Apple: Promising and Puzzling News

I use Apple Pay all the time at
Whole Foods and McDonald's

The promising: Apple Pay has won the federal government's stamp of approval. [bold added]

Analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy predicted that the federal government's approval will redouble Apple's momentum in the mobile payments space.

"This is really a big deal as it gives Apple access to the millions of federal employees but, more importantly, the billions [bloggers note: he meant "a lot more" but probably got carried away] of Americans who pay federal institutions," he wrote in an email.

The puzzling: Apple car project is for real, and it's a minivan.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been hiring auto engineers, including from Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA): The company has several hundred employees working on project "Titan," toward an Apple-brand electric car that one source says resembles a minivan, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Apple Pay is gaining wide acceptance because of its security, privacy, and convenience. Importantly, it is layered on top of the existing payments system so that the banks and credit card companies view Apple as a helpmeet and not an existential threat.

Hang on to your seatbelts. We'll see more of
these concept drawings in the weeks to come.

An Apple Car, on the other hand, would have to succeed against very powerful American, Japanese, and German competitors, some with many decades of experience. It doesn't make sense that Apple would enter an established market which contains some of the world's best companies; take the understandable concerns about offering an Apple television set and multiply those objections ten-fold.

More likely Apple is working on a demonstration minivan(?!?) outfitted with its software and products. The Apple module would be offered as an optional add-on to car companies and their customers.

We're holding our breath on this one; whatever Apple's doing with cars can't be as troubling as it first sounded, and its long record of success has earned the company the benefit of the doubt.

[Update - 2/21/15: the Economist is skeptical about an Apple car:

it will be tough to overturn the incumbents in a business where clever technology is only part of the equation.....the tech firms may be better off working with carmakers, to develop the software that will provide the brains of the self-driving car, and to improve the range and battery costs of the electric car.]