Is Apple about to become a car company? Justin Young and Tom Merritt talk about Apple Analyst Neil Cybart’s compelling speculation.
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Show Notes
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About manufacturing cars:
Elon Musk pointed out the following: in car business you are mass producing to get to economy of scale. To mass produce you have to make the machines that make the machine. Designing/building a car takes a lot of work, designing and building the machines that make the machine takes TEN times more work than that.
The way I understand it: if you want to be in the car industry, outsourcing the manufacturing is not an option.
That said, Apples partnership with Foxconn isn’t exclusively one of outsourcing production. For the MacBook line of laptop computers Apple introduced a unibody design. It’s my understanding that Apple also developed the technology for the particular CNC-milling machines capable of manufacturing the unibody. So that’s Apple making the machines that make the machine.
As pointed out during the show: if you want to get into the car business you have to go all in. Design and manufacturing have to be intimately connected, otherwise you won’t be competitive.
Also, further on in the show there was some banter about Apple buying Tesla. I couldn’t quite make out whether that was entirely in joke, or only partially. While Apple has the amount of money it would take to buy Tesla, Elon Musk would never sell. Elon Musk is a man obsessed. During the last Tesla Earnings call Elon Musk mentioned that in keeping with his way of moving his desk whenever a department is in need of closer oversight, he would set up his office at the end of the production line, with a couch and a sleeping bag in there, which he expects to use whenever necessary, as he has done in the past.
Clearly Elon Musk is convinced that he is the only person who is capable of fulfilling Tesla’s mission, and he will let nothing get in the way of that.
Justin Robert Young, Gawd you are boring.
Justin Young is a dick. I’ll never support him.