Apple's car building is also considered to be settled, from February 2015 news that it has been ten years intermittently, Apple finally shut down the car project. At the beginning, I wrote an article saying that the probability of Apple building a car is 50%, because Apple is not short of money, and building a car at that time is a good choice for industrial upgrading, but the place that is not optimistic is that although Apple has money, it is still hard work to build a car.
Several landmark events during this period are still fresh in people's minds, including the earliest Titan plan, then the preparation to cooperate with Hyundai Kia to build cars using the e-GMP platform, and then it was rumored that he was ready to borrow Foxconn for OEM, and then even Cook and Elon Musk talked about investing in Tesla. Halfway through, Doug Field, the earliest person in charge of Apple's car, left the Titan project and went to Ford to be the leader of the next generation of electric vehicles and software architecture, and later Apple directly promoted the car project to COO Jeff Williams and dedicated VP Kevin Lynch to take over, Apple also has a test car for self-driving running, but the speed of the whole project is not high - 9 years, it is enough to launch two generations of models.
This time, Apple directly cut the car-making business, not because of money, after all, it has only spent billions of dollars over the years, which is simply not a matter for Apple. But from the perspective of industry insiders, the core logic of Apple's no longer making cars should have several judgments-
1. Apple assesses that building cars is not a good business.
2. Apple's judgment on the automotive industry has changed: the trend of electric vehicles will change from mobile tools to smart terminals.
3. The rise of AI has changed the development logic of the entire Apple.
First of all, why is it no longer good business for Apple to build cars?
If the time goes back to 2015, Apple will build electric cars and do autonomous driving, it should be a logical choice at that time. Because around 2015, the sales prospects of mobile devices have reached the ceiling, and there is not much room for imagination in devices such as iPads. At that time, Apple had hundreds of billions of dollars in cash in its hands, and it always had to find a place to consume it, and building a car was a good choice, with a large investment, a high threshold, and a large scale of income. At that time, Apple was not a trillion-dollar technology company, and it was very imaginable that building a car could bring hundreds of billions of market value growth.
And at that time, Tesla also broke a path in the electric vehicle market, especially products like Model S opened up the $100,000 high-end electric vehicle market, which is very powerful for Apple. For Apple, from the founder Steve Jobs to the chief designer Jonathan Ive, they have always paid attention to the luxury car market, especially Ive himself likes cars, including Jaguar and Bentley, which he has studied. So Apple was going to build a car at that time, and it should be very enlightening to see the success of Tesla's Model S.
Of course, around 2015, technology companies began the first wave of car building craze, including Google's Waymo, and Jia Yueting's Faraday Future in China, when Silicon Valley was very keen on electric vehicles.
But nine years have passed, the logic of electric vehicle manufacturing has changed, and the preferences of the capital market have also changed. From the beginning of electric luxury cars, it has become a self-driving boom led by Tesla, and electric vehicles are no longer luxury positioning, but popular products. This poses a big problem for Apple to build a car.
If you want to say that Apple builds an electric car with a million yuan, it is not attractive to Apple, but to build a million-level electric car, the entire demand cannot go up, and it is meaningless from the perspective of an operator like Cook. Therefore, the logic of building a car that I thought about at the beginning didn't make sense, and it is natural not to do it now.
Secondly, technology companies should have changed the development of the automotive industry in this round.
From the very beginning, Apple's core focus was on autonomous driving, and L4 autonomous driving products were Apple's most important functional selling point at that time, and it was also an area that technology companies like Apple preferred to challenge. But now, Tesla's FSD has been delayed, and the progress of autonomous driving around the world is not ideal, whether it is Waymo or GM's Cruise, or Argo AI, which has been disbanded by Ford and Volkswagen, is now basically marginalized. Including Tesla, it has also changed its understanding of FSD to "intelligent driving", and the story told has changed.
If autonomous driving is delayed, how much point does it make for a tech giant like Apple to just change a car to a pure electric drive and then add some Apple software? There is no revolutionary progress at all, and it cannot make Apple and other car companies differentiate themselves. Therefore, if the industry believes that there is no possibility of autonomous driving in ten years, then it makes little sense for Apple to build a car.
Another trend change is that in 2015, the node to build a car, a very important point is that technology companies regard the car as the last information island after the mobile phone, that is, from the car to the Internet of Vehicles system, and finally obtain the last information entrance of consumers. You must know that there is no way for a person to use a mobile phone when driving, which means that the ecology in the car cannot be controlled by technology companies, and it is still controlled by car companies. Carplay was launched before Apple built a car, but the carplay ecology has not been fully opened, especially in the Chinese market, which is almost still relatively exclusive to the carplay ecology.
By 2024, the perception of in-car ecology has changed. One is that the competition between automobile companies and technology companies in the in-car ecology has gradually subsided, which is why Apple has launched a new generation of CarPlay, and is even ready to access vehicle information. On the other hand, the previous car companies have not invested enough in intelligence, but in recent years, the intelligence led by China's automobile industry, based on the open Android system, has created a car machine system that is not inferior to Apple's iOS.
Finally, one of the main driving factors for Apple's axing of the car-making project should be the current thinking of the tech industry as a new opportunity for AI. In the news, it is said that Apple has transferred a large part of the 2,000 people in the car-making team to AI, which actually shows that Apple is rethinking the entire track.
The CEO of Li Auto wrote a paragraph that is actually very referential, to the effect that Apple's focus on artificial intelligence is an absolutely correct strategic choice, including that artificial intelligence is the top-level entrance to all devices, services, applications, and transactions, which is too important for Apple; The second is that the automotive industry is too small compared to AI, and the future of automobiles is also AI, so it is better to invest directly in AI.
In fact, Li Xiang's thinking is also in line with the current competitive trend in the automotive industry, for example, Musk has always said that the reason why Tesla's valuation is so high is not because Tesla is the global leader in electric vehicles, but because Tesla is an AI company. Tesla's large amount of money is not to develop new cars, but to build computing power monsters, collect a large amount of driving information, and develop autonomous driving.
Similarly, from Apple's point of view, the most fierce battlefield is AI, as long as AI is done, then the automotive industry is just a subset. Apple's most important mobile ecology can be directly migrated from mobile devices to the car, and it has always been Apple's ultimate goal to build cars by opening up mobile devices and in-car ecology.
For Apple, betting on AI is the most important choice at present, and according to Apple's consistent "preemptive" strategy, betting on AI is a more reasonable choice at this time, because the previous pits have been walked by other companies, and now Apple only needs to spend money and computing power.
A digression: As a fruit fan, I also know that Apple's thinking on many things seems to be a stroke of genius, but in fact, there are often rules to follow, which can be regarded as a grass snake gray line.
For example, Apple spent $3 billion to acquire the company beats, which was aimed at strengthening the influence of the streaming market and making the integration of software and hardware more outstanding. After the acquisition of Beats, Apple's real focus is the AirPods Pro, which is almost Apple's most successful product in recent years.
To give another example, there have been rumors about the creation of the so-called "Apple TV" during Jobs' lifetime. Therefore, at that time, ICT companies including domestic Xiaomi and Huawei immediately followed Apple's idea and made TV boxes and smart TVs, but Apple never followed up the category of large-screen TV. But in 2023, Apple launched a new product, Vision Pro device, this VR device seems to be made by Apple following Facebook at first glance, but at present, Apple Vision Pro is actually the "big TV" that Apple wants to do, but it is no longer in the form of TV.
So maybe Apple is also thinking about the car building project. Apple said that it wanted to build a car, so it did the thing of building a car, and finally found that building a car is not essentially a car, but to create a new ecological model, and finally did not make a car, but to create another terminal, which solves the problem of users needing to use Apple devices when driving.
Therefore, Apple does not make cars, perhaps it is just that Apple does not want to build a "car", but Apple may not have given up on the goal of the entire ecological chain from the mobile phone to the desk to the car.
Text jackielxx
Figure Network.