Last time I checked, the iPhone made up 70% of Apple's profits. If that's not a one-horse-company I don't know what is. They've failed to make any significant progress into other markets.
you really need to look a bit further than the proportional iPhone revenu to understand this. Apple still generates about 5 billion a year from macs and the same from iTunes and the App Store. That is not at all a one-horse-company. Cellphones are the product with the most large customer segment, and it will be very very hard to find or design a product that will be able to come close. A gaming console especially is not the answer to that. In addition, with the power cable companies have it will also not be a TV box, especially not globally. You cannot blame Apple for making their iPhone the biggest product. It is market demand that did that job for them. The same as you cannot blame Apple for any of the other categories being smaller. Even the Mac category that many people still would want Apple to focus exclusively on doesn't have that potential.
The iPad and Apple Watch are never going to replace the iPhone.
Why would they have to?
And neither is some ridiculous car.
Maybe you should try and keep your feelings out of this. The car or whatever it is hasn't even been announced yet. How do you know it is ridiculous? Tesla has shown that there is potential for a newcomer to have a profound effect on the car market.
By the time the global middle class can afford autonomous cars they will already be commoditized and the profit will have already been largely sucked out of the industry by competition. And that's where the real big money is, selling things to the global middle class. That's what Apple really needs to be looking for, some consumer technology with high margins that don't have a lot of existing competition. There are so many potential areas that could meet this criteria, I'm not sure why Apple thinks they need to move in the automotive space, a space that is so notoriously difficult to make any money in. They cannot really use their existing manufacturing lines to make a car.
I think you have failed to understand what disruption really means. In this case it means that a newcomer should kill the barriers that the old incumbents have put up. Again look at Tesla. They are far away from where they need to be, but the car (yes I have taken a good look at it at a dealership, Teslas are all over Amsterdam) is much less complex than any other combustion based car while providing better performance. This makes a real difference both in manufacturing and marketing. You and I might not know the difference that is needed to disrupt the car market, but somewhere there are people that do, and Apple has been contracting a quite sizeable amount of people from that group.
Google has so much more knowledge about the world than Apple does just because their core business requires it. Apple has no business entering the autonomous car industry. It's going to be a gigantic mistake. It's good to enter new markets, but not new markets that have so little in common with your existing experience. Tesla is starting to find this out the hard way. The car industry is not the tech industry. A lot of clueless tech executives think they can barge into the car industry because they think they have some "killer app", some technological advantage, and they usually realize a bit late in the game that the car world doesn't always follow the same rules that apply to the tech industry.
You are thinking again in the current dogma. People are nowadays seeing cars in a different light. They seem them as spaces they spend a lot of time in, so they must provide comfort and media options, consumer technology. In addition (outside of the US), the relation between performance and fuel economy has become more important with people looking either for smaller cars or electric cars. The trend has been set towards the car moving from a fuel based system to an electrical based system that will get you from a to b (semi)-autonomously while providing entertainment etc. this will take lots of years, but it will happen.
It doesn't help discussing the current status and barriers only to understand where technology is going. It helps to understand the powers changing the current status and understanding where consumers want to be (sometimes without knowing it). All of the big disruptions were created by understanding current barrier and looking beyond the current status: self-monitoring of blood glucose, smartphones,... You can probably come up with a few yourself.
For Apple and Google this means going beyond their current core competencies, as all the fields that are closer to the core competencies are heavily contested and do not provide enough profit potential.
Remember Wayne Gretzky's quote which went something like: I'm not skating to where the puck is, I'm skating to where it will be. This is exactly what Apple and Google are doing.
