Marco Arment doesn’t think Apple will make an actual TV:
Apple’s primary business is selling computing devices and related hardware, with healthy margins and tightly integrated experiences, to customers who generally replace them with the newest models every 1-3 years.
There’s no place for them in the TV market, and they’re content (and smart) to stay out of it.
Chris Dixon thinks they might:
Perhaps Apple won’t enter the market due to its structure. But that didn’t stop them in mobile phones where the structure was similarly difficult. The mistake analysts made about the iPhone was to assume the current industry structure would be sustained after Apple’s entry. I’d be wary of making the same assumption about the TV industry.
I agree with Chris on this much: Apple completely upset the phone market when they convinced dozens of millions of people to add an extra $30 to their monthly phone bill AND buy a phone hundreds of dollars more expensive than they’d ever bought before… and then do it again twelve months later. So, the market will change its habits. Perhaps people will start upgrading their pricy TVs annually.
The thing that most likely caused this habit-switch in 2007 was something the name “iPhone” doesn’t convey: it was the world’s first pocket computer. It could do most everything people did on their home computers. In fact it was much better at many tasks than a faster, beefier computer. Who bought an iPhone because it was a good telephone?
Everyone wanted a pocket computer. But I’m not sure everyone wants a living-room computer. That has been attempted before, quite awfully so; perhaps Apple can do it better. But perhaps they can’t, because perhaps people don’t really want it that much.
I’ll close with two childish observations:
