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Apple Rumored To Be Exploring Medical Devices, Electric Cars To Reignite Growth
An anonymous reader writes "The Apple rumor mill is alive and well. This time around the tech giant is rumored to be looking into exploring medical sensor technology related to predicting heart attacks, and might even buy Tesla. 'Taken together, Apple's potential forays into automobiles and medical devices, two industries worlds away from consumer electronics, underscore the company's deep desire to move away from iPhones and iPads and take big risks. "Apple must increasingly rely on new products to reignite growth beyond the vision" of late founder Steve Jobs, said Bill Kreher, an analyst with Edward Jones Investments in St. Louis. "They need the next big thing."'"
please dont do that apple, I really like Tesla. I dont want apple to be able to remote kill my car if i dont accept their EULA
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
It always seems that when companies start trying to branch out into wildly dissimilar industries, it's a sign of trouble within the organization. Do what you do well, figure out how to do it better if things aren't going how you'd like them. Don't try making sushi if you've always sold donuts.
Yeah, medicine and the treatment of illness is a real global conspiracy alright.
iPhones and iPads make Apple an obscene amount of money and they are in a controlling position in the market. It should go without saying that they don't have "a deep desire to move away" from them. Add new product categories? Sure. Move away from iPhones and iPads? Nope.
Growth is a bullshit metric. A company with one customer can grow their user base 1000% by getting to ten customers. A company with hundreds of millions of customers can't grow like that. Growth naturally slows as a company gets larger. Only bullshit artists looking to get page views or prop up a stock price blather on about how Apple need the next big thing to continue growing. They don't need to continue growing. They are raking money in faster than just about any other company. Trying to grow at the same rate as they have done in previous years is not only a ludicrously unachievable expectation to place on them, it's probably bad for business if they were stupid enough to try. Apple's core strength has always been a small, focused product family.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Any issues with the car will probably be blamed on the driver. "Your car doesn't accelerate properly because you're holding the steering wheel incorrectly."
Yeah, medicine and the treatment of illness is a real global conspiracy alright.
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
Next time you need a fairly major medical procedure, refuse to pay until you get an itemized bill - you'll be amazed at some of the bullshit they try and charge you for; $50 for the off-brand Sharpie they used to mark your skin, for example.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Remember that HP once was almost only known as a producer of measurement equipment. Then they went into the computing hardware business big time. They, too, needed the "next big thing". As much as I may despise Apple, from a corporate-strategical point of view such a move sounds like making a lot of sense for Apple.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
If Apple cared about selling more widgets, they would have created lower-priced versions of all of their products years ago.
Analysts want Apple to run the company their way, and Apple is refusing to do it. Good for them in my opinion.
I would be happy if Apple just started selling a 17" Macbook Pro again. Would be even happier if they started selling screens with matt displays again.
"Since Apple likes to believe they should have control over what software we are allowed our mobile devices, does that mean If they made cars, they would belIeve they should have control over what roads we can and can't drive on?"
no
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper and much more accessible.
Low prices is Apple's motto all right
With the passing of Jobs, I'm pretty sure everyone must realize that Apple's relevance is simply fading away. I know this sounds like a troll and perhaps in some ways it is.
Despite the fact that I disliked Jobs and all that, there's no denying he was extremely effective. Despite the fact that I think he help the company from overtaking the business marketplace, he probably did it for extremely good reasons. He probably kept the company from making huge mistakes and from being hugely liable for all sorts of problems which Microsoft lives with daily. Legacy code support, business and government needs and all that. While there is no doubt Apple has that problem, Jobs managed to keep those things in check and their liabilities limited.
And anyone familiar with Apple's history will recall what Apple did when they canned Jobs. They almost died because they did everything the normal business way. It didn't work. They weren't tooled to make it work. And Jobs is definitely not coming back (though I have no doubt some are still holding out hope) this time. Will there be a next great cult leader of Apple? Doesn't seem to be. So what's ahead besides the public getting tired of incremental advancements which seem to follow other products which have been successful with incremental advancements? Don't know, but I suspect anything to do with anti-privacy and personal identification research will bite Apple in the ass in today's political climate. The whole planet is still pretty angry at the US and US companies. Pushing that stuff forward now seems like it will not go over very well. But what do I know? I'm just a guy on Slashdot.
Apple doesn't have a magic-man any longer. True? Apple pushes a non-Microsoft way to the masses. True? This has always been a disadvantaged position in business and often even in personal computing. True? Apple's fandom kept it going for a while but was floundering until Jobs brought it all back but it wasn't about computers any longer. True? Now Apple is essentially "consumer electronics with a legacy of personal computer stuff." True? The mobile market, the one which Apple unquestionably played a highly visible and major role in its present-day and contemporary form, has MATURED. True? (Apple seems to think so or else it wouldn't be looking to watches and other things which, IMHO are doomed to impractical failure.) A matured market has had many players and competitors but the main players are decreasing in numbers. I just don't see where Apple will continue to fit in.
Suggestions for Apple? Get into more personal data storage and computing. Don't just let things connect together in limited, specified ways. Get into personal storage environments -- personal clouds. Create a wireless standard for storage so that users can keep their data secure and available (a tricky balance which almost seems mutually exclusive) and synchronized.
I think personal computing needs to be UI adaptable while providing access to most or all apps and data the user wants. But there is no universal wireless universal storage scheme yet. (You know, like a wireless server in your pocket or backpack or whatever?) Put R&D money there. This isn't only what people want, it's what they need. Apple has momentum and is capable of doing it. But will their own corporate greed prevent them from trying to keep control of user data the way everyone else is? Or will they get pushed aside when someone else steps up and says "you now control your own data and you can have it any way you want." I know lots of people want all of their pictures, all of their videos, all of their music available to them all of the time and at the same time, they don't want someone else controlling or containing it for them. Especially now.
Yeah, these days it's all about X-Men and The Avengers.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I think that;s probably more of a national conspiracy (in the US) than a global conspiracy...
...because in 2006, Samsung clearly copied the design of Apple's 2010 iPad. Maybe Apple should buy them just for their time travel technology.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I think you don't need a conspiracy to explain the broken conditions in the US. Just an obsession with free market solutions in a field that can never be a free market.
Don't worry, fewer than 1% of users suffer "blue screams of death" as a result of any given non-optional automatic update. And such users can usually be rebooted after installing an iBrain and any other iSelf modules not already purchased. WARNING: behavioral changes may occur, and any proclivity to destroy other electronics to gnaw on their microprocessor "brains" should be reported immediately.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Apple could be in a position to leverage advances in sensing technology to make medicine cheaper and much more accessible.
Right... because Apple is really known for driving prices down.
They're also big enough to beat down the FDA and Wizard lobby (aka Doctors).
Damn right, 'cause the FDA and doctors are just evil. Those criminals try to make sure our drugs are safe and that our illnesses get treated. We should rely on the magic of market forces for that. Apple should invent a device that replaces them. [/sarcasm]
All this data fed into the cloud in real time and analyzed for problems? What's not to like?
Lets see... Maybe the fact that there is no actual product and even if there were there are all sorts of likely privacy, security and data interpretation problems.
Keeping the cost of it high seems to be.
That is a matter of incompetence and bad policy. Lot's of people in the US love to insist that we have the best healthcare system in the world and that nothing is broken despite the fact that we pay the most (by a wide margin) and do not get even close to the best outcomes by most measures.
I feel like a broken record but its an US thing. In Canada they just fix you up no matter what you have, they never cheap on the treatment because there's no bullshit like a max number of hearth surgeries of type X a year per hospital. If the hospital has to run a deficit to treat everyone they just will. Seriously, even for medicines we have free gov coverage and if you're employed, the employer has to provide a plan with no limit. The best part? Our economy STILL hasn't collapsed or is not in danger because of that. I never IN MY LIFE had to worry about being sick and not being able to get treatment. The only worry you have when you have to see a doc is: "Damn I'm going to have to wait 3-4 hours in a waiting room to see a doc, am I sick enough to want to wait that long.".
"The Apple rumor mill is alive and well."
And, you can stop reading right there. Analysts are idiots, and rumors usually turn out to be wrong.
As for growth... "Last year, we grew (revenue) by $14 billion to $15 billion. Yes, those percentages are smaller compared to a year earlier and two years earlier and so forth. But that doesn't mean that you're not a growth company. We were in hyper-growth, or whatever is above growth. We went from $65 billion to over $100 billion to $150 billion to $170 billion. These are historic, unprecedented numbers. I don't know any companies adding growth at that level. So when you say $14 billion to $15 billion compared to those numbers, it's clearly smaller and a smaller percentage, but, to put it in some context, that's like adding three Fortune 500 companies in a year. [emphasis mine] I think that's hard to say that's not a growth company."
--Tim Cook to the WSJ Feb 7, 2014
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Remember when Apple was the company that came out with revolutionary new products and the rest of the industry followed them?
Apparently, now it's Google.
(Oh, and who would trust Steve Jobs' company to make their medical devices? Yes I am speaking both to his general approach to ethics, and the circumstances of his death.)
Apple:
- Not the first smartphone
- Not the first touch phone
- Not the first MP3 player
- Not the first GUI
- Not the first All-In-One
- Not the first platform for media production
- Not the first selling media
Apple's strength was, under Jobs, an impeccable sense of timing to enter the market, and marketing. They were great at making people think they were innovating, and made hundreds of billions doing it. There's nothing wrong with that except that they fundamentally weren't innovating, and they're not so good at the timing or marketing sans Jobs.
Google, on the other hand, is a train wreck of a company in desperate need of Ritalin. They throw large sums of money at ideas, other companies, and markets and pretty much nothing sticks except the things that drive more ad revenue. Things wither and die on the vine, and eventually are shed when the next shift in upper-management power comes along.
There are basically two choices. You can either eliminate all subsidies and allow the insurance market to become a real insurance market, like auto, fire, life or any other type of insurance where risk is priced at market rates OR you can go all the way with single payer and make the government the single buyer of all major medical services. Obamacare does neither of these things. It combines the worst parts of both paths into a disastrous course down the middle. It's frustrating because Obama has probably now blown any chance at reforms that would actually begin to address high costs. Even if more people end up ensured the costs are only being shifted onto the taxpayers. The costs themselves aren't being reduced, merely shifted and hidden beneath more layers of bureaucracy, subsidies and mumbo jumbo about more people being able to afford insurance while the national debt continues to increase like the odometer on the Starship Enterprise.
What does the requirement to provide life-saving treatment have to do with anything? It helps people who are so broke that they have no assets, but it doesn't help anyone else.
You have a heart attack, you get treated at a hospital which is required to do so; you're insured but not adequately, and you get a bill for $50,000 more than your insurance covers. Welcome to medical bankruptcy.
Now, how exactly are you supposed to shop around, rather than just taking the first-available treatment? Sure, they're required to provide that treatment whether or not you can pay -- but if you can pay, they're going to do everything in their power to be sure that you will.
In my wife's case, it wasn't a heart attack, but brain surgery -- and while she was in the hospital, her employer went out of business. Her insurance policy disappeared with them, and she was personally on the hook for follow-up care, wiping out years of savings.
All true. They're going down. When the Lisa was their flagship loser Jobs went psycho and made the macintosh a winner.
They kicked him out and started going downhill. He got what was eventually to become iOS developed at NeXt before bringing it back to an Apple that needed resuscitation once again and the iThingy revolution saved their asses.
Then he decides to get all hippy dippy refusing conventional medicine which most likely would have saved his life and as a result kicked the bucket earlier than was necessary.
And now Apple will fade into the obscurity it was always destined for without Steve Jobs there to implement his uncanny business savvy.
I too am not a fan of the man and probably wouldn't be able to stand his presence on a personal level. But he was the business success of Apple (with the Woz being mostly responsible for the technical success in early days) and this time, he aint' coming back.