What should Apple do with all that cash?

Not $20B…but I’m sure similar examples could be found at Apple.

Modern Man likes this.

  • advancement in power storage tech and a systematic approach to cleaning up the accumulating plastic/crap floating in our oceans before there’s more floating plastic than live fish.

I’d put it on red, but I’m sure Apple would go black.

With that much money and the current backlash about how the 1% has all the power, I would suggest going into the professional medical market, including communications. Do good. Seems to me that there are still a lot of systems there that can be improved regarding interface, hygiene, cost-effectiveness, etc. Especially in the emerging and third world markets.

A revolution in personal/shared transport would be pretty great too, but it would be a slow change with lots of competitors throwing up roadblocks.

For shorter-term returns and business growth:

  • Just expand faster into the everyday lives of the consumers that are not yet dominated. Like form partnerships and get OS integrated into all major car brands, home systems etc. Take over mobile/online banking industry.

For long-term world changing stuff:

  • Space exploration (for future colonies, mining asteroids etc) - think what Apple could do with their massive resources compared to SpaceX.
  • Biogenetics, pharmaceuticals for beating cancer and other disease that mankind has not yet learned to conquer.

Buy a nice medium sized country in north africa which borders the mediterranian sea. You see where this is going…

mo-i

Like Coffee87 said, space exploration.

SpaceX, Virgin, and Blue Origin are all doing neat things, but Apple has a tendency to take things that people are working on and making it really work nicely.

If not that I think it would be great for them to use the extra cash to set up manufacturing facilitates in California or elsewhere in the US. With that much cash they could set up the facilities with no problem and be able to pay good wages too. It could be great for the rest of the US economy and spur more highquality design/engineering/manufacturing jobs in North America. (but that’s with rose colored glasses on…)

That is an interesting idea. I’m sure you have read all the press about the Faraday Future factory being built outside of Las Vegas.

Let SpaceX do the space exploration, FWIW though since we’ll be fine with the resources here on earth as well.
And let Tesla do electric cars. No need to drive prices down through competition, better let companies do what they’re good at and act in fairness to make their products available to everyone.

Let Apple be the face of technology - that is what they are good at. Their aesthetic design quality has always been unique but this uniqueness has faded. What truly distinguishes Apple is their focus on friendly and refreshing user interface design. I would like to see Apple everywhere - medical devices, vending machines, lab equipment, 3D printer interfaces, car dashboards. Let Apple be the partner with the knowledge of how to connect people to the digital world.

Then there’s Africa. It may seem like a charity idea but I do feel there is a lot to gain from getting into Africa as well. With the excess profit Apple could start to set up hubs, starting in the more well-faring countries such as Ghana, to develop lower cost products to supply the population with accessible, solar-powered smartphones, for example. Apple could send a lot of people over to do user research in order to make their interfaces more user-friendly, intelligent, informative and fun - I’m sure African people are very eager to help and would come up with great ideas as well. And many young people in the US would be more than willing to go on, say, 6-month missions to Africa.

I would also like to see Apple communicate their original ‘Think Different.’ spirit more - they’re still doing well but their communication has mellowed down I feel, it lacks some of the original strength, urgency and intensity. They could put up iPad shaped billboards in strategic places with things like animated infographics, short documentaries about people all over the world using their products, ideas about innovation etc.

Manufacturing is in a global decline as % of GDP. Trying to boost what’s left in the US is a waste of resources.

Some more ideas:

  1. Build a network of more efficient freight train lines in the US. This is more infrastructure that is in decline in the US and Canada, but the pay-back is 20-30 years. Far too long for probably any company to make the investment. It’s worthwhile because freight trains are the most energy efficient ways of moving goods on land and a new network could improve that efficiency even more.

  2. Do some kinda design/business dev. training. Like I said, manufacturing is in decline but services are up. Teach other companies how to develop their business. That could definitely boost the overall economy.

  3. Microsoft now has a phone that essentially runs Windows and can be docked to a monitor, mouse, keyboard etc. Why not rethink that? I would think that there would be a lucrative market for an iPhone that doubles as your work laptop.

Realistically the only thing they could do to actually help African countries like Ghana is bringing some of their production into the country in order to industrialize it.
Solar powered smartphones (by the way, they have plenty of smartphones… mostly cheap chinese phones of course, not iPhones :wink: ) and similar stuff is usually just feel-good activism without any impact.

Not that making a car isn’t a big hair audacious goal, but I think something like this would really change the game in their core categories unless they see limited potential in those categories due to pressure from Samsung/Android, but I don’t see them viewing the world that way. :confused:

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Keno: I did hear it. I read an academic article that Robert Gordon wrote 1 1/2 years ago about the same trends. Interesting read and I think it can be found online for free somewhere.

I’d be curious to hear others experience, but I feel like 20 years ago there were alot of ID student concepts of iPad-like devices, smartphones, fitness watches. I go to senior shows every other year and I feel like I see re-styled iPads, but nothing really new. Maybe this is another sign that humanity is hitting an innovative dry-spell?

I think for consumer products, it started drying up 30 years ago. Greatest innovation in that time is the internet. That did have impact on consumer products as it accelerated the miniaturization of computers. A smart phone or tablet is merely a small computer. That market is saturated.

Sort of related to the consumer market is data analytics. Kind of cool, but definitely a bubble. If you are not shorting FitBit for the long term, you are going to lose money.

I do think there could be an impact if there is a miraculous energy innovation that makes fossil fuels obsolete. Then we can finally have our flying cars.

iab: I think the same thing. Nuclear fusion is the only technology that has the potential to fundamentally change how we live. Unfortunately, it appears no closer than ever to reality.

According to the latest developments that’s not the case. I read this article from a Spanish science blog a few months ago comparing the technological breakthroughs for computer science vs nuclear fusion and the looked very similar, just 10-15 years behind. I can’t find it at the moment, but it’s definitely a very interesting topic.

It’s like this recent news of this computer beating a top player of Go. They predicted in '97 it’d take 50 years to achieve anything similar, it’s taken less than 20. The pace we develop technology nowadays it’s just insane and luckily some people are using those resources for useful purposes.

I think Ray Kurzweil would agree. However, it depends on if the obstacles to the technology are data based or mechanical based. For example, half way through the human genome project, the team had only read 1% of the genome. The project was completed ahead of time because computers had developed so rapidly that they had the number crunching firepower needed to get it done. It seems to me that we know how to build a fusion reactor, but it will require some leaps of imagination combined with a huge engineering effort.

Thanks, guys. Interesting reads.

But I see the typical designer approach at work here. We tend to value revolution over evolution, just because it is part of what makes us go as designers.

But.But, is 20 years really much in the grand scale of things? How long did Rococco last? Isn’t it only natural to develop something, that is quiet successful a little deeper? Won’t it still take a generation or two, to fully harvest it? Do our minds really work differently because digital technologies speed up every technical aspect of developement?

Energy: Nuclear fusion won’t be here any time soon, lest it becomes “competitive”. Given the point of “fundamental research”, that they are still working at I’d be surprised to see that coming to fruition.

I’d rather bet on what Musk does: Scaling up the most advanced processes, that we are already halfway “good at”. Our generation will see the developed nations becoming independent of burning carbons. Because we need to, - and because we can.

mo-i

Another cool thing to do would be mass electrolysis to produce hydrogen and then put it at every airport along the top 100 passenger routes. That’s all existing technology. Leave it to Boeing/Airbus to figure out how to put it in a plane. That would make a substantial cut in CO2 and give the potential for hydrogen cars and other inventions too (because you now have a big reservoirs of H2 in the top 50 world cities).

Eventually Apple would become the next Exxon-Mobil, which is normally quite profitable.