alt Hacker NewsThe other thing that always got me about the car was.. I wondered if the executives at Apple had all become too rich? Apple sells premium hardware but generally sells products in the 10s or 100s of millions of volume, so pretty mass market consumer good.
The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?
At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.
I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.
Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.
The Apple Lisa was the first GUI computer Apple made. Starting price $9995 (or $35,000 in today’s dollars).
Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.
Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).
And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa and had no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).
The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were sub 100.
If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.
Apple today is just too risk adverse.