Apple building a car makes perfect sense

Apple building a car makes perfect sense. After positioning itself as a lifestyle company in the early 2000s, Apple is in a perfect position to redefine all those consumer products that inevitably will be transformed by becoming essentially networked computers—but that people don’t think of as computers. It has already done this for music players, phones, tablets and watches, while TVs, cars, kitchens, clothes, desks, etc. are just waiting to become “smart”—but in a way people will find fun and effortless, not confusing and frustrating like e.g. Samsung’s “smart” TVs.

Google understands this as well and is arguably in a better position regarding AI (think self-driving cars or home automaton), also utilizing the large amounts of data it’s gathering, but Google still has no clue about fashion, style and ease-of-use. However, it’s purchase of Nest certaily wasn’t a bad move.

It’s going to be interesting to see where Tesla ends up in all this. While they are currently ahead on the car and battery construction (think smart grid), it’s questionable whether they will be able to scale up, and scale out, to enter many other fields quickly enough on their own.

Above: Ford concept car by Marc Newson, who is now working at Apple.