Apple, Now Carless, Faces Renewed Questions About Growth

Maybe Apple should cancel multibillion-dollar projects more often! Shares of the iPhone maker, which have fallen since the start of the year, rose nearly 1% Tuesday after Bloomberg scooped the news that Apple had canned Project Titan, its decade-old autonomous car project. As a Morgan Stanley analyst said in a research note, the Bloomberg report, “if true, would be a positive development.” The analyst said he hadn’t put any value on the project, thinking Apple was too far behind its competitors to catch up in the arena of cars. In other words, Wall Street seemed to be saying to CEO Tim Cook, “What took you so long?”

Tech companies have to take big, risky swings if they want to keep growing—that’s the nature of the business. There’s never a guarantee of success. For Apple, now generating nearly $400 billion in revenue annually, coming up with a new growth business big enough to move the needle isn’t easy. So it makes perfect sense that Apple tried in cars, a giant market. Still, it was surely evident a couple of years ago that Project Titan was a disaster. As The Information outlined in this deep dive in 2022, the car project had been plagued from the start. So while Cook can be applauded for having the discipline to call off the project, there is a question of why he didn’t make the decision earlier.