You DO realize that, while you're not in the market for another HDTV, other people will be this year and beyond?
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Samsung Underestimating Apple's Potential Impact on Television Market?
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I don't think samsung is scared at all, but what they said is also bulls***. They're just waiting for apple to make their move then copy that 
I disagree, i think that the most important thing is the content rather than the "picture quality" that they DON'T HAVE in 90% of theirs tv's.
I am totally convinced that this guy will eat his own words, like others did in the past.
Samsung guy does not have a clue of what he's talking about
I've read the Sam guy statement, "it's all about picture quality", and i wonder how you can be so naive and yet have an important role.
People don't have a clue about picture quality, as much as they don't have a clue about audio fidelity. Thinking that people choose a Samsung TV because of its picture quality is stupid.
Maybe 10% of people can distinguish a good picture quality from an average picture quality.
The rest of he world sees the design of the TV, its price, the way you use it, the way it is marketed and displayed, the actual experience of having that big thing in the middle of the living room.
This Samsung guy is at the moment like someone stating in 2001 that the ipod can't have success because it's songs are played at 128kbps, which is low quality, and heck, they have a fantastic 100-button super hifi player that can work at XYZ bitrate.
This said: i think Samsung is designing great TVs both in design and in picture quality (at least for 99% of the world).
But if this is what they're thinking, that Apple can't match them because the black level on their TV would be 10% better, then i hope for them that Apple is not planning to enter in their market, because they're clearly not seeing it coming.
I've read the Sam guy statement, "it's all about picture quality", and i wonder how you can be so naive and yet have an important role.
People don't have a clue about picture quality, as much as they don't have a clue about audio fidelity. Thinking that people choose a Samsung TV because of its picture quality is stupid.
Maybe 10% of people can distinguish a good picture quality from an average picture quality.
The rest of he world sees the design of the TV, its price, the way you use it, the way it is marketed and displayed, the actual experience of having that big thing in the middle of the living room.
This Samsung guy is at the moment like someone stating in 2001 that the ipod can't have success because it's songs are played at 128kbps, which is low quality, and heck, they have a fantastic 100-button super hifi player that can work at XYZ bitrate.
This said: i think Samsung is designing great TVs both in design and in picture quality (at least for 99% of the world).
But if this is what they're thinking, that Apple can't match them because the black level on their TV would be 10% better, then i hope for them that Apple is not planning to enter in their market, because they're clearly not seeing it coming.
I don't think samsung is scared at all, but what they said is also bulls***. They're just waiting for apple to make their move then copy that
Shhhhh!! You have just revealed Sammy's super secret plan that nobody knows!!!!
There is one thing Apple can that Samsung simply can't, and that's software.
The one reason why Samsung is suddenly so popular in the smartphone / mobile market is because they've finally got someone doing good software for them (Google with Android, Microsoft with Windows Phone for instance).
If we go a few years back Samsung still had some very impressive phones if we looked at hardware alone, but when you had to run either Symbian OS which they NEVER supported nor updated, not to mention their Bada nonsense and their horrid TouchWiz interface they had going on for a while which nobody enjoyed, not even one tiny bit. Their sales numbers weren't much to brag about.
So if they aren't able to team up with Google, porting Android to their Smart Televisions or perhaps start using Ubuntu Media Center or even Plex / XBMC (which they can't as those are free, open source alternatives not to be sold by anybody?) I can't really see this SmartTV business going anywhere.
The one reason Samsung have suddenly started with all this SmartTV business nonsense is most likely because they fear what Apple can bring to the table and they try beating them to it. So even though their current implementation of SmartTV is pretty much useless considering the clunkyness, the performance and the bad execution we are currently seeing, I'll bet they are trying to anything in order to be able to claim "Hah! We've had that for years already Apple! Copycats!".
And that's the major difference between a company like Apple and a company like Samsung. Samsung's main focus isn't on quality, it's more about bring new things to the table before anyone else and then perhaps optimise it on the go and hopefully we'll see it working as intended someday in the future. Apple on the other hand takes their time and won't release their technology and solution to the masses before they feel the time is right and things actually work as they've intended it to.
Samsung is begging to God that televisions will still be all about hardware and image quality, because that's the only area they know they can actually compete and perhaps even beat Apple. If Apple makes television more about features and software and capabilities and not about just the image quality Samsung will have a hard time keeping up if we look at their past track record when it comes to developing software and just take a look at their current implementation of SmarTV. It surely got potential, but with the current state of their SmarTV business it shouldn't have been released to the market at all. It's pretty much useless at it's current state.
The one reason why Samsung is suddenly so popular in the smartphone / mobile market is because they've finally got someone doing good software for them (Google with Android, Microsoft with Windows Phone for instance).
If we go a few years back Samsung still had some very impressive phones if we looked at hardware alone, but when you had to run either Symbian OS which they NEVER supported nor updated, not to mention their Bada nonsense and their horrid TouchWiz interface they had going on for a while which nobody enjoyed, not even one tiny bit. Their sales numbers weren't much to brag about.
So if they aren't able to team up with Google, porting Android to their Smart Televisions or perhaps start using Ubuntu Media Center or even Plex / XBMC (which they can't as those are free, open source alternatives not to be sold by anybody?) I can't really see this SmartTV business going anywhere.
The one reason Samsung have suddenly started with all this SmartTV business nonsense is most likely because they fear what Apple can bring to the table and they try beating them to it. So even though their current implementation of SmartTV is pretty much useless considering the clunkyness, the performance and the bad execution we are currently seeing, I'll bet they are trying to anything in order to be able to claim "Hah! We've had that for years already Apple! Copycats!".
And that's the major difference between a company like Apple and a company like Samsung. Samsung's main focus isn't on quality, it's more about bring new things to the table before anyone else and then perhaps optimise it on the go and hopefully we'll see it working as intended someday in the future. Apple on the other hand takes their time and won't release their technology and solution to the masses before they feel the time is right and things actually work as they've intended it to.
Samsung is begging to God that televisions will still be all about hardware and image quality, because that's the only area they know they can actually compete and perhaps even beat Apple. If Apple makes television more about features and software and capabilities and not about just the image quality Samsung will have a hard time keeping up if we look at their past track record when it comes to developing software and just take a look at their current implementation of SmarTV. It surely got potential, but with the current state of their SmarTV business it shouldn't have been released to the market at all. It's pretty much useless at it's current state.
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Plex is on LG products. Google tv, rooku. Sony and vizio tvs
http://plexapp.com/connected/
Plex is on LG products. Google tv, rooku. Sony and vizio tvs
http://plexapp.com/connected/
10.000 morons that put the same button 3x on one remote (function-wise), but sorting channels still feels like 1991.
Come on Apple. Show them who's boss!
Just the hint of Apple doing something has already pushed the TV industry forward.
I think Apple will crush it due to seamless integration.
Just the hint of Apple doing something has already pushed the TV industry forward.
I think Apple will crush it due to seamless integration.
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Apple has never spent as much on r&d as its competitors but still creates superior products.
10000 people doing tv r&d seems unwieldy and well past the point of significant diminishing returns
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He is supposed to say nothing and like it.
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Nokia agrees with you.
Apple has never spent as much on r&d as its competitors but still creates superior products.
10000 people doing tv r&d seems unwieldy and well past the point of significant diminishing returns
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basesloaded190 said:What is he supposed to say? "We are running around like a bunch of chickens with our heads cut off over a product that might not even exist"
He is supposed to say nothing and like it.
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HishamAkhtar said:
Nokia agrees with you.
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How is pioneer doing these days?
By the way apple would not be targeting you but the 98% of people who have other priorities than you do.
Only a very small percentage of consumers have picture quality at the top of their list. That being said apples ability to assemble high quality products in an affordable way means the quality would still be extremely high.
TVs are a stagnant industry without much profitability. Sort of like cell phones were six years ago. It doesn't mean if apple enters the market they will dominate it just means it is silly to bet against them. No other company in the world is better at getting quality high tech products assembled in large numbers totally leveraging economies of scale.
gugy said:
How is pioneer doing these days?
By the way apple would not be targeting you but the 98% of people who have other priorities than you do.
Only a very small percentage of consumers have picture quality at the top of their list. That being said apples ability to assemble high quality products in an affordable way means the quality would still be extremely high.
TVs are a stagnant industry without much profitability. Sort of like cell phones were six years ago. It doesn't mean if apple enters the market they will dominate it just means it is silly to bet against them. No other company in the world is better at getting quality high tech products assembled in large numbers totally leveraging economies of scale.
There is one very big reason Apple will have a much tougher time with a iTV than iPod/iPhones/iPads .. the content.
What we have seen with the current Apple TV is, that is a product that is very different in the US where they have a lot of nice deals in place (like the $.99 rental, the Hulu, the Netflix app and so on ..) .. for the rest of the world this looks very different. Most local iTunes stores don't even support movies let alone TV shows yet and Apple would have to negotiate content deals locally, which lets face it, is not worth it for the majority of the markets.
So without additional content .. there is only so many things Apple can do to improve the current TV expierence .. most of which don't seem to interesting to me (looking at the weather forcast, internet, facebook .. I don't know).
I personally can not imagine what Apple is going to do with its iTV, but I have learnd to keep my feet still and see what they can do before dismissing but. At this moment however .. I have my concerns that it will be a device I would be interested in.
T.
Edit: On the topic of Samsung though .. they make nice consumer TVs and more importantly, they are in the panel producing industry .. so chances are they will even benefit from an iTV either way .. if nothing else it will give them new idea what to implement next for their own TV's ..
What we have seen with the current Apple TV is, that is a product that is very different in the US where they have a lot of nice deals in place (like the $.99 rental, the Hulu, the Netflix app and so on ..) .. for the rest of the world this looks very different. Most local iTunes stores don't even support movies let alone TV shows yet and Apple would have to negotiate content deals locally, which lets face it, is not worth it for the majority of the markets.
So without additional content .. there is only so many things Apple can do to improve the current TV expierence .. most of which don't seem to interesting to me (looking at the weather forcast, internet, facebook .. I don't know).
I personally can not imagine what Apple is going to do with its iTV, but I have learnd to keep my feet still and see what they can do before dismissing but. At this moment however .. I have my concerns that it will be a device I would be interested in.
T.
Edit: On the topic of Samsung though .. they make nice consumer TVs and more importantly, they are in the panel producing industry .. so chances are they will even benefit from an iTV either way .. if nothing else it will give them new idea what to implement next for their own TV's ..
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Hehe 10000 people with trace paper is a funny image.
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I want to be able to point to a person on screen and bring up their imdb profile or Wikipedia page.
BrooklynTech said:
Hehe 10000 people with trace paper is a funny image.
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MisterK said:
I want to be able to point to a person on screen and bring up their imdb profile or Wikipedia page.
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Apple TV set will gain traction and momentum due to Apple hype but I think it will be the first product that will not live up to the hype and people would blame it on absence of Steve Jobs and lack of his monitoring.
Where Apple would fail is content most likely, just like iOS UX will be superb but this time other TV manufacturers like Sony are ready to go head to head. You can't surprise the industry two times. It will be a battle between Apple and Sony for the content and Samsung will check in once it sees there is some market opportunity for smart content distribution.
Where Apple would fail is content most likely, just like iOS UX will be superb but this time other TV manufacturers like Sony are ready to go head to head. You can't surprise the industry two times. It will be a battle between Apple and Sony for the content and Samsung will check in once it sees there is some market opportunity for smart content distribution.
I don't get the whole "Smart" TV deal. TV is dumb, you sit there, drool and watch it while you get fat. We've had Apps for ages here in Quebec at least. Our local cable co has been doing "smart" TVs with Apps for decades now. It was called Videoway early on as an analog service that provided games/weather info/lottery numbers and other oddities you might "want". Here's what it looked like near the end of its life (a screenshot of an old browser showing a screenshot of Videoway...) :
About 20% or so of subscribers actually paid for the thing, which also provided a short lived "Interactive TV" where you participated in the shows (it was actually 4 different angle shots you selected using the remote at given cues by the show), Videotron even required it for "pay channels" to try to force adoption.
Then we got Illico for the digital age. PVRs, Games, channel guide, a bit less stuff than Videoway, they mostly did away with the crap people didn't use. And ... people still don't use anything other than the PVR and channel guide.
If I want to run "apps", I have a computer, smartphone, whatever to do that. If I want to "game" I have a game console hooked up to the TV which doesn't require throwing out the TV when I change it. If I want movies, I have a blu-ray player or VOD from my cable co.
Also, a TV is a monitor. If I want "smart" out of it, I'll hook up a "smart" box to it via HDMI. That way, my 1080p monitor can last for years and I can upgrade the "smarts" every year or whenever there's a worthwhile update, independant of the monitor itself. In the end, I don't see how "smart" TV can work. All of 'em are overpriced, "been there, done that" and no amount of gimmicks (Siri, Kinect) will ever be as efficient as a good old remote.
About 20% or so of subscribers actually paid for the thing, which also provided a short lived "Interactive TV" where you participated in the shows (it was actually 4 different angle shots you selected using the remote at given cues by the show), Videotron even required it for "pay channels" to try to force adoption.
Then we got Illico for the digital age. PVRs, Games, channel guide, a bit less stuff than Videoway, they mostly did away with the crap people didn't use. And ... people still don't use anything other than the PVR and channel guide.
If I want to run "apps", I have a computer, smartphone, whatever to do that. If I want to "game" I have a game console hooked up to the TV which doesn't require throwing out the TV when I change it. If I want movies, I have a blu-ray player or VOD from my cable co.
Also, a TV is a monitor. If I want "smart" out of it, I'll hook up a "smart" box to it via HDMI. That way, my 1080p monitor can last for years and I can upgrade the "smarts" every year or whenever there's a worthwhile update, independant of the monitor itself. In the end, I don't see how "smart" TV can work. All of 'em are overpriced, "been there, done that" and no amount of gimmicks (Siri, Kinect) will ever be as efficient as a good old remote.
In all honestly, Apple will succeed in television no matter how lame their first tv will be. There will always be those die-hard early adopter fans, giving Apple enough success to come out with a second gen and onward. Then people will forget how lame the first gen was. Later people will claim that Apple tv is the best, specs and picture may not be not be the best, but still people will say its the best.
People say that with all Apple products. You know why? Because its true. The iPhone doesn't have the best specs, or the iMacs or iPads, but they sell because they have an amazing user interface, build quality, ease of use, speed, look and feel etc
It's crazy how people use Apple products and don't realize why their products are better than the competition.......
Picture quality depends on the quality of the individual LCD pixels and the backlight on one hand, and the quality of your image scaling and filtering on the other hand. The second part used to be done with expensive hardware, created by the best and brightest in the industry. But today, the graphics chip inside an iPad easily has the capability to do that, with some decent programming. It's like a company spending tons of money to breed the absolute fastest horses to get you from one place to another, and then one day any cheap moped beats them.
Only if you can hear the difference. When I started ripping my CDs, I obviously tried out the sound quality first. At 160 KBit AAC I wasn't sure if I could hear a difference, at 192 KBit AAC I couldn't, and now the majority of my music is 256 KBit AAC. Even if your ears can here the difference to CD, the question is whether your equipment is good enough. So CDs may be better, bit 256 KBit AAC is good enough for the huge majority of people.
The problem is that it is near impossible to find out what the picture quality is like before you buy. So if there is a cheap TV with unknown picture quality on offer, and an expensive one with unknown picture quality, what are you going to get? At least if it's cheap you got your money's worth. And of course a shop selling multiple TVs and showing them will have them set up so the one they want you to buy (the one with the best margin) looks best. But a cheap one myself for the bedroom, had lousy picture quality, and lucky enough broke down before the warranty ended so I got my money back and the one I bought then was fortunately better. Which was just luck.
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Everything besides the most expensive TV's typically have **** picture quality, size factored in. Color accuracy, etc... the general goal is lets make this 1920x1080 and call it day. Don't get me wrong, there are a handful of high-end TV's that do great considering the size... but that's only a fraction of the market that most people won't purchase.
Bit like other tech before Apple gets involved
I wouldn't go that far. I also have an Apple TV which is basically the same thing only not built in. I couldn't even see my PC until I got my MBP. I think I wasted $130. I was hoping I could buy good apps or JB it and do cool things with it.
I just don't want to spend $40 to use XBMC ATV2 when the ATV does the same thing. Am i missing something cool? If so then I would pay the $40.