It’s a lot of fun to speculate about a future Apple product, particularly one that has, as yet, not been officially announced. With a dearth of major announcements from Apple, might as well use our crystal balls and ouija boards to figure out where all that extra R&D cash is going.

The key rumor has it that an Apple Car is under development. You’ve read about the possible locations of the development and test facilities, and the names of some executives who might be working on the project. It is said that personnel have been recruited from major car companies, and even Tesla Motors is said to have waged a hiring war with Apple to grab the best people.

According to some reports, one Steve Zadesky said to be one of the key executives for what has been called “Project Titan,” left Apple for one reason or another. Spending over 16 years with the company, Zadesky reportedly worked on the iPod and iPhone, but, in 2014, he was named to head the alleged project to create what has been called an Apple Car. Make that Apple Car to employ Apple’s penchant for referring to its products as proper names. Oh, yes, Zadesky was once an engineer at Ford Motor, so he had some car cred.

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In wondering what Apple is doing to jump start the company after the March quarter debacle, some commentators have pointed to clues from the R&D budget. Apple’s estimated investment now stands at $10 billion for the year. It has steadily risen in recent years, so clearly something huge is afoot.

One industry analyst, Neil Cybart, wrote some perfectly sensible comments in a widely quoted column in Above Avalon, a blog covering Apple’s business trends.

Here’s the relevant paragraph: “Apple is not spending $10 billion on R&D just to come up with new watch bands, larger iPads, or a video streaming service. Instead, Apple is planning on something much bigger: a pivot into the automobile industry.”

Now Apple has obviously not confirmed what products are being developed; some are obvious. Clearly there are many projects underway. The company is clearly looking for new revenue streams now that it seems the smartphone market is topping out in developed countries. While Apple may sell lets of gear in India and other countries, the era of overall double-digit growth appears to be over.

So Apple would need to boost other revenue streams, such as iPads and Macs or make a breakthrough with the Apple Watch? With one billion activated devices, getting customers to pay for more services, such as Apple Music, or a video streaming service, only enhances their value. Services achieved double-digit growth in the last quarter, and the trend is apt to improve as Apple adds and improves them.

Past the new generation iPhones, iPads, Macs and Apple Watches, is it all about a car? Probably not, even if Apple decides, in the end, to bring the rumored Project Titan to a production motor vehicle. Virtual reality may, as rumored, play a part on it.

Now Apple has historically spent less of its revenue on R&D than other companies, but that shouldn’t reflect on the results. But when it comes to a new car, it’s going to be a costly proposition, even if it’s eventually built at someone else’s factory.

I did a little research, and it appears that the starting price to develop a new vehicle is $1 billion according to autoblog. But that’s usually just for a model refresh. When it comes to designing a new car from scratch, with a new platform, new components, and a new engine, the estimate soars to $6 billion or thereabouts.

But those numbers are for existing car companies, not to establish an all new company or division and setting up the design, manufacturing, support and dealer networks from scratch. I’ve little doubt the figures can grow to several times that top number. Thus the higher investment from Apple seems reasonable.

The hefty cost of admission is one of many reasons why there have been so few new car makers in recent decades. Tesla Motors shows the potential of being the most successful new car venture in a long time. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll remember the DeLorean Motor Company, which was founded in 1975. The company went out of business in 1982, in part because of problems with founder John DeLorean that ultimately resulted in drug smuggling charges. He was found not guilty in a 1984 trial, but that didn’t help save the company beyond the legend around it created by the “Back to the Future” movies.

In any case, if any company can pull this off, Apple is first in line. The record shows how the company has confounded the critics in the past with major new products.

Consider the iPod, something few took seriously as anything more than a Steve Jobs indulgence, such as the Power Mac G4 Cube. I know I didn’t pay it much mind at first, largely because I’d reviewed some digital music players for ZDNet in the years before the iPod arrived, and I found none of them to be remotely useful. The iPod did many things right that those products did wrong, and soon became a sensation.

The iPhone was dismissed as another indulgence. Isn’t that nice? The Internet in your pocket, but don’t proper smartphones have physical keyboards? It was a serious argument at the time, but less serious when all the other companies decided to come out with gear using touchscreens that had more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone.

Every single year since then, the critics have predicted that the iPhone will fail, with Samsung taking over. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. A key reason for flagging iPhone sales is market saturation, and the economic headwinds in China. So perhaps they’ll stabilize. But the product had a great run despite the all those dire predictions.

Even though iPad sales have declined, so have sales of other tablets. Apple is still number one, and this product, this swollen iPod touch or whatever some thought it to be, will continue to survive.

True, automobiles are way beyond anything Apple has ever done. CarPlay is just an interface for the infotainment system, and the Apple Car would be the first product that cannot be sold in an Apple Store.

I am not making predictions about when it will come to pass, or if it will come to pass. But it sure explains that growing R&D budget.

After hearing about what a marvelous service WhatsApp is, I decided to give it a try. So I downloaded the app on my iPhone, and set it up using my Facebook account. Other than the fact that Facebook owns WhatsApp, the result of a $19 billion acquisition, it seemed the simplest way; I have quite enough usernames for different apps as it is. But installing the WhatsApp Web on my Mac only revealed the limits of the technology.

While WhatsApp for iOS and Android, both official and third-party, are available from Apple and Google’s online stores, not so with the Mac clients. At least not yet. But when I first launched the official app, listed as a beta, I wondered why I bothered. So the opening screen revealed a QR Code. A who? Well, in order to set up the app, I needed to open Settings in the iOS version, and scan that code.

This step had the effect of linking the two. You see, WhatsApp evidently requires the iPhone version in order to sync messages. This is similar to the way Continuity integrates SMS messaging and phone service with your iPhone and Mac. Indeed, there’s a recommendation to make sure your iPhone, or Android handset, is hooked up to a Wi-Fi network so you’re not consuming too much data from your wireless carrier.

Indeed, my son’s uses WhatsApp on his iPhone, but says, “I dislike the amount of battery and data it consumes.”

With support for voice chats, I got to thinking that WhatsApp might give Skype a run for its money if it added support for group chats and, perhaps, the ability to make regular phone calls.

Regardless of the potential, I’m not at all sure that WhatsApp is necessarily so much better than other chatting schemes, although I’m sure some of you will be delighted to tell me how. To me it just leads to more chat confusion, to some degree a throwback to the way it was in the early days of the online world where that wasn’t much integration among different services.

In other words, it’s a comedown.

So not so long ago, you could use Apple’s Messages to talk to AOL and AIM users, Facebook users via Jabber technology, plus such services as Google Talk and Yahoo! Last year, in its infinite wisdom (??) Facebook decided to kill Jabber support. There may have been technological and security reasons for it, but it meant that I could no longer use Messages to chat with Facebook users.

To use the Facebook Messages, I had to download a third-party app on my Mac. iOS has a native client from Facebook. That meant two instant messaging apps running at the same time with separate messages and contact lists. Add to that Skype, which I use mostly for my radio shows. That makes four with WhatsApp, which can be integrated with contacts from such services as Facebook and your own list. You even have the option of sending invites to entice your friends to sign up, a typically clever way to expand the ecosystem.

Recently, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption for chats and voice calls. I was reminded of this capability with an onscreen message the first time I launched the messaging apps. More to the point, this serves as a notice to the authorities that, even if you manage to break into a smartphone despite encryption, WhatsApp exists in its own space. It’s another layer of encryption they have to attack.

So imagine, after the FBI unlocked that iPhone 5c used by a terrorist, and found a copy of WhatsApp installed. If the contents were encrypted, it would have left a whole new problem after spending over $1.3 million to some hackers to gain access to the handset.

But that’s an issue for another column. My concern about this chatting situation is that the various apps don’t talk to one another. While having simultaneous chats on a Mac or a PC isn’t such a big deal, it can get pretty ungainly on a smartphone. Consider the multitasking limits, even if you consider Split View on recent iPads.

While many of your contacts might have several of these apps and would thus be available on the service of your choosing, the mess results when they only use one or two. To reach a fellow mobile handset user, you might just stick with old fashioned SMS; that is, unless they have installed one of the other chatting apps. And remember that Apple’s proprietary messaging scheme doesn’t let you talk to people who aren’t using an Apple gadget. At least SMS, AIM, Facebook, WhatsApp and other chatting schemes have multi-platform support.

Notice I haven’t considered RC, MSN, ICQ, and other services.

While there are apps that support several chat systems, none support them all — or at least the most popular ones — so far as I can determine. The underlying technology shouldn’t make a difference so long as it integrates with your contact list and provides a reasonable level of notifications. There may be reasons why the owners of different technologies do not want to work together, and I see where Apple might want to keep its messaging scheme for itself. But none of that serves the customer.

After all, you can use loads of email clients to access all or most email accounts. You choose the one you like based on features and performance. But when you’re stuck with a proprietary instant messaging system and have to use several different apps to stay in touch with all your contacts, it can easily discourage chatting, and that’s not the way it ought to work.

Let’s look at a couple of facts, one confirmed by Apple, the other suggested in a recent survey, which indicates that price cuts will do wonders to the company’s revenue prospects. In the first case, there’s the iPhone SE. The price starts at $50 less than its predecessor, the iPhone 5s. But it contains most of the parts of the high-end iPhone 6s, and has been back-ordered since being released at the end of March.

According to Tim Cook, during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts, Apple misjudged expected demand. So far so good, but was it the lower price that fueled more sales, or the fact that there was pent-up demand for an up-to-date iPhone with a smaller display? Perhaps it was a combination of both.

Now in a survey conducted by Slice Intelligence, a firm that didn’t really exist as a public presence until the Apple Watch arrived last year, sales of the device soared in April. Why? Because the base price was reduced by $50 for entry-level models. So the 38-millimeter model went from $349 to $299.

As a practical matter, $50 doesn’t seem to be an awful lot for a product that tops out, with the very fanciest watchband, at $17,000 or so. But the watches you buy in two sizes at the highest prices have the very same components as the cheapest models. So you can see where the volume is. So Slice Intelligence reports that sales soared by 250% as the result of that small price cut.

Is this true?

Well, the copying machines that pass for journalists these days are taking that information at face value, that it didn’t take much to make Apple Watch sales soar. Perhaps, but it’s not that Slice Intelligence has a solid track record for delivering dependable numbers about anything. According to the company’s site, the actual online purchases of people who participate in their surveys are tallied, so they claim higher accuracy.

A statement at the company’s site explains, “Slice Intelligence data comes from several sources, including the receipts in the e-mail inboxes of consumers who use the popular Slice online shopping service, Slice, and through strategic partners, including users of Slice’s API platform. Each e-mailed receipt contains a treasure trove of data, all of which Slice extracts, parses and measures, using our proprietary Merchant Template Management (MTM) technology.”

I’m not at all clear how this all adds up to data that represents an accurate cross-section of the public, however. I suppose other surveys will present a clearer picture of how Apple Watch sales are faring going forward.

Understand that Apple doesn’t report Apple Watch sales. Instead, the estimates are based on the “Other” category in Apple’s financials, so there’s some level of guesswork in how sales are allocated to different product and service categories.

So where does that leave us?

Well, I suppose the price cut had some impact simply by making the process of buying an Apple Watch a little less daunting. But someone still has to be interested in wearables, and that may be a stretch. The level of demand has yet to be proven beyond a few million per month. But it’s early in the game, and perhaps future versions will, with built-in cellular radios and some killer apps, become more compelling to customers.

This isn’t the first time Apple has cut prices. Two years ago, the price of the cheapest MacBook Air was reduced by $100 to $899. Did it boost sales, or stop a further erosion? Without access to Apple’s marketing data — something outsiders won’t get, it’s hard to know. But Macs occupy the highest tiers of PC pricing, so even a little bit had to help. Overall, the prices of most Macs are lower than they used to be. With a double-digit reduction in sales for the March quarter, I suppose Apple might consider cutting prices yet again if it doesn’t seriously hurt margins.

But what about the iPhone? Does the iPhone SE herald a trend? Will the iPhone 7 also see a price drop? And is Apple willing to tolerate lower profit margins to boost sales and potential revenue? If so, to what degree?

Don’t forget that Wall Street is already down on the company’s prospects. Even though other smartphone makers, except for Samsung, report little or no profit on mobile handsets, that doesn’t mean that the financial sector is going to tolerate a significant change in Apple’s margins. It’s certainly clear the company won’t join the race to the bottom, so it’s a matter of how sales might increase in exchange for modest price cuts.

This is the sort of dilemma that will no doubt keep marketers and corporate bean counters up at night. True, higher sales volumes will lower the cost of components some, but what’s the sweet spot? Or has it reached a point where, except in underdeveloped countries, the smartphone market is saturated and boosting sales will become more and more difficult regardless of price?