Apple is looking to dive deeper into in-car entertainment technology through its partnership with Ferrari.
The tech company is looking strengthen its relationship with the famous Italian sports car company, which revealed its million dollar LaFerrari hybrid hypercar at the Geneva Motor Show in Geneva, Switzerland this week.
The two companies have been discussing a partnership for a while now. In April of last year, while making the Bay Area tech rounds, Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo met with Apple CEO Tim Cook (in addition to paying a visit to Google, and speaking at Stanford).
“Apple and Ferrari are connected by the same passion, the same love for the product, obsessive attention to both technology and to design,” di Montezemolo said after the meeting in Cupertino, according to Bloomberg.
And in November, Eddy Cue, senior vice president for Internet software and services, joined the board of directors of Ferrari, further cementing the bond between the companies. Cue was instrumental in the development of iTunes, the App Store and Siri.
In addition to the beautiful, redundantly named LaFerrari, the company also showed off its 2+2 shooting brake coupe, the FF, complete with two iPad Minis in the seatbacks, to entertain the passengers who can sit in the Ferrari's backseat only if they have no legs.
On Wednesday, Apple posted a job opening to its website, announcing that the company is looking for a “Software Quality Assurance Manager to drive iPod/iPhone/iPad integration testing with car stereos.” And in February, the company posted two other jobs focusing on “iOS Car Services.” Hopefully this means the company is looking to develop new technology that really integrates Apple products into cars, rather than just slapping tablets into a supercar.
But what will fusing Apple mobile tech into car interiors mean for the future? Will Apple and Ferrari be able to reconcile the vast discrepancies between their products' lifetimes? How will Apple’s in-car tech age when a tablet’s lifetime is only a few years, compared to a car, which could last for decades?
Years from now, will these cars be little more than rolling, beautiful museums, full of embarrassing, outdated tech? In the future, will this Ferrari FF with built-in iPads be seen as nothing more than a 2013 version of a Lamborghini Countach equipped with a Commodore 64 in the passenger seat?
