“The hints that have piled up in the past week are intriguing,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for Fortune. “Jony Ive and his pal Marc Newson, we learn from Ive’s New Yorker profile, are as obsessed with car design as they are with watches. Veteran Apple VP Steve Zadesky, who according to the Wall Street Journal is assembling a 1,000-man team ‘researching different types of robotics, metals and materials consistent with automobile manufacturing,’ is from Ford. Luca Maestri, Apple’s chief financial officer, spent a couple decades at General Motors.”
P.E.D. writes, “All this has led some people who thought they knew Apple — understood the nature of the beast and the scale of its ambition — to think again.”
“When I stated previously that Apple has always been a personal computer company, that is because Jobs believed so deeply in the potential of the computer to change people’s lives. If Ive, as this [New Yorker] profile argues, now serves Jobs’ function as the soul of Apple, my characterization is surely obsolete: perhaps we need to think of Apple as a design company with a specialty in computers, not the other way around. And it’s much more plausible to imagine that Apple building a car.” – Ben Thompson, Stratechery
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A Mac is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An iPod is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An iPhone is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An iPad is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An Apple Watch is custom hardware packed with custom software that does X. An Apple Car would be custom hardware packed with custom software that does X.
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