Are We Close to Seeing Apple’s iTV?
May 16, 2012
It might not be smart to try and predict exactly what products Apple will be launching in the future, but it sure is fun. So let’s go ahead and give a little credence to the heaping of recent claims that the Apple TV maker is going to offer another living-room product sometime in the next year or two: a great big television set to harness the power of lessons learned selling that little black streaming box.
According to the popular electronics news website Boy Genius Report, the founder of Apple product manufacturer Foxconn, Terry Gou, has let slip during a press conference in Shanghai that his company’s facilities are being prepped to start pushing brand new Apple-branded television sets down its assembly lines within the year. This doesn’t mean they’ve received an order to build those televisions just yet, but that they anticipate such a directive in the near future. To make the announcement slightly sweeter, the editors at Cult of Mac claim to have good info from an Apple insider with specific details about the so-called “iTV” device, gained from seeing a prototype in action. The iTV resembles one of Apple’s current black-rimmed, LED-backlit, flat-panel Cinema Displays, but in a bigger size. It runs a version of iOS that includes Siri for voice-recognition that lets you control and navigate the device. Also, an onboard iSight camera is included to allow FaceTime video calls from the couch. And…well, that’s kind of it, on the hardware end, which is part of the reason it’s impossible to think that Apple hasn’t put such a device together, just to see how it would work. They already have all of the parts, and it’s safe to say they can make them play together without much trouble. Besides, Microsoft’s Kinect does this and has for nearly a year.
Unfortunately, the latest rumors don’t address how Apple will get along with the cable companies, who represent the biggest hurdle in their path towards complete household domination. Google’s own effort at diverting TV content away from cable companies was a miserable failure, so we shouldn’t expect a repeat of those methods. Previous guesses as to how Apple will improve have called on an ala carte subscription service via apps for individual networks or season passes on a show-by-show basis, sold through the iTunes store. But that’s a lot of companies that will all need to agree on a brand new pricing structure for a segment of the economy that has been especially resistant to quick changes. Perhaps Apple could team up with just one provider and start in a smaller portion of the country, as they did with AT&T in the mobile phone market. It’s not likely, but certainly possible. Whatever move they do decide to make, chances are we won’t see it coming so easily.
Alexei Bochenek is a lifelong tech nerd & film buff based in Los Angeles. When he’s not playing with his phone, it’s because the movie has started. Shhhhh!
