DigiTimes Lends Credence To Apple-Branded TVs For 2012 232
It's a rumor that goes back years (here's one example from this summer) that Apple is planning to produce dedicated TV sets branded with its own name; the main question seems to be when. DigiTimes (hat tip to CNet) is reporting that component-maker sources say that Apple has begun the process by ordering parts that hint at an offering next year of Apple TV sets (as opposed to Apple TV) in 32" and 37".
Oh good (Score:2, Insightful)
A tv that will cost twice as much as the next overpriced Sony and only lets you watch content approved by Apple. Oh and it will also use proprietary connectors so you can only connect it to other Apple devices.
I guess its the next logical progression from the iPod, iPad, and now iTv.
wake me up when there's some info (Score:4, Insightful)
As the summary itself notes, these rumors go back years, so yet another iteration of the rumor, "this time for real", without any real info except some screen sizes, is not so exciting.
Steve said the TV market is hard (Score:3, Insightful)
At his last All Things Digital [youtube.com] (fast forward to 1:31:30 or so), Steve Jobs said that the TV market was hard because the hardware was subsidized, which prevented doing anything interesting. The set-top box from your cable company is "good enough", it's free (at least, you think it is), and enough people won't spend money for a wow-cool interface to allow someone like Apple to make money. He referred to Apple TV as a hobbyist product.
So it sounds like the strategy now is to make the whole TV and not just a set-top box. I'm curious what that is going to bring. Sure, it'll be a nice set and maybe the interface will be better than the typical clunky "navigate a menu without a mouse" things. But so much of what's controlled on the TV is controlled outside of it - i.e., through my Dish/Cable/etc. carrier's box.
Will iTV replace those boxes? Is this a sort of androidy model where Apple provides everything those carriers do and then says to the carriers, why keep building your own set-top boxes when iTV can do that for you?
If it's just a nice TV with a better interface for adjusting the brightness, I can't imagine anyone getting excited, so there must be something more...speculations, please.
Re:Oh good (Score:2, Insightful)
Hell yeah I'm gonna hate. These days Microsoft is no longer the big evil corp that everyone loves to hate. Apple has done way worse things than Microsoft these past few years. How about the shell company they set up in order to sue EVERY cell phone manufacturer over patents? Apple has sued bloggers who simply make predictions about new products. The G4 cube incident comes to mind.
Who will they sue? (Score:3, Insightful)
There already plenty of televisions that are black with rounded corners. Who will they sue?
Phillip.
Re:What a steal! (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe thats why they should do it.
Early adopter and tech guys all "know" that multi foot long TVs are supposed to be thousands of dollars. I simply left the market up until recently, there's no way I'm spending a "used car" on a tv. Ignored the market, was shocked recently at how cheap TVs have gotten. Almost cheaper than a physical window. We're very close to the point that from a materials and energy cost standpoint for it to be cheaper to install a 40-something inch TV in portrait mode and a webcam sideways outdoors and call it a "iWindow" or something like that.
Of course my recently purchased 42 inch TV was only a couple hundred bucks, not several thousand, and I'm probably the last guy in the US to have upgraded from CRT to LCD, so it might already be too late to "convince" people that big TVs are still $3000, including the new iTV?
Re:Not likely (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'untapped' TV market is simplicity. It's hard to integrate all of the potential choices for TV input (cable, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, Blockbuster, DirectTV, Over the Air, DVD, BlueTooth, PirateBay etc) without setting up some complicated 'Home media server' and a remote with three thousand buttons.
It really surprises me how bad the TV manufacturers do at this. I have a 2 year old Samsung 42" - not a bad screen but the interface just absolutely sucks. Yet another 500 button remote with Tiny Little Letters and a few new icons (still haven't figured out the purple button with 2 dots and something vaguely resembling a triangle). The stupid thing can't even remember what it was last hooked to.
Come up with a generic way of doing this and you're rich. Of course, it it was easy, it would have been done already. For the reasons amply detailed in this and thousands of other posts it is quite a technologic and social challenge. Personally, I don't see Apple solving it - I don't thing anyone really can because of the inherent Balkanisation of the 'TV experience" but perhaps Steve has a better perspective on things from the Other Side.
Re:Oh good (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, excuse me. $30 for the $.03 cable. My bad. They used to be $50. I used to sell the fucking things, I know. The myriad of video adapters were the worst. We couldn't keep the Mini Displayport to DVI adapters in stock if our lives depended on it...
Please let us know when you are able to manufacture, package, market and ship for 3 cents per adapter.