When the wave of Apple Car discussion made its way around the blogosphere, Jean-Louis Gassée was pure skeptic:

In the first place, I wrote, a long history of eating and drinking at the best restaurants on the planet doesn’t qualify you to become a successful restaurateur. More important, Jony Ive’s justly renowned prowess in coming up with exquisitely polished objects misses the point of car manufacture where the focus isn’t on the object itself, but on the machine that excretes the cars in high volume, high quality, and well-managed cost. It’s the Industrial in Industrial Design that matters.

On the weight of these two points I concluded that while the idea of an Apple Car is attractive, Apple shouldn’t confuse its love of cars and its high regard for beautiful swage lines with an ability to become a successful car maker.

Jean-Louis then encountered Greg Koenig’s fantastic Atomic Delights’ piece How Apple Makes the Watch, which contained this gem:

“Apple is the world’s foremost manufacturer of goods. At one time, this statement had to be caged and qualified with modifiers such as “consumer goods” or “electronic goods,” but last quarter, Apple shipped a Boeing 787’s weight worth of iPhones every 24 hours. When we add the rest of the product line to the mix, it becomes clear that Apple’s supply chain is one of the largest scale production organizations in the world.”

To clarify, that’s the weight of an unladen Boeing 787, balanced on a scale with an equal weight of iPhones. No matter how you measure it, that’s a lot of manufactured and shipping product, requiring an incredibly nimble and complex supply chain.

Of course, I’m looking at the putative Apple Car in terms of the car as we know it today, just as we all initially looked at the iPod and the iPhone using existing products as the frame of reference. Perhaps Apple has something more imaginative, more in keeping with its Think Different mantra than a mere derivation of existing designs. But whatever it intends, I no longer believe that Apple can’t design a machine to make cars.

Apple’s has certainly demonstrated their supply chain expertise. But the Apple Watch design and manufacturing advances and subtleties explored in the Atomic Delights post bring home the point that Apple, should they so choose, would raise the science and economies involved in building a car (or, for Gene Munster’s benefit, a fictional Apple television) or any other product to new levels.