What's Next for Apple? Flying cars?
To sustain its market position, AAPL needs to innovate -- not imitate.
Props for Apple. While their stock price suffered after a Barclays downgrade early in January, they are back on the upswing today. Last year’s holiday revenue exceeded analyst expectations at $120 billion, up by 2.1% from the same quarter in 2022.
I might be ready to retreat from my earlier dire warnings, which were based mostly on consumers’ declining purchasing power. Except that yesterday afternoon, I happened to run across this YouTube video:
Apple Vision Pro is not a mature technology. It is actually kind of embarrassing. Makes Google Glass look positively natty. Essentially what the glasses let you do is layer another screen display on top of your real world environment. The controls involve a lot of gesticulating in empty air. If you are coming down from a hallucinogenic drug trip or have some other medical condition whose symptoms need masking, these goggles might give you the perfect cover story. Otherwise, it’s hard to see the use case. There are reasons that “Silent Disco” never really caught on.
Apple made its reputation by taking technologies introduced and popularized by others and delivering a seamless consumer experience. But lately they seem to be coasting on the popularity of the brand itself.
The “Apple Car” has been rumored for years, but Bloomberg reports these plans have been scaled back. No, flying cars are not in the works. Neither is a fully autonomous vehicle. Rather, they seem to be aiming for an EV with limited self-driving features. Much like a Tesla. Given the huge capital outlays necessary to enter the automotive sector, such a play is unlikely to happen except as a rear guard action, where Apple adds their logo and consumer electronics to an existing make and model.
A more proactive green approach would be for Apple to acquire a residential solar company like Sunrun (RUN) and entice their most loyal and affluent customers to integrate Apple devices with solar panel installations. This would play to Apple’s strengths in the space of IoT (Internet of Things), hardware, and home systems. Residential solar is wide open (less than 5% penetration of the total addressable market) and who would be more trusted than Apple to take households off the grid?
Apple still has tremendous opportunity to shape the future and texture of daily life. But an Oculus knockoff won’t get them there. In the meantime, there are other stocks.