Comment by ctdonath

Over the decades I've noticed how businesses need to recognize and focus on their core competencies - if they don't, they die. Everything must feed that core, and undue distractions are lethal. Occasionally there's a need to pivot, which is deliberately stepping from one competency to another, but that is rare and difficult. Apple's core is to build small computers; everything else they do (music, video, cloud services, Siri, AI, AR, operating systems, etc) are all built to draw customers deeper into the ecosystem for the sole purpose of buying more small computers. Electric self-driving cars, while very nifty, are decidedly not small computers (at best being a tiny part of a large product demanding other competencies); to compete in that market requires scale which Apple could certainly buy but would fiercely compete for the attention vs small computers.