Production of Apple television expected to begin in May/June for late 2012 launch - Page 2

That's just nuts. Samsung is Apple's only hope to manufacture products.

Did you hear the latest?


http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...n-for-new-ipad

Without Samsung, Apple would be in DEEP trouble.

The Apple TV will not be available for in store pickup. That is, unless the price tag is so high that nobody will buy it.

show me a 55" Apple TV for $2500 bucks [or a 60" for $3K] and i'll buy one.

if they top out at 42" i won't bother - and i HOPE Apple doesn't pretend to know what size TV everyone should have.

as for the iPhone tangent, i hope it goes to a 4" screen @ 1024x768.

Which TV sets have two DTT tuners for Full Picture-in-Picture (Full PiP), which requires at least two Digital Terrestrial Television (DTTV or DTT) tuners inside the TV set? The Full PiP feature is extremely useful for channel surfing during commercials (ie., very handy for bridging commercial breaks). Thus, waiting for commercials to end on one show while flipping through channels to see what else is on. No cable/satellite/TiVo/DVR involved; just the TV set. After image quality, Full PiP is the most important feature of a TV for many consumers.

That's crazy. The iPhone is 3:2, not 4:3.

What if it's like some of the TV apps out there? The Time Warner, HBO, TNT, Cinemax apps all just have you authenticate your cable subscription to access them. They could use something similar for a television without a cable card or set top box.

I'm believing (hoping) they will keep the external appliance and have it be as functional as the integrated. I can't imagine Apple creating a display that suits what I've come to expect from my visual home entertainment experience in two of my viewing rooms.

When you think of the form factor involved, it doesn't seem feasible for such sets to be sold directly out of the typical Apple Store.

It'll be hard enough to display them in-store, but impossible to store them on-site. They'd have to just ship them after you order in the store or on-line.

Sure, but there's a big difference between a name and a convenient means of reference. My brother is my first brother, but "first brother" is not his name any more than my second brother's name is "brother 2." For the first little bit my brother was, "my new brother." It's just a reference. What's confusing about that?

I'm going to place myself directly in the crosshairs here...

What's wrong with "TV" as it is, now?

Between my iPhone, iPad, AppleTV and internet-connected Bravia I can pretty much watch whatever I want, wherever I want, with whatever-sized audience I want. And it looks and sounds great.

I'm not sure Apple is the company to solve the "distribution problem."

Fire away.

Imagine the last nine years if you could only buy CDs and not individual songs.

Yes, it has only been nine years.

Apple is exactly the company to fix television. They just don't have to MAKE a television to do it.

I agree, what would the iPhone gain with more speed? What Apple could do is include the advanced battery design that they created for the new iPad. That would allow Apple to upgrade the iPhone with newer Qualicom chips for faster data delivery without a talk-time hit.

Perhaps, if the timing is right, Apple could change out the CPU/GPU chip for one with a smaller die size. I have no idea what the time-line may be on that possibility.

The available programming is BORING. You have to spend too much to get the channels you want. Furthermore, I want the ability to make a little Steve Jobs avatar that could run out onto the field during a national championship game and steal the ball and run with it. I want the ability to interrupt poorly produced commercials and interject my own commentary.

Apple will make all that possible.

Sony has patents for that.


Mystery Commerical Theater 3000!

Well... it can be done better. At least Jonathan Ive thinks so.

• The remote - how many buttons do you ever use. Remotes are big, ugly, and unwieldy.
• Programe selection - I don't want to buy my programs, I think that concept suck big time, but I want to be able to decide which channels, or even which shows I watch, when I want to watch them.
• I want a broader selection of shows without having to buy the MEGA package.
• I want to be able to watch internet content
• I also want to be able to start watching content in my living room and continue in my bed and when I flake out I'd like to continue the next day.
• I don't want a million cables, remotes, or boxes
• I want to watch in style
• It's Apple, right? So that ought to be enough..

That's not an improvement as far as I'm concerned. It just leads to more cherry picking, fewer quality albums and ultimately worse music.

I still get excited today when one of my favourite bands releases a new album. Sure maybe I don't like all the songs as much but even today I only ever listen to a whole album or nothing. That way you get to hear tracks that will never get played on the radio and that you would probably never discover otherwise. Album tracks get to the heart and soul of who a band really are and what their music is all about.

There is a whole generation of kids growing up listening to shitty compressed music, cherry picking their songs from the "hits" and listening to it all on crappy headphones or crappy iPod speakers. It's all wrong IMHO.

The new TV will come with a 7.85" touch screen remote.

One could make the argument that recording artists have to be more focused on producing more hits instead of sliding 10 filler songs into a 12 song album because of the Ã* la carte model. You want to sell more music... then make more good music.

Missing the point of any Jobsian Apple TV. It won't be a cable device; it will be a network device, like any computer or smart phone, and its programming will come only through a new iTunes-like service. A new "walled garden." We won't be paying [insert name of your cable carrier], we'll be paying Apple.

Apple's strategy in the TV industry can not be tied exclusively to a television. The service would have to be accessible from multiple devices including the Apple TV, regular Mac computers, the iPad, the iPhone, even the Touch.

A television model would be a compliment to that service, not the sole means of accessing it. I don't think Apple has failed to launch its service because of technical hurdles. Rather what has delayed it is that deals for content are hard to ink. Once those deals for content are secured, we'll see a rapid rollout of complimentary technology, including an Apple-branded TV.

It makes sense to have an approach to television content delivery that means one has access to that content from a plethora of devices. No doubt there are plenty of people who would love to be able to start a program on the living room big screen and finish the program off on the go, if the situation called for that. Since Apple dominates the mobile space like no other company, it is best positioned to offer that sort of service. A big-screen set would then make a logical addition to the mix, taking a consumer right through the process with an Apple product slotted in for every scenario.

Which will only work if/when the content carriers decide to put their content inside the walled garden. And I'm not just talking about Fox/CBS/NBC/ABC. I'm talking about CNN, TBS, Food Network and the holy grail of cable TV, ESPN.

Rest assured, in order to get this content, Apple will have to pay. And not just a flat rate. NBC and CBS and Fox will do what they have done for years to the cable cos--they will tell Apple that if they want ESPN, they will need to pay for ABC Family. If you want USA, the most watched cable channel, you'll need to buy SciFy. And so on.

Also just an afterthought--but how many people have good enough home network that they can get HD quality streaming TV, 24 hours a day? And how many homes have more than one TV? Lots. 1080p * 24fps * 2 streams at least == 10Mbs speed at least. And that's just for the TV(s). If you want to use your Internet on top of that…forget it. Heck my AppleTV starts to stutter when streaming from iTunes if I also try to download an OS X update, and I have Comcast's top speed package.

Oh, and where do people that kind of high bandwidth from? Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon FiOS, AT&T Uvers…the same companies that also offer TV service.

Not saying it's impossible, but I'd need to know the logistics first.

I think there are good arguments on both sides. Works such as Pink Floyd's "The Wall", The Who's "Tommy", or the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" are either meant to be listened to as an entire album, or are (almost unarguably) better when listened to in their entirety, rather than cherry-picked.

But that said, recording libraries are full of albums where track after track were added just to fill space on the flip-side of the disc.

So I think that the iTunes music model helps small bands, new artists and one-hit wonders. And it probably helps expose people to particularly good tracks of genres that'd otherwise go unnoticed. (For instance, I'd never have bought an "Arabic trance" album or CD in the old days, but I have discovered a few individual tracks that I've liked and purchased via iTunes.) However, the iTunes model greatly *decreases* the likelihood of a Pink Floyd or The Who coming out with a ground-breaking concept album.

Agreed.


As long as I can cherry-pick what I buy (the idea of network-specific "apps" that I could purchase and then watch programs from), I don't care how many also-ran cable networks they shove on Apple. In fact, the more the merrier.


We've been using nothing but our AppleTV2 for 8 months now, and the only issues have been Netflix's server or Comcast's service - not the concept of streaming overall.


Which is why the cable companies *and* the wireless companies are both going to become bandwidth companies, not content providers. You'll watch programs on your ATVn, iPad, iPhone, PC, whatever, and the content will come through wireless, wifi, and/or a cable/fibre running to your house.

Literally uncertain.

That's assuming everyone can or want to buy an Apple HDTV. It's more likely the Apple TV will sell nicely along with an Apple HDTV. I doubt ATV3 is a stop-gap product at all for reasons I just said. And it definitely IMO will not be needed to plug into an Apple HDTV. That's not Apple's style. All the ATV3 functionality will be onboard any Apple television.

What do you call it though? And why would anyone buy an Apple TV that had a screen for thousands of dollars when you could buy the box and attach it to your TV for less than a hundred?

Yes, because shows on television are better because you're forced to pay for them just to get the shows you want to see…

Really? This again? Apple doesn't target "people in the industry". It's a name, not a processor version, not an OS version, and not a generation. It will either be nothing at all, or 5.

I know what you're saying but doesn't that just lead to a "more of the same" type mentality where the record companies demand that their artists produce similar songs over and over again. There's no incentive to be creative or original. Bands in the past would have maybe 3 hits on one album and the rest would be a more diverse collection of their work. I often prefer the songs that were not hits and you usually find a few real gems in there.

I do agree that many modern artists, especially of the teen pop variety, simply pad out their hits with rubbish basically to fill up an album. But again if I listen to an artistÂs album and hear that 90% of what they do is crap I'm simply not going to follow that artist anymore. I might still listen to their hits on the radio but those artists always run out of steam eventually once the hits start drying up. I still continue to buy albums from bands that haven't had a hit in many years but continue to produce albums, many of which are better than their earlier hit albums.

For me cherry picking is about reducing music to a basic common denominator - is it catchy, is it popular, is it instant. If those artists are reduced to selling a few tracks many times over there really is little or no incentive for them to grow as artists, to experiment, to try new things on their albums, see what works and what doesn't. It deeply saddens me to see how for many people now music is little more than background noise rather than a lasting pleasure.

Can't say that I've ever been forced to pay for anything on TV. I don't subscribe to cable TV and I'm sure that means I miss out on a few good shows I would otherwise watch. Does it materally affect my life? No not really. If there is nothing I want to watch I just switch the TV off and do something else.

I'd call it... Apple Television. and... Wow I needed a TV set so I bought an Apple television and it came with all this stuff built-in. Gee I didn't even need to buy any cables.

So you would happily pay more for a tv just to save $4 on a cable?

Four dollars? You're being ripped off.

This, among many other points, is an example of why I don't think they'll be making a TV either.

Monoprice wanted a photocopy of my Visa and something else before they would ship internationally, meanwhile they charged my Visa while waiting on it, meaning it cost me money in currency fees when I cancelled the order. They are not a company I would want to deal with.

But yes, you Americans are lucky with places selling things at that price.