Some races are not worth contesting in. The race to be a contract manufacturer for an ipr and customer owning company is one such race. Sure Apple is very happy to have the House of Tatas as one of their unsecured creditors and risk investors. But how does that help the House of Tatas.
They enter a business in which they don’t own any brand, don’t own any IPR and don’t own any customer. They are just providing labour and trying to become a China + 1 player in a market which is going to die out.
Ai kills the smartphone as well as the mobile network as it exists. And unable to lead in ai – Apples future itself seems bleak. Apple has dominant market share and hundreds of millions of expensive devices tied to their networks. They can shut off any phone at will, force migration to a newer handset and snoop into any cell phone. They are not adhering to many Indin laws and regulators around the world are gunning for them. This includes the Indian Regulators and armies of lawyers have been engaged to manage the legal risk.
Let us see what Ai will do to the smartphone. Ai will in effect virtualise the smartphone moving all compute inside data centres. The handset will in effect be a television with a long battery life, a low cost cpu, negligible memory and a thin edge Ai system running an extension of Cuda or its Indian equivalent.
The cost of a phone with a functionality equivalent to the iPhone 17 pro will be down to Rs 10,000 or less. Currently Tata gets rs 10,000 to assemble the phone and the phone sells for Rs 1.6 lacs. There will be no business left when the device price crashes to Rs 10,000 or even lower.
The second risk is regulation. The product service lock held by Apple cannot continue for long. Regulators will or should ensure that the device must work without the service. And the service is optional. Without this, in the event of war Apple will be able to shut down and or control every phone. It is not possible to hide anything from the Apple servers including location. Both on the case of the Venezuelan Presodent and the Iranian leadership – precision strikes and abduction was enabled by Apple.
Tim Cook understandably had a good equation with Ratan Tata for shared beliefs and interests. But Mr Cook is now retired and Mr Tata is no more. The contract signed by Tata is extremely one way with no guarantee of anything and Tata being accountable for everything.
Few know that the first iPod was not made by Foxcon. It was made by an Indian company in Chengdu. Foxcon came to Chengdu only in 2010 directly and only in 2006 through a partnership. The original iPod was conceived of and built in 2002 when Steve Jobs had enrolled in a monastery to become a monk. He failed to enlist in the 19 year course and then took to the less austere Hindu beliefs. The plant which first made the iPod and the iPhone was actually the old manufacturing plant of HCL HP which had been relocated to Chengdu in 1999.
History is rarely remembered.
Or learnt from.Activate to view larger image,
