music player - music became digital and the player was the revenue generator.
online music store - digital music sales became the revenue generator.
a cellular phone - really a smart phone (computer that also was a phone) the hardware was the revenue generator until the App Store gathered steam.
credit card payment systems - people wanting the convenience of the smart phone allowing payment will be one source of revenue, with others developing. Remember that all credit card charges are digital. So digital shopping, digital payment, digit smart phone.
Watch - I'm not sold on this one.... will have to see how this one pans out.
2016, a car is far afield from - what is the revenue flow from digital hardware or software (includes music, shopping or any other thing which can be digitized) in the car market? Apple does not recreate the wheel, they either create a new wheel so to speak or vastly improve an existing product.
Great feedback from everyone on this topic. We all will be guessing until Apple surprise all of us, but we all will have fun trying to figure out the plan!
Absolutely great points. . . but I remember the contemporaneous naysayers at each of the nexuses. . . all saying the same thing: this move is outside of Apple's core competence. They'll never succeed. For example:
"Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent (Palm CEO) John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
There are govt mandates in California and the northeast states for numbers zero emission vehicles that must be sold as a percentage of the total market. This number increases over time. There are also significant federal and state subsidies for purchasing these vehicles.
That’s the only reason Tesla is in business and I suspect Apple has figured this out also.