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Apple Focusing on Existing Hardware Lines?
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I disagree with your description of the average consumer's thoughts, but there's not much to talk about there. However, I think that one more reason you won't see this widescreen touch iPod until the end of this year is because the technology isn't quite worked out yet with the HDD player and battery life. Making even a 32 GB flash iPod would be insanely expensive.
I 'd say equivelant to the Sony Bravia range plus maybe 10% for the Apple TV /ipod dock technology...there has to be plenty of profit in that as Bravia's are twice the price of 'budget LCD TV's'...
Existing lines
Has ANYONE noticed the four hardware lines consist of two lines that have not been released yet, and the ones that do exist have big-a$$ legs and multiple hardware implementations?
Mac - over 6 styles of hardware (40+ historically)
iPod - over 4 styles of hardware (10+ historically)
iPhone - ONE announced style of hardware (implies some might be added to ATN
)
TV - ONE announced style of hardware (implies some might be added)
So in short, two entirely NEW hardware lines have been added, and discussed "on the record" as having LEGS, and only one of a multitude of future poroducts have ever been discussed for each of those TWO new lines in ONE year.
Some might believe this might be good for the stock.
Rocketman
Has ANYONE noticed the four hardware lines consist of two lines that have not been released yet, and the ones that do exist have big-a$$ legs and multiple hardware implementations?
Mac - over 6 styles of hardware (40+ historically)
iPod - over 4 styles of hardware (10+ historically)
iPhone - ONE announced style of hardware (implies some might be added to ATN
) TV - ONE announced style of hardware (implies some might be added)So in short, two entirely NEW hardware lines have been added, and discussed "on the record" as having LEGS, and only one of a multitude of future poroducts have ever been discussed for each of those TWO new lines in ONE year.
Some might believe this might be good for the stock.
Rocketman
I agree completely. Apple TV is not a replacement for sat tv or cable. I think instead it augments that choice and is more direct competition to the DVD rental market.
Besides I do not want to see the sat tv or free over the air broadcast tv go the way of the horse and buggy. Can you imagine the cost of sports shows, olympics, sports opens, news, tv series and movies if they were only supported by pay per view markets. Right now local and national advertising foot the bill for all of this programing.
If we went to pay per view only, local advertising would be gone, and network advertising would never pay for the comercial time like they do now.
Sony is going to end up competing with Apple TV with the Bravia line. The latest announcement is that the Bravia line will have ethernet built-in with a high-speed movie download service direct from the Sony Entertainment Catalog which by the way includes a lot of movies.
The problem with the Bravia line--unsure about the other Sony HD TVs--is that they only have one HDMI port, which is a major downfall. Other companies have at least 2 HDMI ports.
Why is anyone even arguing this? Because they aren't offering it yet? Then why not change your argument to "Too bad they aren't offering the AppleTV"? After all, the AppleTV has yet to hit stores.
I am befuddled by the number of people who do not think forward and believe that Apple introduced a product capable of 720p just for giggles. When the 640x480 iPods hit the market, iTunes Store started carrying 640x480 content.
Given the datacenter expansions Apple has quietly been doing in the background during the AppleTV's development, it's a foregone conclusion that they'll introduce 720p content... It's just a question of when at this point.
Are the posters on this board so seriously lacking in vision that they'd walk into a 35,000 square foot construction site saying, "I can't imagine why any business would want to be located here... the site's not even finished!"
I never said that... and neither did the surveys. I'm talking about a-la carte programming. A-la carte... as in individual programs, not channels.
And regardless of what you believe, no... a-la carte channels aren't what's most desired. Internet-downloadable, a-la carte episodes are the more highly desired of the two.
Tell that to the DVD distributors who are doing assloads of business with TV series on DVD. TV series purchases on DVD have exploded from a curiosity to a full-blown industry upon which DVD distributors such as NBC-Uni rely for a huge chunk of their business. I know this not only because of the sales figures for this end of the business, but I also used to write reviews. Many distributor's PR agents drove me up the wall with their constant bombardment of TV-on-DVD marketing collateral.
But then you're mixing arguments... I don't get it. First you talk about episodes and then you shift gears to entire seasons (e.g. "Is LOST really worth $50 a year?"). You do realize nobody is putting a gun to iTunes users' heads locking them into entire seasons, right? You can buy episodes OR seasons. Neither DVD nor cable nor dish give you that flexibility.
I also think your response now is entirely inconsistent with your previous response which I was debating. First you argue that 250 channels gives you choice... Now you argue against too many choices? Then what the hell do you call 250 channels if not too many choices?
The issue consumers gripe about most isn't the quantity of choices... it's the quality of choices. A-la carte episodes doesn't cast consumers into a chasm of unfathomable proportion any more than walking into Best Buy does.
The difference is that Best Buy is extremely unhelpful in narrowing down those choices to your preferences. Same goes with video rental stores. I walked into a video store the other day and while browsing one idiot clerk proffered the unsolicited recommendation of John Cena's "The Marine." If the store management had any sense, they'd have trained this person to gauge my preferences by asking a few simple questions... Even easier, I tend to make snide remarks when walking by crap movies on the shelves (not that I think it's mature of me... it's just a habit). An OBSERVANT sales rep could have gathered information from my browsing habits and running commentary, even without talking to me, and could have made a more useful suggestion. THAT is precisely what iTunes Music Store does!
"Walk" into iTunes Store and your purchasing habits are duly noted, categories are well-organized to help you constrain your browsing to what you're in the mood for at any particular moment. And on occasion, recommendations are made that you might not have thought of, but still based on your general usage habits.
I think you're arguing for the sake of arguing at this point... flipflopping from "250 channels" to "too much choice", making points predicated not on what will be, but complaining about what lies in a future you can't seem to see.
And how many overpriced plasma sets does Bang & Olufsen sell? How much of the cost goes to a third-party manufacturer who designs and manufactures the display components?
Apple's brand positioning is quite different from Bang & Olufsen. While Apple is a premium brand, B&O caters primarily to audiophiles seeking astronomically-priced equipment with unconventional industrial design. The reasons they entered into the display market have more to do with the general shift of audio equipment purchases into the dual-purpose home theater and music applications that have greatly accelerated the sales of higher-end audio equipment.
One of B&O's most popular products is the A8 earbud set. Guess what retail chain sells the majority of them... (hint: it's not Bang & Olufsen).
Apple is a computer technology-driven company and their solutions have more to do with a computer/network driven lifestyle. They have no interest in releasing a TV in the conventional sense of the word because the key component that separates an HDTV from a computer display these days is the presence of an ATSC tuner and, in some cases, an HDTV cable card. Apple's strategic goal with AppleTV is to supplant television programming with internet-distributed, a-la carte programming. This should be obvious given the lack of a DVR, ATSC tuner and/or cable card on the AppleTV.
Yes, because most viewers only want to watch every-other episode of LOST.
Assuming the customer wanted to watch the entire season (duh!), it's cheaper to buy a season pass (or multi-pass).
Of course, you're right, in some cases, in the customer only wanted to buy a single episode (which is rare), it can be done.
Choices are great, until money is involved.
Once the cable bill is paid for the month, it's out of sight and out of mind. Meaning, most people aren't thinking about the money flying out of their pockets while watching Desperate Housewives. With the iTunes store, you can't help but notice the price of each episode, and second-guess if you really want it.
So yes, choices are great, as long as they seem free.
...But of course, this is probably great for America, because I guarantee people will be watching less TV.
I think it's obvious a TV is coming, otherwise why else call that 'TV streamer' Apple TV when it was iTV, which clearly falls into line with the rest of their i-naming convention. They didn't, for example, call the iphone the Apple Phone. That's the TV's brain they're developing right there under 'covert' disguise' - once perfected it's just a drop in card and your TV solution is good to go...
Apple TV gives the game away - that's the 'stake' in the ground. And it indicated, as rockertman said that 'Apple TV' is a new brand line hardware development road...and down that road is a nice big juicy 50" Apple brand TV in white with a nice silver bezel around the ede and lots of Apple core animation goodness and streaming technology all over it...
my wallet awaits.... Apple - if your reading this...this could be bigger than ipods!!
Apple TV gives the game away - that's the 'stake' in the ground. And it indicated, as rockertman said that 'Apple TV' is a new brand line hardware development road...and down that road is a nice big juicy 50" Apple brand TV in white with a nice silver bezel around the ede and lots of Apple core animation goodness and streaming technology all over it...
my wallet awaits.... Apple - if your reading this...this could be bigger than ipods!!
mmh, maybe that's it...but pre-existence didn't stop them using iphone...and that's just a hard-up UK TV channel and not an intergalactic transnational super corp like Cisco...
Anyway, a 'great idea' is still a great idea - and a nice big Apple Telly is definately that...
'When in rome....'
Anyway, a 'great idea' is still a great idea - and a nice big Apple Telly is definately that...
'When in rome....'
Depends on what you mean by TV. If you simply mean a large display on which to watch your H.264 movies... they already have one. It's called the 30" Cinema HD. They could make a 40" Cinema HD or 50" Cinema HD... but is this a "TV" in the common sense of the word? No.
So if you mean a TV in the sense of having an ATSC tuner, a cable card, etc. then no. It's not in the cards because it would cannibalize one of their biggest strategic objectives for AppleTV and iTunes.
Their AppleTV-iTunes product-service collaboration is predicated upon the idea of a-la carte programming and positioned as a direct competitor to broadcast, cable and dish. To introduce a product at tremendous expense in an HDTV-saturated market relying on third party vendors for almost all the display components only to cannibalize their own iTunes/AppleTV sales by facilitating the competing content delivery formats (especially while their content delivery concept is still taking off) is absurd.
I have one of those, actually. It's called a PowerBook G4.
Just start burning the DVD, flip over the PowerBook, and lay the bagel directly over the processor.
Ahahah, these overheating powerbook jokes never get old
Not if your cable bill is nearly $100 a month.
You seem to be confusing the average cable customer for the target demographic for AppleTV, or Apple products in general, for that matter. The average cable customer is not an issue here.
AppleTV is targeted primarily at HDTV owners. While it will work on SDTV's its design is built with HDTV in mind. The core target market for AppleTV would naturally be customers who presently spend upwards of $70/mo. on cable/dish.
Are there customers in that niche that don't pay attention to their cable bill? Sure. But by and large a person is more likely to be irritated by a $100 a month bill than a $50 a month bill regardless of how much income you bring in.
But here's the rub... When you compare the products and services of cable versus the products and services of iTunes, there are differing scales involved in the purchase decision.
If you're going to get hit with a $70 recurring, let's say, you're more likely to shop around to try to get a deal than say if you're at Best Buy and on your way out you pick up a $9.99 movie off the discount racks that are very intentionally placed at the endcaps of the cash registers.
This is impulse buy psychology. Apple has done considerable research on the price points needed and the store design needed to help feed impulse buy purchases. Music tracks under a dollar, movies just under $10... these figures weren't arrived at by throwing darts on a wall but rather by studying other retail outlets and the design of their impulse purchase merchandising techniques. Also, Amazon.com.
While you can not only visibly see the drain of a $70 recurring charge in your bank account but you can visualize it relative to your monthly expense, the iTunes Store has a very clever means of fire-and-forget impulse buying. In this case, your credit card's already preprogrammed... Compared to writing a check, paying cash or swiping a card for that $10 movie placed oh so intentionally at the endcap of the checkouts at Best Buy, the iTunes Store model is even more seductive... Push a button. DONE!
It's so easy and so addictive to push a button and get the movie you want without physically traversing the myriad aisles of a superstore, relying on inept clerks who aren't as helpful to find exactly what you want as a system with intelligent searching that also gives you the ability to watch a clip to confirm that's the movie you're looking for (or to find out if you'll like it).
At the moment of the purchase decision and execution there's absolutely nothing blaring in your face reminding you that you've just spent $10 on a movie! You don't even see the total... the receipt is e-mailed to you later.
Now, let's go back to our $70 a month (and again this figure is generous... after taxes, fees, etc. my bill comes to $95 a month) example. That recurring charge is pretty easy to pick out in your monthly bank statements. However, a bunch of scattered charges from Apple for much lower amounts individually are something you'll easily forgive or rationalize the same way very few people keep track of the hordes of money they drop at convenience stores and vending machines while at work or out shopping on the weekends.
The price points have been heavily researched so as to keep them at levels that Apple's target customers will easily accept as impulse purchases at the least. Sure, there are those like me who also do reasoned searching... but if something is cheap enough to be an impulse buy, price isn't going to be a big inhibitor to the more heavily researched purchases on the same system. In other words, if I'm willing to drop $10 on a movie I hadn't really thought through all that much... I'm more than willing to drop $10 on a movie I really want.
Exactly. All the media in your life, whether music, video, movies, and even email and even Internet based media like Flash, will all eventually converge into one system or network. We're already seeing it with Airport Express and now
TV because the Mac becomes the central hub. The speakers/HiFi and the television only become extensions of the computer to display the media.Sorry, but that's not going to happen for a long, long, time. People like having their huge HD TVs with over 250 channels to chose from an any moment.
I'm not so sure about that. These days I doubt everyone who has cable or sat connections are watching all of the shows on all of their channels. If you really take the time to look at how many different TV shows you watch and the number of different channels that you actually watch at any given time, I'm sure it's nowhere near the total amount available. People watch what they want to watch and if that's offered without any commercials and is also able to be replayed over and over again as long as their computer and storage system lasts, it might be more attractive than paying $XXX per month for a bunch of stuff that you never watch.
The only way
There's nothing to say this won't happen in the future.
TV can already stream video from a connected Mac, so the technology is already there. If I had to bet money, I'd wager that it's the television networks that would be reluctant to let Apple be able to capture the signal and then stream it back to the computer, primarily because that could facilitate the distribution of television shows and movies across the Internet, especially if the recording process lacks DRM.There we go folks. I'm reluctant to pay $35 for basic cable when all I really watch are the occasional sports broadcasts. I'm more willing to pay $50 for the entire year and watch all of the baseball games I want on my computer with the ability to choose which games I watch at which time than pony up the costs of a cable or sat connection and only watch what is broadcast in my region.
A-la carte and on-demand is the future of television. People will be more willing to pay for what they want to watch instead of a plethora of stuff that they don't. Quality > Quantity. Who wants to watch 250 channels when only a few are offered in HD and even less offer quality programming?
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Bingo. And I can't wait for the day that sat/cable providers bite the dust. Hell, why not let the networks sell them directly to the consumer, or utilize a middle company like Apple to provide the distribution system (iTunes) over an already well established network (the Internet)?
Amen brother.
Absolutely correct.
Well I would say that's very short sighted and 'exclusionist' to the extreme of Apple but I don't think they're not going to do this for a moment.
Having the Apple TV 'itunes/mac' streaming engine embedded into an Apple brand 'consumer' large screen TV ( ie not a computer monitor no matter how 'good' it might be) will only create more users accessing the HD IP network services that Itunes/Apple provide. Furthermore having a dock for the ipod is just a no-brainer.
Your never going to change the entire viewing habits of a continent and there is no point in trying to be all things to all people.
Apple merely provide one of many ways to access TV and media and they do a great job of it.
If there kit is embedded in their sexy TV then people may not be so quick to 'tie up' with another service but even if they do they'll still enjoy a beautiful TV with 'embedded Itunes et al'. PVR/DVR is inevitable in Apple TV2.
All this stuff is - Apple not making a 'designer TV' isn't going to stop the competition from creating some incredible convergent 'living room' viewing solutions which threaten that little grey apple TV box far more than an embedded TV solution.
I simply don't accept an Apple LCD HD TV goes against some pre-conceived idea of Apple's 'strategic plan'.
Sorry to be so cynical, but isn't this pg2 rumor material?
Yet another 'analyst' speculates on a broadrange, long-term forecast? Umm, where have I seen this before, lol.
So we might as well then (Admin?) plop up a competing rumor story ( did a quick check on this thread and haven't seen the link yet).
A UBS Investment Research analyst said this week: ...yawn, let the speculating threads begin.
Apple may host Leopard event, intro ultra-portables, bring iPhone to Best Buy
Apple may hold a media evet in April or May for the intro of Leopard...wow, now there's a real stretch, I wish I could get paid $$$ as an 'analyst' to BS like that!
Yet another 'analyst' speculates on a broadrange, long-term forecast? Umm, where have I seen this before, lol.
So we might as well then (Admin?) plop up a competing rumor story ( did a quick check on this thread and haven't seen the link yet).
A UBS Investment Research analyst said this week: ...yawn, let the speculating threads begin
.Apple may host Leopard event, intro ultra-portables, bring iPhone to Best Buy
Apple may hold a media evet in April or May for the intro of Leopard...wow, now there's a real stretch
, I wish I could get paid $$$ as an 'analyst' to BS like that!
New products are great but I would really like to see some evolution in the computer line. We have new intel cpus now give us a some new case designs.
Introducing the Maclet.
15" x 10" x 1" All screen tablet.
Fully Multi-Touch OSX.5
2 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 gig ram
Slot-loading SuperDrive
Bluetooth 2
All Macbook pro ports.
15" x 10" x 1" All screen tablet.
Fully Multi-Touch OSX.5
2 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 gig ram
Slot-loading SuperDrive
Bluetooth 2
All Macbook pro ports.
so an "iPhone-less" video iPod is not necessarily out of the question, then.
I really, really, really don't think they're going to release an multi-touch iPod sans the iPhone. It makes it too confusing to customers...
"Oh! you got that new
Phone, huh?""Uh, no, this is the iPod with video without phone but with multi-touch..."
I agree. The powerbook/macbook lines are overdue for a design overhaul. Hopefully the rumors about slimmer laptops will come to fruition.
What's B&O ever done to you? Best TVs on the market, you won't find a picture that'll better them.
On the topic of the conversation, I don't think Apple should enter the TV market. Leaves making TVs up to the TV manufacturers, it's just too different from making computer monitors...