Apple Category
Apple’s innovations and steps towards becoming dominant in the broadband video sector.
If you believe the old adage that there is no smoke without first then the it’s a case of when rather than if Apple is going to release a television set. New rumors have emerged recently that suggest the product is certainly in the pipeline.
Previous iTV Rumors
It’s been a few years since rumors of an Apple television set began cropping up. The thinking was that Apple would try and do for the television market what it has done for the mobile and computing markets. It would certainly be an obvious next step for the company to take.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson just before his death last year that he had “finally cracked it,” the “it” being the television set and how Apple could disrupt the market. Which suggests something new, innovative, and enough to warrant a high price.
Rumors at the end of last year suggested that Apple was preparing to launch the Apple television set, possibly named iTV, at the end of 2012. That now seems unlikely, but you would have to be very cynical to believe the product doesn’t exist, even if it’s just in prototype form for the time being.
It looks exactly the same, it does pretty much the same things as it did before, and even under the hood little has changed. But we should still be getting excited about the new Apple TV.
It’s well known that Apple has been planning to develop a television set for some time now. Or at least it was the dream of late founder and CEO Steve Jobs to do so. But the plans are taking a long time to materialize, and dripping through to the public rumor by rumor.
It seems even 99-cents wasn’t a low-enough price to tempt consumers into renting individual episodes of TV shows from iTunes. Apple has now ended the experiment and it’s a Buy-Only world once more.
Apple could be preparing to launch a new feature on iTunes allowing people to re-download or stream content they’ve previously bought. And that could be just the first streaming element making its way to iTunes as we all switch from downloading to utilizing the cloud.
