Well, Elon calls it "premium" not luxury. That's part of my point...let Apple deal with low volume luxury while Tesla moves on to high volume mass electrification.
In the entire universe of smart phones, Apple makes most of the profit on a small % of total phone sales, while the mass-market Android handset makers churn out the majority of phones, but make thin-as-ice margins, if they are profitable at all. If Tesla's long-term focus changes to low-margin Corolla type cars, then as an investor, I'm done with the company.
Apple would pay Tesla for the service. And yes, Apple gets the high margin...Tesla doesn't need it anymore, as they'll be selling 100x the volume of Apple cars. And what's wrong with FoxConn building in China (or Brazil or wherever)? With much lower volumes the high end platforms would just get in the way at a mass market Tesla factory. Contract manufacturers work quite well for many low volume brands. As for gross margins...they are going to be dropping anyway as the sales of Models 3, 4 and 5 overwhelm those of the S and X.
Apple has a reputation for squeezing its suppliers and having onerous supply contracts. Tesla would end up getting hardly anything, while Apple would pass the cost on to the customer.
What's wrong with FoxConn? It's CEO compared workers to animals and said they were difficult to manage.
What happened with OS X when it switched from PPC to x86? Both were fully supported for quite some time...and Apple even supplied emulators to run the old PPC applications for years under x86. When OS X went from 16 to 32 bit, and then to 64 bit they managed the transition way better than Microsoft or any flavor of Linux did at the time. Without any 3rd party apps to support, a truly closed system such as the Model S software should be easier to switch out the underlying OS than previous Apple OS updates were, and Apple did a pretty good job with those.
It seems inefficient to duplicate operating system development efforts, especially considering that Tesla would be providing service and delivery under this model. There would need to be two sets of everything, one for OS X and one for Linux: training manuals, stuff for DS and service center techs to learn, different diagnostic tools, etc. One could get around this by having a common user interface and APIs, but then what is the point of having 2 OSes in the first place?
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I don't see brand dilution, or customer confusion. Having the identical (or slightly modified) car built by two different nameplates is quite common. Acura had the (short lived) Sterling brand building what was known in the states as the Acura Legend in Britain.
The Acura ilx is just a Honda Civic plus some bling. It happens all the time, and customers are not confused. Think of Apple is to Tesla as Lexus is to Toyota.
Yikes, this is not a good thing. The Acura ILX is a spectacular failure, as it failed to achieve American Honda Motors' sales projections, was panned by the car mags, and is viewed with disdain by the Honda enthusiast community. I am very opposed to badge engineering.
Tesla is not, and has never been a "Toyota". Toyota today stands for nothing good except reliability. Their cars generally have terrible handling, mediocre powertrains, awful styling, and are just plain boring. The entire reason for Tesla's existence is to prove that EVs can be better than ICEs, and desirable. Ceding the desirability aspect of the brand to Apple fundamentally changes the nature of Tesla. I can't agree with any of that.
As a shareholder (albeit one owning "small potatoes" compared to most here), I'd much rather see Tesla selling a smaller number of high-margin cars, than a Camry/Corolla amount of cars on thin margins. Apple doesn't pursue the low end because there's no money there. Why should Tesla go for the low end?
