On January 9, 2007, this little box began to be sold that changed everything. And this, in reality, never convinced Steve Jobs himself, because he considered him just another “fish” in a big aquarium. But it helped him find the key to his next project: Jobs wanted to translate the iPhone experience to television.
And what did that mean? Bet for the best materialsgood experience and good profit margins. And “television is a terrible business. It doesn’t evolve and the margins are zero.” But you can imagine what happened next: Steve Jobs wasn’t going to give up.
The Apple team of the future
The problem is that making an “Apple” TV has always been a t ask that the brand has been committed to. But also something Steve Jobs wanted to achieve almost as a personal challenge
“Television is going to lose until there is a better strategy, until there is a viable strategy.” And he understood: streaming is coming to traditional television, but also to cinema. The AT&T earthquakes are repeating themselves and big companies like Warner are doing their best to adjust their offerings without shooting themselves in the foot, with simultaneous movie-TV releases, cable TV exclusives, controlled leaks or directly a return to the traditional model.
Apple TV, Steve Jobs’ last wish
Even if Apple was going to make TVs, it probably never will. And it makes perfect sense. But we have not yet anticipated the event. Let’s go back a few years, to the appointed day. “It will have the simplest user interface you can imagine. I finally figured it out”. Apparently, Steve Jobs had found the alchemical formula a few weeks before his death.
During his final days, Steve picked up the phone and called trade journalist Walt Mossberg, inviting him to his home to discuss the move. “I think we found a way to do it, and it’s going to be fantastic.”. It was the night of August 24, 2011, the same day he hung up his CEO hat for good. Five weeks later he died. After his death, Walter Isaacson, his personal biographer, went so far as to say that Steve had already found the right strategy, he had already managed to figure out how to make this Apple television a reality.
Jobs resigned as CEO but hinted he would remain involved. This is the project he worked on until his last days. He never went into detail about the hardware and software, but apparently found a hybrid model, an integrated package, that would serve as a console – with a system similar to Apple Arcade or the current Xbox Cloud Gaming. In short, a standard TV and a streaming transmitter. In general, the strategy lay in Avoid cable companies by using iCloud as your primary interface and container. Something we’re still working on.
Businesses buying Apple, the next step
As happened with the Apple Car, the next step was to hire as many professionals as possible in the sector. Apple acquired certain platforms like Matcha but did not go further. Other rumors suggest that during the summer of 2014, Apple was close to ordering 55- and 65-inch UHD panels from Samsung Electronics Co. When this hot potato fell into the hands of Tim Cook, This has become one of those zero priority projects.
And today, the Apple TV makes less sense than ever: manufacturers like LG are producing high-quality OLED panels 300% cheaper than just five years ago. And TCL ate Samsung’s toast for selling even cheaper.
While Apple’s best-selling device is its MacBook Air due to its reasonable price, What would be the place of a television costing 6,000 or 8,000 dollars, with slow production and limited distribution? Technologies such as QNED or mini-LED are advancing at cruising speed while Apple maintains its dependence on third parties. No, it’s none of your business.
And it’s not because in the meantime they are playing with their own “Ready Player One” bet. The Apple Vision Pro goes in the opposite direction, eliminating physical media such as a screen in favor of an omnipresent viewer. which is capable of multiplying the experience towards the immersive. They are already used to perform surgical procedures and it is only a matter of time before their use becomes standardized in similar work processes.
And with them, Apple has shown that whoever follows them understands: they have decades of work behind them. Let’s add to this formula the new artificial intelligence models, the Apple Ajax project which will result in a complete reformulation of macOS 15 and the way we communicate with our devices. Our analysis of the iPad Pro M4 clearly shows that, to make the definitive leap in terms of productivity, iPadOS 15 only needs to integrate the latest macOS functions. It’s a question of time.
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