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Comment by gajeam | Hacker News Reader

I guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into, especially if they insist on controlling the whole ecosystem like they do with their other products.

First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area. Waymo, Uber, Tesla, Ford (and a dozen other car companies), and who knows how many start ups are all vying for the same pool of engineers. Even if they get top talent, it's another story holding onto it. If you look at the LinkedIns (Anthony Levandowski, Jur van den Berg, Chris Thrun, all the founders of Otto and Argo AI), they change jobs every two years.

Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships and how good they are at choosing winners in the race to autonomous vehicles. They already have $1B invested in Didi last year--it will be interesting to see where they go from here.

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> I guess you never know with Apple but it just seems like a really crowded space for them to come into…

The iPhone entered a crowded phone market and now controls the vast majority of smartphone profits. There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants.

> First of all, it's a high price tag for them to get top talent in the area.

Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.

> Their success I feel depends on how much control they are willing to give up in partnerships…

As with phones, their hypothetical success in this area will be due to how much they won't give up. Apple learned this lesson with the disastrous Motorola ROKR E1, a.k.a. the one where they tried to be a "good industry partner" and play by industry rules.

If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing. Any launch partner(s) will profit, but on Apple's terms.

>Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.

It's not their money, it's the shareholders. It might be tough to make a case to them to jump into this market.

> The iPhone entered a crowded phone market and now controls the vast majority of smartphone profits. There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants."

The iPhone was far superior to other phones of its day. Plus it had significant network effects - having more users meant having more apps, which meant having more users.

Self driving tech would be much more a commodity product. Even some Apple employees "struggled to explain what Apple could bring to a self-driving car that other companies could not" [1] And self driving cars will have absolutely no network effects or 'lock-in'. Ford will dump Apple's self-driving technology in an instant if Google offers their technology a bit cheaper.

[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/technology/apple-is-sa...

> There's really no such thing as market "saturation" when you can grow the market and eat old participants.

The car companies aren't making the same mistake that Microsoft and other old tech companies made with smartphones. They all see that autonomous vehicles are coming and they're doing their best to put out their own solutions. For them to "grow the market," they have to do AVs far better than everyone else. It's tough to imagine them doing that with Google working on this since 2009.

> Apple has $250 billion in cash, so this doesn't strike me as a huge concern.

It's an arms race to outspend in this area. Yes, they could muscle their way through, but only at a huge cost. And even then, employees could leave to start their own startups (see Faraday Futures, Otto, Argo AI, etc.)

> If Apple enters this market, they'll play by Apple's rules and give up virtually nothing

There are way more parts in building an autonomous vehicle than a mobile phone. This graphic [1] does a good job of getting into some of involved industries. Shareholders won't stand for them to sink money into reinventing the wheel (e.g. car components, vehicle to vehicle communication software, AI.)

[1] http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/SELFDRIVING-SUPPLI...

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