That bank account will not look so full after a while.
Pie in the sky..
edit: Lol, of course there are no margins, and there will be no margins for 5-10 years in both (TV/Car) of these businesses.. if they do it it will be mostly a PR move to promote "smart living" etc.. and promote the Apple Lifestyle etc.. They could have went into the TV business cirka 2005,6 but if they go into the car business they will have no margins for 5-10 years.. probably massive initial losses and no profits for 5-10 years
The TV/Car business/markets are not exactly like the smart watch market where you can make good margins and probably a profit in the first year. Although I still think Apple watch are a plus minus zero brand building exercise..
The profits are suppose to come later.. after the initial investment.. and then they could add premium brand overhead, margins like they do with the smartphone, PCs etc.. that people will pay extra for Apple. They could never compete with the margins that for example Samsung Tvs have.. thats not Apples play, you pay extra for the brand/image with Apple.
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Yes, I'm German and I can make such a sweeping statement because I have figures to back it up. Mittelstand companies are 99% (literally, I didn't make that up) of German companies and make up about 2/3 of exports. I've seen many of them and know people who work there; one literally makes some kind of specialised screws, the other makes a part used in air-conditioning pumps (not even the whole unit, just a vital part of the pump), another makes some kind of fastener for railway girders. All very, very niche areas that at would have long been swept up and consolidated in to a bigger firm in the UK/USA.
I'm not saying German companies are the best at everything. Clearly they're not. I'm saying that the mentality is more introverted - to refine and perfect what you have, rather than extroverted - to reinvest your profits in new products and try to do more things.
I would hesitate even to call big corporations like Volkswagen "German". They are part of a class of multinationals whose decisions are made all over the world and who have no loyalty to any one nation.
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They could go in to the TV industry. The question isn't boldness, though, it's margins. Right now Samsung have unrivalled production scale and quality, and have been competing so aggressively that TV prices have fallen drastically. Sony, Sharp and Toshiba have all been forced out of the TV business in one way or another, and that's a market which resonates deeply with their brands. They're getting mauled out there.
It's not worth Apple getting in to this market from a business perspective - they're going to have to invest a lot of money to compete with Samsung, all for razor-thin margins on products which people don't replace very often. There's no clear mix of "profitable" and "successful" that you can craft a winning strategy from. TVs themselves are commodities: they are dumb, increasingly large and increasingly inexpensive screens.
The profitable part of TV is with the content, not the hardware. That's where Apple's starting out from. They want to make a great UI for discovering content - that's going to start out primarily as video, integrating with Netflix, Hulu, etc. Eventually those TV experiences and content will evolve, and Apple has a mature native App platform available to support that stuff.
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Your reasoning is very poorly developed. One very much doubts Apple's offshore workers engaged in insane hours of overtime due to the "love" of it. In fact if you had any ounce of understanding of the issues here you would acknowledge Apple workers do it because they are very poorly paid <8% the typical factory worker in countries with humane working conditions. They're being exploited. And maybe in "your world" you exploit other people too, who knows.
Your views are totally irrelevant because they come from a deep seated place that is hostile towards Apple offshore factory workers, as previously noted by the commenter, they are "disposable". Your hostility deserves no further acknowledgement.
So, nice try. Considering that Apple negotiates contracts its implausible to suggest that Foxconn and others really set the wages freely and fairly. Apple is completely complicit in exploiting its workers at offshore factories. Do you understand the concept of exploitation, do you understand the concept of wages that are completely miss matched with costs of living? China Labor Watch is doing a tremendously great job of shining a very bright light on corporate misdeeds such that Apple's extended workers endure. Take for instance huge amounts of overtime worked by Apple's offshore workforce. China Labor Watches investigations go so far to publish more than 1000 original pay stubs showing excessive over time worked by workers assembling Apple devices. No nonsense there. We certainly do not get that level of in-depth information in the reports Apple presents on its shiny website. Apple could be the champion here in the industry. But it isn't. Apple has a shiny outer but it is totally rotten to the core. What a disgrace.http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/newscast/524
I don't think we will see AI within our lifetimes. Most current "AI" is just programming with a set of rules. The ability to "learn" is very limited, more to something like, try something and if it gives an outcome that is better than some threshold then further actions can benefit, but put that AI in a slightly different space such as roads without white lines, then it may never learn how to drive on those roads. That is why I think current cars don't use AI (in what I think AI is) as such.
That's not what I said...
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Was a random clearly exagerately low number, dude.
I've said it a week ago and people ignored me as if I was Ming-Chi Kuo:
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/22791231/
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/22790330/
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/22791231/
https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/22790330/
Mini would be nice
You know just as well as I do, AI doesn't work.That's what people said years ago about ABS, ESP, airbags, etc.