Apple does have the most stable, intuitive and secure platform of the major players that do business worldwide. Apple would not do the medical itself, but provide a platform for reseach and collaboration and provide health monitoring for individuals to spot problems early when they are easy and inexpensive to treat. Already the cell phone is the platform for many health monitoring and testing devices like the EKG device that does it at a very, very small fraction of the cost in a hospital. I use a blood pressure and heart rate monitor weekly and a scale that besides weight, monitors fat, muscle mass, bone mass and several other measurements. Oximeters and other divices that cost about twenty dollars. It would be nice to have a platform to give us our health status real time to prevent a minor condition from becoming a serious, expensive condition. Prevention is far, far cheaper than serious health problems. Health monitors of all types have become cheaper and have more uses thanks to the world of semis. Apple may not be the best solution, but better than the insurance and medical companie that have given us the expensive. low quality mess we have for most. It you have a better solution, please post it. Apple would not be a medical company, but a platform for the monitoring devices needed to what our condition is and spot problems early when they are far cheaper to work with.
When you see a tidal wave of medical ads, this is much of what you are paying for.
Any company which will be a platform for health data will attempt a vendor lock in.
Why are office suites like LibreOffice and Google Docs cheap these days? Because Microsoft was forced to open up their proprietary file formats.
To make something cheap, open standards need to exist which make solutions interoperable and cause competition.
A bolt from firm A according to ISO standards will fit a nut from firm B.
Tomorrow firm C can buy the ISO standard and make better and cheaper bolts.
For cheaper healthcare, there have to be open medical data formats.
Right now in AI, when it comes to cheap, Llama is winning from proprietary big GPT models and Google / Microsoft. People train LLama models on a Raspberry Pi!
It's because Facebook open sourced the model and the weight table leaked. All researchers started using it, improving it, publishing the results for free. Thats why Llama models can reach 80% of the GPT4 quality at less than 1% of the cost.
One could give many examples, but for cheap healthcare, patents have to be severely limited, and data has to be free.
In such a world, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and nany others wouldn't thrive.