iTV and batteries for cars, this is what Apple's most famous investor expects from the company in the period 2016-2020, he published an open letter to Tim Cook yesterday. Echoing the rumors proliferated by various analysts over the years, Carl Icahn expects Apple to launch a iTV, the mystical Apple TV, but also batteries for electric cars, even though Apple has not yet launched any cars.
Carl Icahn believes that Apple will launch an iTV Ultra HD that has a screen with a diagonal of 55 inches - 65 inches, the selling price of this product will be approximately 1500 dollars, lower than those rumored in the past. The Apple TV would be released on the market separately from the new one Apple TV 4 and it should bring those from Cupertino several billion dollars in revenue in the first year of availability.
Apple Television Set - after many years of rumors as part of Apple's push into television and as we referenced previously, we expect in FY 2016 Apple will sell 55" and 65" ultra high definition television sets. We forecast revenues of $15 billion in FY 2016 and $37.5 billion in FY 2017 on 10 million and 25 million units respectively with average selling prices of $1,500.
Separated from iTV, Icahn he sees her on Apple as a company that can compete with Tesla on the battery market for electric cars, saying that the first product of this kind could be launched by those from Cupertino by 2020. Apple hired a multitude of Tesla people, but you also have a manufacturer of batteries for electric cars, so it definitely has people thoroughly trained to develop such products.
Since lithium-ion batteries represent a large percentage of the cost of today's electric vehicle, we believe Apple should be well positioned to leverage its existing knowledge domain and more robust R&D spending in this area, and in turn apply any energy density / battery life improvements for a car across all the other products in its ecosystem that will share the benefit from such battery innovation (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, Beats).
We know for sure that Apple car is in production and that it will be launched sooner rather than later, but what we do not know is whether Apple will separately sell batteries for other types of electric cars on the market. If I had to guess, I would say that this will not happen, and to the same extent I think that iTV will not reach the market in the near future either.
