Is Tesla modern-day Apple Macintosh?

There was news this month out of Japan and Germany of extraordinary leaps on the horizon in battery technology — the kind of huge advances that will drive down costs and charging times.

Solid-state batteries promise to make electric vehicles functionally indistinguishable from today's combustion-powered automobiles. They're game-changing.

Maybe you have to be a certain age, but it all just struck me as so familiar, like I've lived through this before.

And then the memory came back: the first Apple Macintosh.

I was in college in the mid-1980s when my university offered students an opportunity to buy a Macintosh, which didn't look or act anything like its DOS-based competitors. It still makes me laugh today that we sprang for the extra 20-megabyte external hard drive, upon which the Mac, with its built-in black-on-white screen, would sit, and which I confidently explained to my father that we would "never fill up."

The Mac was different, better than anything else on the market at the time, and it destroyed the linear evolution that those in charge of DOS-based computing were pursuing. To own a Mac made you different from the rest of the world — better in some ways, like ease of use — but at a substantial cost: The software available for DOS-based and later Windows-based machines dwarfed that available for the Macintosh.

The other machines also became far cheaper and better over time because there were myriad companies manufacturing them, and competition drove down prices. When Microsoft emulated/copied/borrowed the Mac's better human-machine interface with Windows 3.0 and later, the gap closed substantially, and the Apple's higher costs began to look very prohibitive to all but Apple's most dedicated fans.

For the younger set, the same drama essentially replayed itself decades later with the smartphone, except it wasn't Microsoft on the other side of the struggle for dominance from Apple, but Google.

So what does all this ancient computer history have to do with EVs? Well, I would argue that the parallels between Apple's Macintosh experience and Tesla are about to go a lot deeper than just their shared California roots.

Like the Macintosh, Tesla's cutting-edge innovations — on EVs and, in particular, batteries — gave it a distinct technological edge over would-be competitors in a game many of them never wanted to play. The rest of the global auto industry probably would have been very happy to continue working with their century-old internal combustion engines, building pickups and evolving ICEs over time to make them more efficient and powerful, allowing Tesla to play with electrons all by itself.

Emissions regulations and the climate crisis changed that equation, however, and forced legacy automakers into the EV business, pushing their engineering prowess and their established ways of improving products and manufacturing at volume onto Tesla's playing field. Just like the hardware and software makers from decades ago, the legacy automakers started out way behind, and their initial efforts weren't as good as Tesla.

But just like Apple, I'd argue that Tesla is now trapped in its own ecosystem. While Toyota, Volkswagen, General Motors and other legacy automakers are free to explore and adopt different battery technologies, such as solid state, Tesla's investments are all one-way: its Gigafactories produce proven battery packs. They're better than what's available today, certainly, but will they stand up to a barrage of energy storage innovation for a decade or more? I'm doubtful.

I only ever bought one Macintosh. By the time I was ready for a new computer, Windows-based machines were far cheaper, met my needs and were far more flexible in terms of the software they could run.

I no longer had to pay a premium — nor was I willing to — for the Apple name or marginally better user interface. Others had the same idea, though Apple has retained and grown a stable core of aficionados for its computers for decades.

So what does the EV landscape look like a decade — one, maybe two product cycles — from now? I have no doubt that Tesla will still be a big player, maybe even the biggest single player on the EV field. And it will still have some substantial competitive advantages, including its present valuation.

But just like Apple, Tesla will find itself surrounded by at least a dozen automakers and brands, including some with their own very deep pockets and global footprints — each making it harder and harder for Tesla to continue to live in its own little world.