Here’s Why Apple Isn’t Making a Television – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
In Walter Issacon’s biography of Steve Jobs, he shares a conversation with Jobs about his vision for the future of TV. Jobs told Issacon that he’d “like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use . . . it would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” Jobs said. “I finally cracked it.”
Jobs’ comments have led many to believe Apple was building an actual television. I personally never thought Apple was doing a TV, and instead was planning to improve its Apple TV set-top box instead.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, Apple was indeed working on a TV, but the project was killed over a year ago. My sources suggest any prototype TV Apple had was probably used more to explore design issues around a set-top box rather than as an effort towards a standalone Apple TV.
It would’ve been a mistake for Apple to create an actual TV. There’s cutthroat competition in the TV market, with rivals like Vizio, Samsung, LG and others all fighting for a piece of the pie. Apple would have had a tough time competing in this space, where the majority of TV’s sold are in the $500-$1250 range. The margins are thin, too. Jobs once told me one of his principles in governing Apple was that he would not create a product unless he could get at least 20 points in margin. The TV business is lucky if it can get 10 points.
There are still more reasons an Apple TV wouldn’t make sense. The average life cycle for a TV in the home is seven-10 years. The way technology advances, a TV with integrated smarts would be out of date in two to three years. Unless designed with modular components, most TVs would not be able to keep up with the technology and content distribution advancements that come into the market on a yearly basis now.
On top of that, a TV these days is just a screen for delivering content — but the definition of content is changing. It used to be that a TV only had to handle over-the-air broadcast signals. Now it has to deal with new user interfaces, web browsers, advanced intelligence and multiple forms of streaming media. My personal metaphor for understanding the future of TV is that the TV is a dumb monitor and my cable box, Apple TV, Roku or whatever is the personal computer that makes the monitor “smart.”
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