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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."'"
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Bad policy I can't disagree with (since good policy would probably fix a lot of these issues), but I've always been a believer in the concept that you should never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by greed and avarice.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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
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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.