I still don't buy Apple is going to make a completely in-house EV. Historically, Apple only innovates in market categories in which the incumbents suck (usually through an order of magnitude improvement in the UI/UX). But Tesla doesn't suck...it's done a pretty damn good job. A partnership with Tesla makes more sense.
I don't think you could argue there were better MP3 players.
About watches, it depends on whether we are considering watches as jewelry (at which they don't suck at all) or as information delivery devices (at which they only deliver one type of information, which is typically readily available everywhere)
My Nokia 3110 was great at making phone calls and quite good at SMS'ing, so in that sense they didn't need to be upgraded. In the same vain we can say that we don't need watches that are better at keeping time. But cellphones of the late 90's sucked at a lot of things that are nice to have in your packet, such as games, news and reading.
So the question is, are there a lot of things other than time that are nice to have on your wrist? If yes, then the market fit Apple perfectly.
I agree. I think the car project is just a way to recruit smart people. What they really want a technical edge in is batteries. Apple pushes design boundaries, making everything thinner and thinner every year. I bet batteries is the biggest design constraint they face in all their products.
Tesla is a teeny tiny portion of the car industry. If Apple is thinking about incumbents, they are morel likely thinking: BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Lexus, etc. Maybe even Ford, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen, etc.
As those cars become more and more computerized, it's becoming clear: those companies absolutely suck at software and user interfaces. The interior of most cars today is an absolute chaos of buttons, screens, levers, dials, and indicators. It's like a wrap-around version of this:
Apple has something that Tesla does not: gigantic piles of capital. Apple has around $230 billion in cash, which is more than the annual gross revenue of Ford or GM last year. Apple is ready to scale from day 1. Whereas Tesla is following a careful growth strategy, using each model's sales to fund the R&D on the next.
>Apple has something that Tesla does not: gigantic piles of capital. Apple has around $230 billion in cash, which is more than the annual gross revenue of Ford or GM last year. Apple is ready to scale from day 1. Whereas Tesla is following a careful growth strategy, using each model's sales to fund the R&D on the next.
I don't care if you have a trillion dollars, you can only tool up manufacturing capacity so quickly. "Apple is ready to scale from day 1" is laughable. Cars are not iPhones you can outsource to Foxconn for production.
The problem is that 90% of their 2 mil song catalog is still only CD Quality (16 bit / 44.1 Khz). 256 / 320 Kbps vs. CD Quality is pretty hard to differentiate for most people. But 256 / 320 Kbps vs. 24 bit / 96 Khz should be fairly obvious.
And of course, you need a good pair of headphones.
Great article. IMO, CVD is the most promising scalable, manufacturing method, but the following advances have to happen:
- Able to grow Graphene of arbitrary thickness on a wide variety of surfaces
- Achieving CVD at low temperature
- Control of grain size, ripples, doping level, and number of layers
- Coming up with a cost-effective way to handle to the Transfer step, or eliminating it entirely
As the current market for graphene applications is driven by the production of this material, there is a clear hierarchy in how soon the applications will reach the user or consumer. Those that use the lowest- grade, cheapest and most available material will be the first to appear, probably in a few years, and those which require the highest, electronic- quality grades or biocompatibility may well take decades to develop.Also, because developments in the last few years were extremely rapid,graphene’s prospects continue to improve.
I'm surprised that they seem to be concentrating so little on CVD.
Yes, CVD is expensive, but it's not rocket science anymore. We can do all manner of things to pizza-sized wafers of silicon in CVD. Shining lasers just above the surface to heat the gas but not the substrate is one of the easiest ones.
It feels like the labs are all chasing patents rather than actually doing research.
