I've made this analogy before in the context of poor customer service and the ability for companies to overcome and succeed but I'll do it again: How many people remember the early days of Apple? With their horrible 90-day warranty on extremely high priced items. The magazine Mac User had a graphic in each month's issue counting how long Apple's "insufficient warranty" had continued. After a great deal of shaming and customer complaints, Apple finally increased their factory warranty to one year.
And who remembers the arrogance of the Apple repair places in the mid 80's? The repair people at my local Apple dealer back then were typically snotty, impatient, and condescending. And they acted like they were doing us a supreme favor by just taking the time to work on our Apple products. On top of that there were a zillion Macintosh models, with very little to differentiate them in the market, not to mention the Apple clones that were cutting into Apple's sales. OS 7 was a joke it crashed so often. The OS roadmap was as chaotic as the model lineup.
It's easy to witness the culture of innovation and lofty goals that permeate Tesla and witness their disruptive technology that drives other automotive companies into a new direction and compare Tesla to Apple and those comparisons are justified, I believe. But let's remember that as successful as Apple is now, they had some really horrible periods that soured a lot of customers and put into serious doubt the ability of Apple to survive.
No, Tesla isn't Apple and all analogies fall short in some way; however, I think Tesla can, and will, learn, much the same way that Apple did, and we'll look back on the painful delivery and service experiences in the same way that people talk about how Apple used to be in their early days.
