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Apple To Start Making TVs?
timothy writes "Apple might want to sell you your next TV,' says this CNN report. Which makes a lot of sense, considering that Apple's razors-and-blades, vertical-marketplace model for iTunes (and the various iDevices) doesn't make as much sense with the world of TV, where your Sony, Samsung, or (egads!) Westinghouse set is just as happy with a Google TV box, or a Roku, or one of many other media devices, as it is with an Apple TV attached."
I must have missed the alternate universe where IE was banned in 1999.
Microsoft wanted to protect its market and decided to do so by using its existing monopoly to control a likely future threat, by developing a web browser in competition with Netscape's and then doing what it could to ensure its browser, and not Netscape, would become standard, in particular using its control over a product it had a monopoly in to promote IE and suppress Netscape.
This is somewhat different from Apple, who doesn't really have a monopoly in anything deciding to enter a new market so that it can sell its products and services there. Microsoft did the same thing without anti-trust criticism in the form of the X-Box. There's nothing illegal or anti-competitive about that.
BTW, interesting fact: what got Microsoft so heated up about Netscape was that it was genuinely concerned that the web might become an environment in which an open, or at least not-controlled-by-Microsoft platform for software in the future. If the platform was not under Microsoft's control, then people might very well cease to be tied to Windows.
And that's exactly what's happened since the anti-trust suit. The move to an entirely web based infrastructure has been slow, but much of the success of Apple in the 21st Centursy has been attributable to the decreasing need to use Windows as the browser becomes the major tool that everyone uses for an increasing percentage of their work (in some cases all of it.) Are we there yet? Obviously not, but when John Carmack releases Doom 7, available for all HTML7 browsers, complaining that the W3C Net3DObjects API sucks the big one, I suspect it'll be largely game over.
Would that be true if Microsoft hadn't been sued? If Microsoft had been allowed to bury Mozilla the same way it did Netscape? If Apple hadn't bothered with WebKit/KHTML because, frankly, nothing out there of any significance worked in anything other than Trident? Would smartphones still be the unpopular devices of geeks and CEOs?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
How does this even remotely "make sense" for Apple? By bundling Apple TV with a TV you are essentially targeting the market who wants, but doesn't currently have an Apple TV and is in the market for a new television.....thats what, maybe hundreds of people tops? The TV market is a commodity market where the interface is usually last on people's list of priorities. Unlike a PC, cell phone, or music player, you almost never interact with the TVs interface, consumers buy based on size, price, connectivity and picture quality. A TV really only needs to be able to turn on and off, switch channels and video inputs.
This ranks up there with some of the stupidest Apple articles I have seen.
Monstar L
Most people rarely "interact" with their TV the same way that they rarely interact with their cell phones and mustic players. Note the shift from the prevailing view not all that long ago of "I don't want all these features, I just want to make a damned phone call" to wanting the latest iPhone or Android. Ditto with music players.
These days, when people watch TV, they want to schedule recordings, pause, play, rewind, watch two shows at once with picture in a picture, have a stock ticker running while they watch a comedy, stream video sources, stream audio over the internet while they play a video game, make phone calls, etc. Turning what essentially a dumb disply into a smart device capable of doing that is the next logical step.
So the market that would be targetted is not the existing market of people buying an Apple set top box. Rather, it's people looking for new TVs and, if the rumors are true, the strategy is to get a sizeable portion of that market to buy one that has Apple's iOS built into it. I think that's a reasonable strategy. The biggest obstacle seems to me to not be the market itself but barriers to entry for varioius services. Cable companies hate cable-ready TVs. They absolutely loved the advent of digital TV where they could start encrypting the signal and requiring a set top box in every room. Apple is going to have to pull a rabbit out of the hat to convince cable companies to allow Apple branded TVs to use the Apple interface rather than the set top box of the cable company. As long as consumers pretty much have to use the cable company interface, or as long as cable card is inconvenient to install, it's going to be difficult to break into the market.
That is, until such time as streaming over the Internet is capable of replacing cable service.
They have proprietary system that is designed to be very costly to leave. In order for someone to decide to abandon Apple, they have to be first comfortable with losing any access to whatever DRM laden purchases they've made and be willing to flush all of that money down the toilet and spend it all over again.
It's classic vendor lock.
DVD and BD may be "primitive" but I can choose from multiple vendors without completely losing access to my entire media library.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Apple already has a device that handles everything the TV needs without having to deal with the TV's problems (backlight, dead pixels, manufacturing problems/"green-ness", etc). My guess is if Apple is looking in this direction, they're going to sell AppleTV equipment to TV manufacturers for integration into their TVs, not their own Apple-branded flat panels. I seriously doubt Apple will release an Apple TV to compete with the Sonys and Philips And Samsungs out there, but Apple will happily sell those companies a plug-in module that'll increase the value of their TVs and increase the userbase of the iTunes store. Maybe Sony won't bite, but the smaller manufacturers might.
bah.
But can you install it on your iPhone?
Anti-Competitive needn't be limited to sleazy back room dealings to prevent competitors access to the market.
But Apple hasn't done things to prevent competitors from entering the market; as evidenced by the number of competitors it has in each market it is in.
Apple's devices, in particular, have been unassailable; which puts other CE manufacturers in an awkward position. If Apple could be counted on to add a little "Redmond design" to each product, there would be a more competitive landscape.
Success in the marketplace does not equate to being anti-competitive. In fact, much of what Apple does is rather beneficial to competitors - Apple doesn't slash prices to drive competitors out, they actual tend to keep theirs high even when other products enter their markets, they don't demand exclusivity in order to use their software on a product (they don't even license their OS); they don't limit their competitors ability to distribute and sell their products in the same markets; they don't get other manufacturers together and say "the price of tablets is $600, the price of computers is $900"...
They have a significant presence in the market because their products are popular, not because of any anti-competitive actions on their part.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Music has NO DRM.
Movies have DRM at the behest of the movie industry. Blame the movie industry
iOS apps do not run on Android, Blackberry, Nokia, etc. Blackberry and Android apps don't run on iOS. Apple is NO different than anyone else, different platform different compatibilities.
I don't see "classic vendor lock", I see "classic disingenuous hyperbole" from your inacurate comment.
It doesn't matter who you choose to blame. Your attempt to create excuses for Apple are ultimately meaningless.
The fact remains that Apple is being handed the means to create and enforce a monopoly on a silver platter.
This is simply inevitable when you have SINGLE VENDOR DRM.
The "evil content industry" imposes this on physical media but at least that's a multiple-vendor DRM standard. YU
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.