Apple’s Car project may be no more, but the vision of transforming cars it into a platform for … [+]
From the first time I heard that Apple was working on a car, I went on record to say that this would never happen. Over the years, we would hear bits and pieces about developments at Apple suggesting that indeed, Apple was making a car. But even with those rumors, I was steadfast in my belief that Apple would never bring an Apple-branded car to the market.
As someone who has covered Apple for 40+ years, I was pretty sure that making an actual car was not in its DNA, even if Apple partnered with some major car maker for potential retail sales.
However, in many interviews with the media, when asked about an Apple car, I believed the real vision for any car project was to view it as a vehicle (pun intended) to deliver its apps and services.
I once did an interview with a major tech exec who helped me see the future of tech.
In 1995, I had a chance to interview Sony CEO Akio Morita, just after he retired. I asked him why Sony bought Columbia Pictures in 1989.
Sony was a hardware company, and this did not make sense to many of us. But Mr. Morita took a futuristic view and said that movies “were just software” that could be played on Sony hardware. Of course, he was right. Today, all movies are digital and can be viewed on a plethora of hardware devices.
Steve Jobs was a major fan of Mr. Morita, and he turned to him for advice even before he came back to Apple in 1997. Surely, Morita’s hardware as a means to distribute software helped Jobs formulate his and Apple’s vision in which software and hardware are married at the hip and are critical to Apple’s success.
When Jobs returned to Apple, I asked him about his vision for hardware. He corrected me and made it clear that hardware and software would be at the center of his quest to turn Apple around.
In my last column, I wrote about Lenovo’s decision to begin working on a car project that, in some ways, mirrors Apple’s original vision.
“Lenovo sees vehicles as a new computing platform. They are not interested in creating a smart car but rather in becoming a leading provider that can deliver the full stack of computing functions that will make cars smarter and eventually autonomous in the future.”
Lenovo officials pointed out that a vehicle is just another computing platform. Since Lenovo is the #1 computer vendor and knows how to build computers, it sees a vehicle as a way to bring its world expertise in building computers to cars in the future.
I believe Apple’s vehicle initiative was primarily a research endeavor rather than a conventional automotive project. The company focused on developing the comprehensive computing framework necessary for a smart vehicle. However, as is widely known, Apple’s Car project has been discontinued. I am convinced that the insights gained from this research will contribute to realizing what I perceive as the true vision for a vehicle: transforming it into a platform for delivering an expanded array of software, content, and services.
If you have Apple CarPlay on your vehicle today, you know Apple has already extended its apps and services to millions of vehicles. However, Apple has discovered many new features and capabilities from the car project that could eventually be delivered through CarPlay. This could include adding AR functions to Apple Maps and Siri and integrating AI through an AI developer kit for third-party apps.
Although Apple officially killed the car project, you can bet that Apple will not let the billions of research dollars go to waste. The work will be applied to their real vision, which was always to make a car a means to deliver Apple’s apps, services, and future functions and bring more people into Apple’s ecosystem.
Disclosure: Apple and Lenovo subscribe to Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high tech companies around the world.
