The TV rumors have dried out and fizzled. Reverted back to being about a box.
Not as much as we could hope. Gene rolls them out once a year cause he refuses to give up. Like the broken clock he seems to think if he keeps repeating them eventually it will happen.
And for a good reason, Apple doesn't want to compete in that space, that market is a race to the bottom.
not as much as one would think. The tech is getting very huge. I think the real race is the 'smart' part of the equation and the issue of digital distribution of files for TVs. If we get back to thinking of TVs as dumb displays and forget about adding tricks to make them smarter it would be a very good thing in my opinion. I really don't want to pay extra for added crap I will never use. I mean yeah it's great that you want to add the MLB smart tv app with a free first year subscription for me if I buy your tv but I hate baseball. It's boring crap. I will never watch it. But you won't take that off and just give me $100-150 off the TV.
I could see Apple making a 'tv' in the form of a display with enough kick it could be used as one. And I would love it. give me a flatish Cinema Display with HDMI inputs and options for 1080p or 4k depending on what I am hooking up to it. Heck give it the guts to support 3D even. For the prices you pay for movies on iTunes you should get all those versions if such exists. Add to the system a box that can provide them and it's a winner. Add all the extras from the disks and a system to cash your physical disks in for a discounted price to buy the digital and many folks would clean house. Especially if tv shows were included.
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Why not make it so the cable boxes hdmi out goes into the appleTV? Then make it so cable TV is an actual channel on the appleTV and then make so the user would be able to control the cable box with their phone/iPad/computer.
Too clumsy. And Cable box interfaces are often crap.
ideally what Apple seems to want is for the Apple TV to be the cable box. Which would be great cause many users have to pay a rental fee for that box that is more than $99 a year. And if Apple can get companies like HBO to allow direct subscriptions without cable for their apps or even to put their shows on the store right away, even better.
An idea that my cuz had floated that I thought would be novel would be if Apple could get all shows, worldwide, on the stores faster (and globally) and do a kind of lala thing. for those that never used it, lala.com had a ten cents streaming only access to songs. Or a link to buy it from iTunes. Imagine if you could subscribe to a show streaming only but have access from airing time through the season. Basically your 'pass' would be good until the next season starts'. And there could be an option to pay the difference and buy a permanent copy at any time. If you don't watch a ton of TV that could be a better way than slapping down $50 a month for a cable subscription. Especially if what you really watch is on channels like HBO. I would much rather spend $10 a season to stream Game of Thrones as it airs than $75 a month for cable I don't watch and HBO.
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Actual TV manufacturing is a horrible space to try and get involved with.
Very true. Mainly because of the number of established names. Apple would have to do something insane to get notice in that crowd. And there isn't the tech at this point to really wow folks. So why do it. Let those kids keep their toys and their fight and work around it.
TV and iPhone would just find some way to communicate without the annoying "why doesn't this work...huh...OH, right...Home->Home->Settings->WiFi->On...wait..." sequence.