What's different with Apple is that the television would be another piece of the existing ecosystem. You could extrapolate this to an Apple TV and existing televisions, which, coincidentally has much less resolution, ie, lesser experience...
I'm not sure what you're saying here but if Apple produces a TV that can receive broadcast or cable signals, it's going to be 1080p or a multiple thereof. And if they produce a TV capable of showing 4K (not that there's any such content yet), the price will be astronomical, even at small sizes.
The key to making this work is to break the user from scheduled television, cutting the cable as it were. If Apple can solve that, then they can win big..
But they can't solve it because most people won't give up scheduled television, especially where sports are concerned.
LG is prepping a 55 inch OLED for late spring of next year, and I would be excited if Apple was able to latch onto that tech at the 32/37 inch size and TB display resolution. I would buy that, and so would most of you..
That LG set is going to cost something like $10,000 and it's still going to be 1080p just like all the current sets. The mass market doesn't buy $10,000 TVs. Pioneer made fantastic Plasma sets in the Kuro line, but they were expensive and in spite of the accolades, they went out of business.
The other issue with the TV business is that prices go down constantly during the model year. Apple never reduces prices until new models come out and then only a little on the older models still in inventory. So even if Apple starts out the beginning of a model year priced similarly to a competitive set, six months down the road, Apple will be priced at least 30% higher.
If I was an audio device builder, I would kill to get a piece of TB, because all of the sudden, I'm selling amplifiers as black boxes. The Apple Television holds the interface and digitally processes the audio, as simple or complex as can be imagined.
Huh? What's TB? Apple will simplify the audio with built in speakers, but it will suck, just like the audio out of the speakers on all their laptops suck. And Apple will probably want to eliminate almost all inputs and outputs. IMO, you can't sell the high end without being able to connect the set to an external 5.1 (minimum) audio system. And in spite of many people who only care about content they can access online, there are still many people who want to play Blu-ray or DVD and access online services other than Apple's. My current TV supports Netflix, Pandora, Amazon On-Demand and about 30 other services (not that I use very many of them). Apple will support only iTunes.
I'd love to see Apple be successful at this and I think Siri and Apple UI will bring a lot of value, but I simply can't see how they can succeed. The market is driving prices down. Sony hasn't made a profit selling TV's in about five years. Apple is not going to be able to get the equivalent content as a cable/satellite provider because the costs per subscriber are enormous: the "important" cable channels charge anywhere from $1 to $3 per channel even if the subscriber NEVER watches the channel. That's why cable bills keep going up and why channels get moved to higher tiers.
Even if it's actually less expensive to pay by the show, most people want the security of a fixed monthly charge. So they are not going to get the masses to give up cable/satellite and go to a "pay as you go" model.
So maybe Apple's got something up their sleeve that I can't currently conceive, just as they did with the iPhone and iPad, but as of right now, I can't imagine what that would be.
