The difference is that people working on the Apple car project "struggled to explain what Apple could bring to a self-driving car that other companies could not". I doubt Jony Ive faced such a struggle with the iPhone.

A lot of people said exactly that. The established smartphone people were quoted as saying, approximately, this stuff is hard, and PC people aren't just going to walk in and take over.

However, just because that sentiment was wrong in 2006 doesn't mean it's wrong now.

In hindsight, what was important about smartphone isn't what the established companies thought was important. Apple's core competencies translated over extremely well to what was actually important, which turned out to be user experience, full internet access, apps, and such, rather than things like telephony and data frugality which is what the established players concentrated on.

It's possible that the same thing would play out with cars. But I'm skeptical, and I'd want to see some explanation of just what advantages Apple would have, not just "they did it before with phones."

Apple had the iPod line. The evolution to smartphone was pretty obvious. Apple have 0 things which are cars at the moment.

It's also not clear they understand the market or sales environment at all.

It wasn't obvious at all. The leap from the iPod of the time to the first iPhone was massive. If it was so obvious it wouldn't have caught the entire industry off guard. Apple changed the entire industry with the announcement of the iPhone. If it was obvious to you I hope you bought massive amounts of Apple stock back in '06.

When even CNN makes a big feature article about it more than two years before, it's kinda obvious: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

(They even guessed the name)

It was obvious in '02 that all-in-ones like Treo 600 would swallow the iPod.

It was obvious and I did.

The iPhone is not that different from the Palm Pilot.

The rockr was obvious evolution.

Agreed. What percent of cars on the road are currently self-driving? I guess roughly 0%. Apple has missed 0% marketshare.

There's tons of capital and talent elsewhere also. Late is late.

And the Nokia 9000[1] launched 11 years before the iPhone. Post-Mac, when has Apple ever been first on anything?

They weren't first on MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, online music stores, or smart watches, either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

It's not an issue of being first or not. It's about being late. They weren't late to those other parties.

You keep calling them "late" without explaining how or why. What key metrics would you look for to dub them 'not late'? How are the Ubers and Googles of the world doing in comparison? You may be right, but I want specifics.

Obviously I'm expressing an opinion here. One metric is talent availability. Uber has already hired the available talent. They hired half of CMUs robotics department - presumably with juicy stock options. Apple, being a large public company, isn't in the same position to offer such incentives to lure away the talent. The other metric is data. Uber and to a lesser degree Tesla have been accumulating data for some time. This business is all about talent and data.

I'll also add that this is a service economy, and while Apple get accolades for their physical products, even Apple fans say that their service offerings kind of suck.

Certainly, but I was interested in hearing your opinion elaborated on, and I appreciate that you did so. Upvoted accordingly :)

With the iPod out and the iPhone not yet, people were basically begging Apple to do a phone. It was a super obvious move at the time.