&gt; I wonder if Apple is positionning it as a competitor to Google&#x27;s Go?<p>They&#x27;re giving themselves the option to get out of the computer hardware business if the car takes off without killing their phone business. Think about it. Right now if they killed off the MBP then most devs would switch to Android and they&#x27;d lose their iPhone monopoly. But if Swift gains traction as an open platform, they have the option to stop making hardware and open source or license OS X while still maintaining the dominant position in the smartphone market.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that Apple will definitely get out of hardware. But with Intel&#x27;s rate of innovation slowing down and the R&amp;D for each generation of chips getting exponentially more expensive, one possible future is that the business is not profitable enough to justify the resource drain.