> requires infrastructure, sales and after-sales support that just aren’t aligned with how Apple does business
I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.
I was going to say. If anyone knows how to quickly create and expand a network of dealerships and post-sales support, it's Apple. They literally wrote the book on this with computers and phones and all their accessories.
Cars are different both for sales and more importantly for support. Apple is best in class for a turnkey consumer experience. But if you’ve ever had to deal with Apple Care Enterprise, which is a lot more similar to the sort of support you have to do for luxury cars, in my experience it just isn’t the same. It is fine, but it isn’t the same experience that a consumer gets (I’m unsure of what the experience is like for people that shell out the money for the on-site support from IBM or whoever the contractor is now).
And that’s the thing. Apple does really well at attainable luxury consumer goods. I think it does less well the higher the price point and market segmentation. Hence why the $10,000 Apple Watch didn’t work (and that was for lots and lots of reasons, first and foremost I think a misunderstanding of why watch enthusiasts spend so much on watches).
But putting that aside, partnerships (dealers) make up the car market for everyone with the exception of Tesla, and although with enough time and money, Apple could absolutely build out their own network, unlike Apple Stores, where they had a solid 5 years to a decade to really grow (coincidentally timed to Apple’s rise as a consumer giant) into that infrastructure, they’d need to have that basically day one for a car. Which is my whole point about it being overhead/capital intensive. Even Tesla had a chance to grow over time as it was a new company and not expected to sell and service cars everywhere. Apple would have a difficult time, I think, releasing a car and saying it could only be bought and serviced in select cities. The stakes are higher the bigger you are.
It isn’t that I don’t think Apple could do these things. It’s that I don’t think Apple could do them at the scale and margins at which it has based its business on. Especially if the net result is growing $100b in market cap. Apple added $1T to its market cap in 2 years (2018 to 2020) and another briefly in 2023 (current is $2.82T). I think there are far less intensive ways to add $100b to the bottom line than to become a car company.
They didn’t though. They piggybacked off of the existing network of phone carriers. They did slowly build out Apple Stores. But they aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as resellers and carriers for selling devices
I always thought Apple was far and away the best consumer electronics brand at this part at least. I'm not saying it would directly translate to a car business, but they do have some real retail skill.