Making an “Apple” TV has always been something that stifled the brand. But also something Steve Jobs wanted to achieve almost as a personal challenge. It was his “hobby”. He spent years looking for a way to integrate it into the Apple formula, enriching the rest of the products. Instead of launching a TV, Apple has cautiously opted for an Apple TV – iTV for friends – a simple device for bringing apps together. An accompanying decoder. On January 9, 2007, this small box began to be sold, which, in fact, Jobs himself never convinced, considering it just another “fish” in a big fishbowl.
“TV is going to lose until there’s a better strategy, until there’s a viable strategy.” And he got it right: streaming has hit traditional television, and also cinema. The AT&T quakes are repeating themselves again and big companies like Warner are doing bobbin lace to adjust their proposals without shooting themselves in the foot, with simultaneous movie-TV previews, TV exclusives by cable, controlled leaks or directly a return to the traditional model.
But that was not the solution Jobs was looking for. Jobs wanted to translate the iPhone experience to the TV: good materials, good experience, and good profit margins. And “television is a terrible business. It does not evolve and the margins are zero”.
Apple TV, Steve Jobs’ last wish
Even if Apple was about to make TVs, it probably never will. And that makes perfect sense. But we still do not anticipate 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 got it.”. Apparently, Steve Jobs had found the alchemical formula a few weeks before his death.
In his final days, Steve picked up the phone and called technology journalist Walt Mossberg, inviting him to his house to discuss the part. “I think we’ve found a way to do that, and it’s going to be fantastic.” It was the night of August 24, 2011, the very day he finally hung up his CEO hat. Five weeks later, he died. After his death, Walter Isaacson, his personal biographer, even said that Steve had already found the right strategyI had already managed to figure out how to make this Apple TV a reality.
Jobs resigned as CEO, but hinted that he would remain involved. This was the project he worked on until his last days. He never went into hardware and software details, but apparently he found a hybrid model, an integrated set, that would work like a console -with a system similar to Apple Arcade or the current Xbox Cloud Gaming- , as a TV to use and as a streaming transmitter. In general, the strategy was to bypass cable companies using iCloud as main and container interface. Something that is still being worked on.
Apple acquired some platforms like Matcha but didn’t go any further. Other rumors suggest that during the summer of 2014, Apple was about to order 55″ and 65″ UHD panels from Samsung Electronics Co. When this hot potato arrived in the hands of Tim Cook, it became one of those zero priority projects. The Apple Car, safely, is ahead. And it is that today Apple TV makes less sense than ever: manufacturers like LG are producing high-quality OLED panels 300% cheaper than just five years ago. TCL ate Samsung’s toast to sell even less.
If Apple’s best-selling device is its reasonably priced MacBook Air, What would be the place of a television at 6,000 or 8,000 dollars, with slow production and limited distribution? Technologies like QNED or mini-LED are advancing at cruising speed while Apple maintains its dependence on third parties. No, that’s none of your business.
And it’s not because in the meantime they play the game with their own “Ready Player One” bet: the Reality Pro glasses have decades of work behind them and the latest leaks already clearly show that we are facing something very big. Something that will add the user-friendliness of the iPad with the interactivity of the haptic game, a refined interface and a quality of design and materials “made in Apple”. A risky move? And necessary. We don’t know if Steve Jobs would be proud of it, but he would find it more appealing than the Apple TV he never felt satisfied with.
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