rkbabang Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 Apparently, a new book on Apple has Steve Job telling his execs in 2010 that Apple would not be releasing a TV: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-no-television-2014-3 Making an actual TV never made any sense to me. People keep them for way too long, everybody wants a different size so you would have to make tons of models, margins are low, and you don't want to have to change the whole thing including the panel just to get the new version that is faster and has new features. It's not the panel that differentiates TVs for most people, it's whatever software/hardware/services/content is creating the experience. It's much better to have a small box that drives a TV and replaces as much as possible of the crappy software that manufacturers and cablecos ship. IMO the current Apple TV will grow up and keep adding capabilities (including gaming console capabilities, probably) until it does for the living room entertainment experience (which is pretty much universally crappy) what the iPhone did for smartphones and the iPad did for tablets; make is simple, intuitive, good-looking, and create an ecosystem that allows developers to build great things on top of it. But most important, it'll turn yet another specialized device into a general computing device, and to do that Apple is uniquely positioned. Most competitors in the space don't have near the expertise and talent in software-hardare-UI-services-content integration that Apple does. I'd also expect even more integration with other devices (ie. AirPlay is great example, and CarPlay could be over time, and I'm sure they can find other ways to make one device more useful thanks to another or to a peripheral (wearables?)). I agree with all of this, yet I don't understand why Apple has been sitting on its hands letting Roku eat its lunch in this area. I've got 3 Roku boxes in my home and 0 Apple TV boxes. I don't even know anyone who owns one. Why can a small company like Roku develop a compelling product in this area, but Apple can't seem to manage it? One reason is that Roku is content agnostic, it provides hundreds of "channels" in addition to the obvious ones (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc) and doesn't try to sell you anything, as well as doing everything the Apple TV does (working nicely with your media server or just content from a memory stick and providing a way to stream from your phone/tablet). Apple offers much less choice in content and tries to get you to purchase overpriced content from iTunes. I'm not sure how they change things to dominate, but right now Roku is the more appealing option. Roku dominating this market over all the big companies has always surprised me a little, because there isn't much to these boxes from a hardware point of view. I can do almost everything these boxes do with my $35 Raspberry Pi running Linux with xbmc . That is pretty much all these boxes are, a cheap ARM chip running some software on a stripped down Linux OS. The only thing that really differentiates them is the custom software and content services. Apple should have already been huge in this area, but they haven't been. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PJM Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 Apparently, a new book on Apple has Steve Job telling his execs in 2010 that Apple would not be releasing a TV: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-no-television-2014-3 Making an actual TV never made any sense to me. People keep them for way too long, everybody wants a different size so you would have to make tons of models, margins are low, and you don't want to have to change the whole thing including the panel just to get the new version that is faster and has new features. It's not the panel that differentiates TVs for most people, it's whatever software/hardware/services/content is creating the experience. It's much better to have a small box that drives a TV and replaces as much as possible of the crappy software that manufacturers and cablecos ship. IMO the current Apple TV will grow up and keep adding capabilities (including gaming console capabilities, probably) until it does for the living room entertainment experience (which is pretty much universally crappy) what the iPhone did for smartphones and the iPad did for tablets; make is simple, intuitive, good-looking, and create an ecosystem that allows developers to build great things on top of it. But most important, it'll turn yet another specialized device into a general computing device, and to do that Apple is uniquely positioned. Most competitors in the space don't have near the expertise and talent in software-hardare-UI-services-content integration that Apple does. I'd also expect even more integration with other devices (ie. AirPlay is great example, and CarPlay could be over time, and I'm sure they can find other ways to make one device more useful thanks to another or to a peripheral (wearables?)). I agree with all of this, yet I don't understand why Apple has been sitting on its hands letting Roku eat its lunch in this area. I've got 3 Roku boxes in my home and 0 Apple TV boxes. I don't even know anyone who owns one. Why can a small company like Roku develop a compelling product in this area, but Apple can't seem to manage it? One reason is that Roku is content agnostic, it provides hundreds of "channels" in addition to the obvious ones (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc) and doesn't try to sell you anything, as well as doing everything the Apple TV does (working nicely with your media server or just content from a memory stick and providing a way to stream from your phone/tablet). Apple offers much less choice in content and tries to get you to purchase overpriced content from iTunes. I'm not sure how they change things to dominate, but right now Roku is the more appealing option. Roku dominating this market over all the big companies has always surprised me a little, because there isn't much to these boxes from a hardware point of view. I can do almost everything these boxes do with my $35 Raspberry Pi running Linux with xbmc . That is pretty much all these boxes are, a cheap ARM chip running some software on a stripped down Linux OS. The only thing that really differentiates them is the custom software and content services. Apple should have already been huge in this area, but they haven't been. 'Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkbabang Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 Apparently, a new book on Apple has Steve Job telling his execs in 2010 that Apple would not be releasing a TV: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-no-television-2014-3 Making an actual TV never made any sense to me. People keep them for way too long, everybody wants a different size so you would have to make tons of models, margins are low, and you don't want to have to change the whole thing including the panel just to get the new version that is faster and has new features. It's not the panel that differentiates TVs for most people, it's whatever software/hardware/services/content is creating the experience. It's much better to have a small box that drives a TV and replaces as much as possible of the crappy software that manufacturers and cablecos ship. IMO the current Apple TV will grow up and keep adding capabilities (including gaming console capabilities, probably) until it does for the living room entertainment experience (which is pretty much universally crappy) what the iPhone did for smartphones and the iPad did for tablets; make is simple, intuitive, good-looking, and create an ecosystem that allows developers to build great things on top of it. But most important, it'll turn yet another specialized device into a general computing device, and to do that Apple is uniquely positioned. Most competitors in the space don't have near the expertise and talent in software-hardare-UI-services-content integration that Apple does. I'd also expect even more integration with other devices (ie. AirPlay is great example, and CarPlay could be over time, and I'm sure they can find other ways to make one device more useful thanks to another or to a peripheral (wearables?)). I agree with all of this, yet I don't understand why Apple has been sitting on its hands letting Roku eat its lunch in this area. I've got 3 Roku boxes in my home and 0 Apple TV boxes. I don't even know anyone who owns one. Why can a small company like Roku develop a compelling product in this area, but Apple can't seem to manage it? One reason is that Roku is content agnostic, it provides hundreds of "channels" in addition to the obvious ones (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc) and doesn't try to sell you anything, as well as doing everything the Apple TV does (working nicely with your media server or just content from a memory stick and providing a way to stream from your phone/tablet). Apple offers much less choice in content and tries to get you to purchase overpriced content from iTunes. I'm not sure how they change things to dominate, but right now Roku is the more appealing option. Roku dominating this market over all the big companies has always surprised me a little, because there isn't much to these boxes from a hardware point of view. I can do almost everything these boxes do with my $35 Raspberry Pi running Linux with xbmc . That is pretty much all these boxes are, a cheap ARM chip running some software on a stripped down Linux OS. The only thing that really differentiates them is the custom software and content services. Apple should have already been huge in this area, but they haven't been. 'Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.' I would agree with you if they have waited, but they didn't wait. They released an inferior product and have been selling it for years. Also I forgot to mention that Apple doesn't even offer Amazon Prime on the Apple TV, which makes it a non-started for a lot of people right away. Millions of people subscribe to Prime for the free shipping and consider the streaming service to be just a nice extra, but when shopping for a streaming player they would want a media player that supports something that they are already paying for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 It's interesting how blunt he is about focusing on making a high margin product that turns over quickly. He was very good about hiding this razor sharp focus on making money via repeat customers with the mythology of "oh....all we care about is making a great product and making peoples' lives better". I don't think they ever pretended that it was all they cared about. It was a necessary condition, but not sufficient. I think Jobs cared a lot about making great products, but he cared as much about making a great company, and since they had to focus on so few things to get them right, they had to be the right things that played to their strengths (basically, general purpose computers and a few peripherals that augment them) and made financial sense. Apple has certainly been making people's lives better - you can look up what PCs were before the Macintosh, digital music players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad, etc - which doesn't mean Steve Jobs wasn't a shrewd businessman too (he made his money not only from Apple but from NeXT and Pixar), as is Tim Cooks (a lot of his work in the past has been making the supply chain as efficient as possible to increase margins). Either way, their focus on economically attractive products is certainly not something shareholders can complain about in my opinion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffmori7 Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 A new iPhone 5C with 8GB to offer en entry phone at a lower price, available worldwide: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/17/8-gb-iphone-5c/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 A new iPhone 5C with 8GB to offer en entry phone at a lower price, available worldwide: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/17/8-gb-iphone-5c/ I thought Apple didn't need to lower prices and go downmarket, and selling a cheaper iPhone was a big no-no that would destroy the brand etc etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 I would agree with you if they have waited, but they didn't wait. They released an inferior product and have been selling it for years. Also I forgot to mention that Apple doesn't even offer Amazon Prime on the Apple TV, which makes it a non-started for a lot of people right away. Millions of people subscribe to Prime for the free shipping and consider the streaming service to be just a nice extra, but when shopping for a streaming player they would want a media player that supports something that they are already paying for. I'm not sure it'll matter in the end. Apple has never been first, or the company with the most features. They weren't first with digital music players, smartphones, etc. Apple TV for most of its life has been more a peripheral/ecosystem-enhancing device. That's why they called it a hobby. It was a good way to show your photos to family on the big screen, play your iTunes music library, etc (people who focus on spec sheets and content lists forget how useful that is to the average person, lots of value in doing the simple stuff well). Over time, they've added more and more content to it and it has slowly morphed into more than just a peripheral. Roku might be competitive on the content front right now, though probably not on the integration with the Apple ecosystem, which makes it inferior to many. But over time, Apple will keep adding more content, including Prime I'm sure, and the end game will probably take the Apple TV somewhere that is hard to follow for any company that isn't a general computing company (as RIM found out when smartphones moved from email pager phones to fully-fledged computers with full-featured OSes and such). If Apple TV is a gaming console and has an app ecosystem and maybe some natural interface stuff (motion traking?) on top of integration with iPhones and iPads and Macs and all the content that Roku has (Apple's dollars are just as green when it comes to purchasing rights), what will Roku do to compete? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffmori7 Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 A new iPhone 5C with 8GB to offer en entry phone at a lower price, available worldwide: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/17/8-gb-iphone-5c/ I thought Apple didn't need to lower prices and go downmarket, and selling a cheaper iPhone was a big no-no that would destroy the brand etc etc. They are not lowering margins here, there are just offering a phone with less storage, quite different. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 I was referrring to prices, not margins, but they are lowering margins, storage is very cheap and drives margins especially in the higher storage versions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeffmori7 Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 I was referrring to prices, not margins, but they are lowering margins, storage is very cheap and drives margins especially in the higher storage versions. But we don't know the price cut for this model yet, so we should both stop speculating and wait until it is official :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 ^Stop speculating in a thread about Apple? ;D https://www.google.com/search?q=8gb+flash+drive&espv=2&es_sm=93&source=lnms&sa=X&ei=fgwnU_fXE6mh2QWM84GoCg&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAA&biw=1600&bih=799&dpr=1#q=8gb+flash+drive&tbm=shop Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
txlaw Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 Apparently, a new book on Apple has Steve Job telling his execs in 2010 that Apple would not be releasing a TV: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-no-television-2014-3 Making an actual TV never made any sense to me. People keep them for way too long, everybody wants a different size so you would have to make tons of models, margins are low, and you don't want to have to change the whole thing including the panel just to get the new version that is faster and has new features. It's not the panel that differentiates TVs for most people, it's whatever software/hardware/services/content is creating the experience. It's much better to have a small box that drives a TV and replaces as much as possible of the crappy software that manufacturers and cablecos ship. IMO the current Apple TV will grow up and keep adding capabilities (including gaming console capabilities, probably) until it does for the living room entertainment experience (which is pretty much universally crappy) what the iPhone did for smartphones and the iPad did for tablets; make is simple, intuitive, good-looking, and create an ecosystem that allows developers to build great things on top of it. But most important, it'll turn yet another specialized device into a general computing device, and to do that Apple is uniquely positioned. Most competitors in the space don't have near the expertise and talent in software-hardare-UI-services-content integration that Apple does. I'd also expect even more integration with other devices (ie. AirPlay is great example, and CarPlay could be over time, and I'm sure they can find other ways to make one device more useful thanks to another or to a peripheral (wearables?)). I agree with all of this, yet I don't understand why Apple has been sitting on its hands letting Roku eat its lunch in this area. I've got 3 Roku boxes in my home and 0 Apple TV boxes. I don't even know anyone who owns one. Why can a small company like Roku develop a compelling product in this area, but Apple can't seem to manage it? One reason is that Roku is content agnostic, it provides hundreds of "channels" in addition to the obvious ones (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc) and doesn't try to sell you anything, as well as doing everything the Apple TV does (working nicely with your media server or just content from a memory stick and providing a way to stream from your phone/tablet). Apple offers much less choice in content and tries to get you to purchase overpriced content from iTunes. I'm not sure how they change things to dominate, but right now Roku is the more appealing option. Roku dominating this market over all the big companies has always surprised me a little, because there isn't much to these boxes from a hardware point of view. I can do almost everything these boxes do with my $35 Raspberry Pi running Linux with xbmc . That is pretty much all these boxes are, a cheap ARM chip running some software on a stripped down Linux OS. The only thing that really differentiates them is the custom software and content services. Apple should have already been huge in this area, but they haven't been. 'Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.' I would agree with you if they have waited, but they didn't wait. They released an inferior product and have been selling it for years. Also I forgot to mention that Apple doesn't even offer Amazon Prime on the Apple TV, which makes it a non-started for a lot of people right away. Millions of people subscribe to Prime for the free shipping and consider the streaming service to be just a nice extra, but when shopping for a streaming player they would want a media player that supports something that they are already paying for. I would agree with you that Apple released an inferior product. I have had a Boxee Box, Sony and Vizio Google TV boxes, an Apple TV, and Chromecast. Of all these devices, the Boxee Box and Chromecast have had the best user experience, though there were/are problems with each. I've played around with Roku, and I've found it to be very good, particularly compared with AppleTV. (Fun fact: Roku was a spin-off of Netflix.) I also use my PS3 for content consumption every now and then, but only where I can queue up content easily via my mobile device (e.g., with Netflix and HBOGo). To be fair to Apple, I think they have been struggling, just as Google has been, to get content providers and distributors to get on board with their products. Nobody wants to give these big tech companies too much leverage as a tollway between them and the end user. The MVPDs and premium content owners saw what happened with the music industry, and they are way too smart to allow that with video. Consequently, AppleTV had been relegated to a hobby project with a subpar experience. GoogleTV has been pretty terrible as well and has been given short shrift with respect to resources, perhaps because Google always felt that Chromecast would be the right way to go. Chromecast has a ton of potential. Hopefully, they can get a ton of content guys on board. But the beauty of Chromecast is that it has been opened up to devs to add casting functionality to the content apps/experiences they create. We may see a proliferation of small content competitors who get on board the Chromecast train. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
txlaw Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 Latest Jony Ive interview: http://time.com/jonathan-ive-apple-interview/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rkbabang Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 (Fun fact: Roku was a spin-off of Netflix.) That's not quite true. Roku was started by Anthony Wood in 2002 and its first product was a wifi music player. I was aware of Roku back then, because I used to work at Analog Devices and we had a chip in that first Roku music device. Anthony Wood was later hired by Netflix to develop a streaming video device, but when Netflix decided against getting into hardware they let him go and let him take what he had developed back to Roku. Roku Inc was never a part of Netflix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
txlaw Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 (Fun fact: Roku was a spin-off of Netflix.) That's not quite true. Roku was started by Anthony Wood in 2002 and its first product was a wifi music player. I was aware of Roku back then, because I used to work at Analog Devices and we had a chip in that first Roku music device. Anthony Wood was later hired by Netflix to develop a streaming video device, but when Netflix decided against getting into hardware they let him go and let him take what he had developed back to Roku. Roku Inc was never a part of Netflix. Fair enough. I probably should have said that the first Roku box was created at Netflix and then that team was jettisoned. "Spin-off" was probably not the right word to use because it's not clear whether or not Netflix gets any direct financial benefits from Roku, Inc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 18, 2014 Share Posted March 18, 2014 Apple is replacing the iPad 2 with the resurrected iPad 4 (retina, A6X chip, lightning connector... ) as their entry level model, and released a 8gb version of the 5c. This only makes the lineup stronger and attractive to more people, so it can't hurt. http://9to5mac.com/2014/03/18/apple-re-introduces-fourth-generation-ipad-in-16-gb-model-starting-at-449-discontinues-ipad-2/ http://www.macrumors.com/2014/03/18/8gb-iphone-5c-launch-16gb-ipad-4-relaunch/ Also, there's a report that Microsoft will launch Office for iPad on March 27 (which would be good for both companies): http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/17/5519614/office-for-ipad-satya-nadella-march-27th-event Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted March 18, 2014 Share Posted March 18, 2014 ^Excellent move by Apple regarding the iPad. The iPad 2 at 400 was an inferior product at a high price, but this totally rectifies that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 18, 2014 Share Posted March 18, 2014 ^Excellent move by Apple regarding the iPad. The iPad 2 at 400 was an inferior product at a high price, but this totally rectifies that. Specwise, it certainly was, but I think they kept it so long for a very specific part of the market and made lots of money on it. Everywhere you see an iPad being used as a cash register, or in a wharehouse to check inventory, or stuff like that on the business or educational side.. You don't need high resolution or fast CPU, just a nice well-built tablet that anyone can use, which the 2 is. But obviously the 4 is much better. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 20, 2014 Share Posted March 20, 2014 http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL3N0MH26X20140320?irpc=932 China Mobile Ltd will increase handset subsidies by 26 percent to 34 billion yuan ($5.49 billion) in 2014, said Chief Financial Officer Xue Taohai, as it aims to keep smartphone contract prices low in the face of competition from rivals. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 21, 2014 Share Posted March 21, 2014 I thought this was a nice moment, brought to you by an iPad: http://youtu.be/cU-eAzNp5Hw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/apple-after-jobs-pretty-much-the-same-as-ever/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fareastwarriors Posted March 26, 2014 Share Posted March 26, 2014 Apple Engineer Recalls the iPhone's Birth Jobs's Ultimatum: Lay Out a Vision Fast or Lose the Project http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303949704579461783150723874?mod=Business_newsreel_2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Palantir Posted March 26, 2014 Share Posted March 26, 2014 ^ Looks like Jonathan Ive wasn't responsible for all the gesture based controls on the iPhone, like some have suggested. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 26, 2014 Share Posted March 26, 2014 ^ Looks like Jonathan Ive wasn't responsible for all the gesture based controls on the iPhone, like some have suggested. Who suggested that? Ive wasn't responsible at all for the software in the original iPhone. In fact, the software team didn't even know what the hardware would look like and vice versa. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCG Posted March 26, 2014 Share Posted March 26, 2014 It will be interesting to see what comes out of this alleged Comcast partnership. Relying on Comcast could be tricky. Seems like there's the potential for Comcast to back out of a partnership a few years down the line which could leave Apple hanging. Apple doesn't usually rely on things that are out of their control. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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