Late last night, All Things D posted the full video of yesterday's Tim Cook interview.
At the ten-minute mark, they dive into discussion of TV. I found it interesting that All Things D themselves omitted "very" in quoting Cook on what Apple is doing about "fixing television". Following Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo playing their hands in the set-top space, Cook was exactly as cagey about TV as he was last year. Of completely inconsequential interest: the roadblock ads that are running on All Things D this week appear to all be for new $7000 Sony 4KTVs.
I'm fairly convinced that at some point in the future, Apple is going to release both a revamped "hockey puck" and a physical TV set.
Macs, Retina, and 4K
Look to the iMacs and the Thunderbolt monitor released over the last couple of years to see Apple refining glare, viewing angle, and contrast quality. The radically slim profile of the newest "Late 2012" iMac displays reveals a continued drive toward thin, colorful, and beautiful monitors.
What no one really talks much about are the aspect ratio and resolution of the 27" iMac and the Thunderbolt display, which both feature a 16:9 panel that runs at 2560x1440. It isn't an enormous leap over 1080p, which is where it appears the vast majority of 22-inch and larger computer displays are bizarrely (to me) topping out. Jump down to the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and you have a 2880x1800 display.
The resolution of 4KTV is 3840x2160.
I would be surprised if Apple didn't wait to release a TV until it could be more than "just" an overhauled AppleTV puck crammed into a 1080p display. It has to be more than a gorgeous aluminum and glass shell. I don't know why Apple would release less than a 4K television.
Apple is pushing all of its products toward the Retina ideal. No matter what unfounded "channel sources" tell some analyst who gets quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Apple's own product evolution patterns have proven time and again to be the best way to read their moves. Apple plots a very steady, concerted course, and that's visible in that for two straight years, we've gotten the same kind of dodge at All Things D from Tim Cook on TV. Frankly, we got almost the exact same rhetoric from Steve Jobs at D8, with some adjectives swapped. Based on their overt focus on "resolutionary" devices, I'm going under the assumption that the Apple "iTV" is a matter of when, and not if. They're massively bought-in with the display industry, and the TV is the one mass-market screen they don't make as of yet.
So, when do we get this fancy Apple television? Everyone, including Kara Swisher on stage, has been pulling a Veruca Salt and demanding it now. Since Apple talks like they're waiting on something, my assumption is that it's for 4K panel pricing to go down. That way, they can sell a TV at a price that people will actually pay. No matter what vestiges of the Apple Pricing Myth still exist, they won't put a TV on sale that costs $7k, no matter how pretty it is.
The Puck
The AppleTV, as it currently exists, could very well be what we have through the end of 2013. They may finally do a substantive overhaul of the OS. They may add more apps (channels). I hope they at least take a cue from Roku and add system-wide search. Maybe they'll rev the device again with a yet-faster processor.
The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will both cost around $500 this fall. The Wii U is not likely to budge from $350. I got a hearty laugh this week from well-heeled game and media industry columnists who bent over backwards three times to explain how badly their tech-averse parents will be desperate to pay $500 for an expensive, aircraft carrier-sized bloatbox. For $350-500, my mother would much more likely get an iPad and, depending on the iPad model, an AppleTV, both of which she would actually use.
The sound logic for leaving the puck in play is that it's the actual TV's Trojan Horse, thanks to an extremely low cost of ownership. Even after the introduction of the full-on TV set, it turns any non-Apple TV into most of whatever that thing ends up being and doing. This disparity already exists traditionally in the Apple ecosystem, with the best example found in comparing the iPod touch and the iPhone.
The two devices are much closer in feature set and software support than ever before, but the iPhone is always king when it comes to internals, most prominently in the processor, RAM, and camera. The question then mutates into pondering what Apple will add to the AppleTV to make it more compelling, as well as what they will hold back for the actualt TV hardware.
Informed Outside Speculation
Let's start with a couple of things that Apple will not do.
Unlike Xbox One, there won't be some sort of ever-present, "always listening" system in a physical or functional form like the Kinect 2. That sort of surround-speaker-sized box would never get into (much less past) the concept design phase. The moment I saw that bit in Microsoft's keynote, I could instantly picture Phil Schiller's takedown: "the new AppleTV is only listening when you tell it to listen, and it won't track your heart rate, the number of people in the room, or whether you're in your underwear".
Tim Cook said himself that Apple is not in the content creation business, nor does it want to be. That's a smart move on Apple's part.
Indicative of what I think they will do on the TV side of things is the way in which Cook chose to answer a question regarding "new services" late in the interview. He indicated that Apple is more focused on finding more applications of existing services than they are in creating new niche services to see what sticks (like Google has). He made specific mention of Siri, FaceTime, and iTunes.
The AppleTV puck needs better navigation control than the gumstick remote it comes with currently. "Just get an iPod touch/iPhone/iPad" is not a solution to this. I don't see them going bulkier with something like Roku's RF-based, accelerometer-enabled Wiimote pseudo-ripoff...but maybe Apple will at least make a new RF-based remote that finally frees us from the tyranny of line-of-sight.
With that addition, AppleTV can have Siri, which would be activated by a button press and hold on the remote, just as on iDevices. The key is not having a remote that does not require line-of-sight. Siri has to "just work", right out of the box. System-wide search ("Siri, I want to watch The French Connection") should be part of that. Why else did they spend so much time working on and showing off Siri finding info about movies, actors, directors, and so on? Why stop at buying movie tickets? Why not build on this function in a different application?
There's no way the puck gets a FaceTime camera. People would have to attach it to the top of their TVs like the original iSights. The FaceTime camera will go right where it is on Apple's existing displays when they make the TV. Gesture control could theoretically be implemented, but it would be odd of Apple to require that the camera be on at all times. They actually care about privacy and design things around that, instead of constantly tying themselves in knots trying to look like they do (see Microsoft's last week of press).
The question mark for me is iTunes, and what "iTunes" continues to mean. Cook talked about it as this massive content ecosystem full of this and that, but functionally, it's a storefront.
Apple likes to throw around the buying power their users offer with record labels and studios. Apple would face anti-competitive inquiries if they fully blocked other storefronts from AppleTV, but they haven't opened the platform to very much paid video content outside of iTunes. Those few include Netflix, Hulu Plus, MLB, and NHL apps.
Amazon Instant is still missing from the AppleTV app list, even though it's on all other set-top app boxes. It presents the best cross-section of problems. Unlike Netflix and Hulu, there is "purchase and own" content in that Amazon service, which is protected by Amazon DRM. It would be inelegant if the Amazon Instant app for AppleTV lacked all of those purchase options (just like the iOS app does), only giving Amazon Prime users access to their free streaming content. Then again, "inelegant" has never stopped Amazon before.
Will we see Apple open up so that channel apps like Warner Archive Instant, Acorn, Crunchyroll, and others could pop up as they do on Roku, Blu-ray players, and so on? I don't see how they can avoid that, but they will do everything possible to delay that for as long as they can, and make sure that the interface defaults to driving people to spend money with iTunes. If there's any monopolistic thing Apple should be worried about, it's limiting which services you can buy or rent content from on their set-top service. Their saving grace on iOS has been the 70-30 split standard, which puts it on the vendor to choose whether to accept those terms.
By iTunes, did Cook also mean the App Store? Apple has admittedly never been serious about console-style, "real" games, but their iOS game developers already speak the language that the TV would. It would be interesting to see what they could come up with that isn't just an iPhone or iPad game over AirPlay. All three major console manufacturers have multiple things going against them in the indie developer space.
This is very much an open topic, and it won't be closed anytime soon. I'll revisit all of this after WWDC and E3.
Don't expect any direct TV talk at WWDC. See Jim Dalrymple's excellent summation of where your expectations should rest.
What you should pay attention to is the further convergence and interaction between iOS and OS X, which will take center stage. The design and UI choices found in both iOS7 and OS 10.9 will be especially indicative of however it is that Apple is actually thinking about TV. Remember, they've been working on this for years.
