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Steve Jobs Planned to Work on Apple TV Set After Stepping Down as Apple CEO

Mossberg is clueless. And the best he can do is go back to what he 'thought' was Steve's view of (what is now) an obsolete concept of TV from several years ago. (a concept that is ridiculously outdated by todays standard anyway.)
A TV is just a thing about the size of the end of your thumb. That's it. Everything else is just a "display / monitor".
Apple would never enter such a commoditized business. 37" 40" 42" 48" 50" 52" 55" 60" 65" 70" 72" (heck: even just from an ecological standpoint)
 
profets said:
I think what we likely know however, is that anything Steve was working on before he passed away would have been left with someone or some group of execs at Apple. I mean, i can't imagine he had good ideas but didn't pass them on. I imagine he left a lot of thoughts and product ideas with the execs near the end.
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Perhaps Apple tried to continue on the path after Steve... but they got held up by the networks and cable companies. The article said Apple had trouble negotiating deals. Maybe Steve would have been the only person to push the deals through.

You're right though... we'll never know.

But was anyone else able to "crack" TV?

There have a few set-top boxes like Roku and AmazonTV... a few over-the-top channel streaming services like SlingTV and Playstation Vue...

I wonder if any of them got closer to what Apple was trying to achieve.
 
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bkaus said:
Or maybe he did and this is what we get. It's unlikely he didn't tell anyone.
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Think of it, with the ATV hardware and platform, Apple controls the experience and interface and ships it in a tiny box with a high profit margin and they round out the ecosystem and bring its synergies to so many more customers than would be possible with a high priced TV set. (This serves Apples need to have critical viewer mass when negotiating cheap Skinny Bundles with content owners ... who are you going to agree lower prices with, the guy shipping lots of ATV's or fewer TV set units???)

This was a much better starting point than starting with a set. Just cause they started here doesn't mean there is no headroom for a full function product. There is nothing that will prevent Apple from selling a niche high def 5k set that takes its signal from the ATV.

The only question is have they achieved the majority of their strategic goals (including positioning for skinny negotiations) in this area and can they easily expand in them if they think it is worth fighting diminishing returns to develop a full set unit.
 
Breaking news! Steve Jobs cracked it!... Wait, I read that a few years ago in Isaacson's biography. Is there anything "new" in this news?
 
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A really sad side effect of Steve's passing is some people thinking Samsung being a few Captain Obvious steps ahead of Apple is genius innovation. The bar has been lowered dramatically.
 
Cineplex said:
Steve would have made the deals and got everyone to participate. The music business didn't go along with Apple because it was Apple, Jobs' salesman ship and passion sold it in the end. Tim Cook just doesn't have the magic and that is why Apple is not anything special right now. Without Steve they are just riding the success train and at some point, it will run out of track.
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And to add, Cook just doesn't acquire the tenacity and demand that Jobs had. Cook is more business orientated on the books and numbers, while Jobs was a relentless shark and a salesman in the same pitch.
 
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Relentless Power said:
And to add, Cook just doesn't acquire the tenacity and demand that Jobs had. Cook is more business orientated on the books and numbers, while Jobs was a relentless shark and a salesman in the same pitch.
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With respect to Tim Cook, how do you know this?
 
Apple did "crack" it. The content providers and distributors didn't want to cede their territory to Apple as gatekeeper. They have higher authority in this field at least for now.

That is cracking.

If Steve had simply surrendered to conventional medicine and surgery, he would have lived 4 years longer.

He was Syrian. He would not have liked what happened to Syria.

So there is that.
 
He could have done it.

Instead we have a crook as CEO giving cashing in millions of dollars in stock and robbing the company blind due to the tailwind profits that were in motion when Jobs died. It's heartbreaking.

All Cook has done is release a bulky watch nobody gives a hoot about and slow as hell. Still no new Macbook Pro.

This is pure robbery.
 
Let's get real here. If Steve Jobs actually said that he could demo his "fantastic" TV product in a few months it means that the hardware must have already existed (since you'd never be able to go from beginning concept to functioning hardware in such a short period of time -- at least not in a form that would be able to be shown to the press/public).

So, Steve was either just attempting some bluster or the product was "canned" for some reason (I suspect the former).

I think the sad state of the Apple TV today is because the management at Apple doesn't want to improve the product to the point where it could be seen as ANY threat to dominate the industry. They are afraid that if they make the product too good that the content providers will stop making deals with Apple and without content the product would fail regardless of how "good" it was. So, Apple management has settled on just having a me-too, somewhat mediocre product because there is no way to ensure success for producing a truly revolutionary product. It's a content issue and nothing else.
 
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Relentless Power said:
And Jobs likely would have re-invented the t.v. Industry. He still is the face of modern technology today.
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This. Innovation in tech stopped upon Steve passing. This is the guy who set the standard which others were attracted to. Think of him as the light and all the tech companies are flies buzzing around as they're drawn to the light. Without the light, all you have is randomness in the hope that one tech company will accidentally stumble onto something big. But the reality of it all is that most tech companies are where they are by dumb luck or they just happened to be at the right place at the right time. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, the whole lot; they all had one or two things which happened for them but they don't have an ability to recreate it because they have no skills. Steve Jobs was innovation in the tech industry and we owe him everything for liberating us from Microsoft, liberating us from the music labels and liberating us from the cell phone companies. It sounds like he was about to sort the cable companies out too. Sadly he was taken from us now there's nobody who can do what he did.

The world has been empty for five years without his genius.
 
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I don't know if you're purposefully ignoring the fact that apple is four times more valuable under cook then it ever was.

Cineplex said:
Steve would have made the deals and got everyone to participate. The music business didn't go along with Apple because it was Apple, Jobs' salesman ship and passion sold it in the end. Tim Cook just doesn't have the magic and that is why Apple is not anything special right now. Without Steve they are just riding the success train and at some point, it will run out of track.
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Ohhhh no... Cue the "Apple is nothing without Steve!" nostalgia. Seems to be the whole point of this article...

In other news.. Steve said this one thing once, someone heard it.
 
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Robert.Walter said:
Think of it, with the ATV hardware and platform, Apple controls the experience and interface and ships it in a tiny box with a high profit margin and they round out the ecosystem and bring its synergies to so many more customers than would be possible with a high priced TV set. (This serves Apples need to have critical viewer mass when negotiating cheap Skinny Bundles with content owners ... who are you going to agree lower prices with, the guy shipping lots of ATV's or fewer TV set units???)

This was a much better starting point than starting with a set. Just cause they started here doesn't mean there is no headroom for a full function product. There is nothing that will prevent Apple from selling a niche high def 5k set that takes its signal from the ATV.

The only question is have they achieved the majority of their strategic goals (including positioning for skinny negotiations) in this area and can they easily expand in them if they think it is worth fighting diminishing returns to develop a full set unit.
Click to expand...

While I agree with you in principle, this thing was a non-starter as soon as you said 'skinny bundle'. The sticking point was (and continues to be) no incentive for content providers to move to skinny bundles.

And it was hard to see Apple's high profit margin fitting in with any option that was great for consumers. The music model worked because 'by the track' purchases were cheap enough to let Apple get their cut and keep consumers happy. (plus the huge hardware markup). That just doesn't exist in TV.
 
azentropy said:
I still think TV would be a much better product category than Watch. Although I don't think an Apple branded TV is the answer. Don't think you are going to convince people to replace TV's every 2-3 years. But a relatively inexpensive set top box would be a much bigger reoccurring market. Just wish the AppleTV did more. While a nice product it really is what they should have released 3-4 years ago. There is so much more it should be able to do by now.
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Why would you have to replace the entire TV set every 2-3 years? Are you thinking in terms of phones and applying that to a television or what? People don't even replace iPads that quick.

The full on jobs envisioned TV set probably would have had an incredibly long update cycle with software updates probably lasting 5-6 years like a Mac and having a replaceable cpu in the back you could just pull off and put a new one on.
 
MacsRgr8 said:
Finally cracked it...

Maybe Seve did, but he couldn't pass the magic on, I'm afraid.
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You know, when I read that line in the book, I started to tear up... because I had the sense at the time that he did... but that we might never know what that was to the fullest extent. It is like the voice of the dead echoing to the living. To imagine how many dreams, hopes, ambitions and ideas might have died along with the man.
 
2010mini said:
So anyone who think SJ could just waltz in and get the tv/movie industry to do things his way is dreaming.
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Steve didn't waltz. Apple was his passion. He worked hard and drove the company hard. The current Social Advocate/Celebrity is clueless. Financial engineering and empty chatter is his idea of innovation.
 
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We used to wait for wwdc to enjoy Steve's keynote and the unveiling of new gadgets now it's different
 
The ATV4 could have been much more interesting. It's basically an iOS Mac Mini.
 
Technically he did crack it. He made the simplest and first ever smart tv plug and play device. The only remaining step was to release more than the set top box...an actual box with the Apple TV software built in. If he had done this every smart tv wouldn't run android like they do now. Apple TV was revolutionary it was just unfinished.
 
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