“The week after next, waves of people will descend on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Nearly every major computer and consumer-electronics company in the world will be there,” Lee Gomes reports for The Wall Street Journal.

“Except Apple Computer. That company will be having its own MacWorld [Expo] show that same Tuesday back on the Coast. But such is Mr. Jobs’s sway in the industry that the 150,000 people at CES will spend all day Monday in Las Vegas wondering what Apple is going to be doing the next day in San Francisco,” Gomes reports.

Gomes reports, “Apple is rumored to be preparing its iTV product, a living-room style device that will do for television what the iPod did for music: integrate it with the growing amount of video appearing on PCs. The counter-rumor is that Apple will use MacWorld to introduce its equally long-awaited iPhone. In either case, the Apple device will get the sort of attention that only something from Apple can muster.”

Gomes reports, “In the case of iTV, chances are excellent that it can be the sort of transformative product that the iPod was. The iPod wasn’t the first music player, but by dint of good design and a tsunami of marketing, it has become a global brand. (Even my mother has one.)”

Gomes reports, “The new iTV will bring video to the living room. Any number of companies make any number of products that purport to solve the media “convergence” problem: finally linking the couch-potato TV experience with the computer. As holy grails go, it’s one of the holiest for the computer industry, and much of that industry is punting the problem over to Apple. After so long, to still be the vessel for the hopes of so many is quite a deed.”

Full article here.

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