I'm not sure "incredibly expensive" is a thing that Apple needs to care about per se. They are the most profitable company in the world. They have so much cash on hand, coming in so quickly, that they are desperate to find ways to productively spend it. From that point of view, a possibly multi-decade-long "incredibly expensive" R&D process to try to tackle an impossible market (I'm thinking ultimately they would want to make the cars themselves, not just self-driving software) is not entirely ludicrous.
That said, I can't map this vision of Apple as a company with too much money to spend looking for new markets with the Apple that can't be bothered to update its desktop computers and who bailed on the wireless router market. If there's any company that has the resources and vision to create the components for an actually useful and productive Connected Home, I would have expected it to be Apple. And I would have thought home servers (in the form of a beefier Mac Mini, maybe) and no-nonsense self-meshing wifi routers (the products they already had) would have been the perfect platform to build on. But they really do seem to have hit some sort of practical limit on how many things they can do at once within their current corporate structure.
That said, I can't map this vision of Apple as a company with too much money to spend looking for new markets with the Apple that can't be bothered to update its desktop computers and who bailed on the wireless router market. If there's any company that has the resources and vision to create the components for an actually useful and productive Connected Home, I would have expected it to be Apple. And I would have thought home servers (in the form of a beefier Mac Mini, maybe) and no-nonsense self-meshing wifi routers (the products they already had) would have been the perfect platform to build on. But they really do seem to have hit some sort of practical limit on how many things they can do at once within their current corporate structure.