“For years we’ve been trying to figure out what Steve Jobs meant when he dropped this juicy nugget to Walter Isaacson while being interviewed for his biography: ‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it,'” Michael Simon writes for Mac|Life.
“The sad part is, we may never truly know,” Simon writes. “It could have been a TV or a TiVo-like set-top box or a cloud service able to be beamed from our iOS devices to any screen we choose, but whatever he had dreamed up, there’s one thing we can pretty much bank on: We would have seen it by now. Whatever negotiating needed to done would have been wrapped up and all the dotted lines would have signatures on them.
“After negotiating for several years, it would seem that Apple is in no better position to call the shots than it was when we first started hearing about its fabled television device. And that’s just not the way Steve operated,” Simon writes. “If there’s anything missing from Apple today, it’s that quality, the ability to sell a radical idea. Senior VP of Internet Software and Services Eddie [sic] Cue is supposed to be that guy, the one who convinces uncertain TV execs that they’d be foolish not to follow Apple’s lead. But with all due respect, he’s no Steve Jobs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs was a unique tour de force. We’re not sure it’s fair to blame Tim Cook and Eddy Cue for not inking a meaningful deal without Steve in the driver’s seat (sorry, Tim and Eddy, but KORTV fails to wow).
That said, there are certainly other more charismatic, more forceful leaders who might have gotten something significant done by now. When you have more excess cash lying around than most of these media companies are worth, it wouldn’t be out of character for Steve Jobs to make that fact crystal clear at a critical juncture. As the general sales manager bluntly told his salesman who claimed to be “close” to a sale: “It doesn’t mean shit until you get the ink.”
The main problem with Apple TV is what it’s always been: Lack of content.
If you need access to content and you can’t ink deals for it, then buy it* – if you believe in your product, that is. If not, then Jobs’ “I finally cracked it” will continue to haunt Apple.
*With just the cash they have lying around today, Apple could finance ten $100 million dollar feature films per year – by top directors, with top actors, and exclusive to iTunes Store – for the next 150 years. There is nothing but imagination stopping Apple from financing exclusive, top quality film and TV show content to feed Apple TV and iTunes Store while jump starting very serious negotiations with Hollywood studios.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Apple in talks to revamp Apple TV set top box; scaled-back plans would rely on cable providers – February 13, 2014
I think it was a huge mistake to fire Scott Forstall, someone who is young and has been an integral part of Apple since NeXT. If it was him or Jony, I would have bounce Jony. iOS 7 PROVES the final and best say on aesthetics was Steve, and not Jony. It is Steve that will be missed on that department. Forstall created iOS. When you think of it this way the choice was obvious and Cook blew it.
Agreed one hundred percent. Apple needs a person like Forstall. He may have been an a-hole but he had a vision and got things done. Sort of like someone we knew (SJ)
He [Scott] needed to grow up and learn how to get the best out people. If he is as great as you think he is he will go on to do great things. Maybe come back to Apple. I don’t believe he has the leadership ability he needs to move people to do amazing things as Steve did. If he was the next Steve why did Maps happen? Leading people was natural for Steve, not so for Scott.
Steve 1.0 was not so good with people. He was great at pushing a single team to great lengths, but was very disruptive and competitive across Apple to the point of dysfunctional. Although it was a mistake to let him go, it was not without good reasons.
Steve’s time spent leading NeXT not only resulted in a better OS but also a much wiser Steve. The guy who came back to Apple in the late 90’s had learned how to manage a whole company very well, not just a successful team.
Is Maps really the disaster that it’s made out to be? It might have been launched prematurely and needed time to mature but Scott might have been under time pressure to introduce something new for iOS 6, as well as the fact that the lease for using Google Maps was running out and Apple did not want to renew for another 5 years as Google Maps did not incorporate turn by turn navigation.
If Cook wants to apologise for the Maps ‘fiasco’ that’s his lookout. Scott didn’t have to apologise for anything. If anything Ive ought to apologise for the fuck up that iOS 7.
Scott might have had Job’s temperament buy I don’t believe that he had Job’s vision, nor Ive’s design ability. Some of the stuff Scott delivered might have a group of Smart Phone Barbies going “Oh! Too Cute!!!!” but without Ive’s hardware design the iPhone would be an “also ran”.
I hope Scott does well in the future. He has the intellectual ability to be successful as well as the wealth from his time at Apple.
“Some of the stuff Scott delivered might have a group of Smart Phone Barbies going “Oh! Too Cute!!!!”
No that’s Ive’s iOS7. As meticilous as Jobs was, there is no way in hell iOS7 would have ever seen the light of day. Ive’s Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony, iOS7
Sorry, but all the Scott Forstall fans know nothing about him or his contributions or lack thereof to Apple.
Zzzzzzzzzzz
Well, there’s NBC and a Sony catalog that are probably available at a not too high asking price today. (Only problem is Japanese only like to buy assets, never sell)
Disney>ABC>ESPN>LucasFilm>Pixar>Touchstone
For the 10,000th time over the last 3 years: “Just buy Disney!”
FOOKIN A RIGHT!
And putting Adobe out of their greedy subscription model for yearly cycle modest improvements most don’t either WANT or NEED.
A-OK right – just think, Apple would then have IP for the upcoming Star Wars movies.
That alone (if rumours are right) would make a deal worthwhile, let alone all the other Disney stuff.
Must confess, I’m not a TV movie viewer – prefer my iPad or the cinema – but this could turn me into a couchie overnight.
Tuck in your shirt, you fat slob.
When I was is 7th grade, there was one reason to walk around with your shirt untucked like Apple executives in the post-Steve era. Watcha tryin’ to hide, guys?
They’re all packin’ heat.
Pretty far out of touch, aren’t you? Tucking the shirt when it is the outer layer is over. When I was in the Armed Forces we tucked our fatigue shirts in. Look at todays equivalent uniform. Better freedom of movement, an actual more uniform appearance and at lot less focus on the irrelevant.
At your age, you should probably untuck just to make people think you might have something to hide. Unless you’ve been gobbling those little blue pills, then you should definitely untuck.
Untucked shirts were present long before Steve passed away, “FactChecker”
He might be chunky, but he could buy you for a million dollars a pound with pocket change. Now STFU.
It may well be that Apple has the equipment that Steve Jobs conceived, but they can’t sell it until the infrastructure is in place.
They have to cover enough territory to create a large enough market, they have to supply enough content to induce people to buy, and they have to prevent throttling, to make the purchase worthwhile. That amount of wheeling and dealing doesn’t happen overnight.
Your incessant whining about iOS 7 shows you have an obsession that needs treatment. Once you made observations that, if not always funny, could be pithy and insightful.
Now you’re an irritating bore who really needs to go and have a word with himself.
Apple won’t pay the slightest bit of attention to a boring obsessive who whines and snivels on an Internet forum, so get over it.
Sorry, that was directed at BLN, who’s post seems to have vanished.
Gotta love how MDN censors all the posts. Never participated in a forum that has so much blatant editing as this one. Ok, who am I kidding… this post won’t last 10 minutes.
God isn’t it embarrassing when predictions don’t come true.
Yet, Ive’s iOS design is the real pithy in the matter. This flatness is the most boring thing ever, even almost “windowish”!
Hope that some of Forstall’s look and feel will come back somedays on Apple’s devices. Some warmth is needed to keep Apple in shape.
Well put. I’m so sick of coming on the boards to find someone still bitching and complaining about iOS 7. It will be 6 months next month that it has been released. It’s not going anywhere. I personally love the UI. Yes there are bugs. My phone does reboot itself at least once a day by itself. That is annoying but I know apple is going to release 7.1 which will take care of that along with other bugs. But complaining about iOS 7 being ugly at this point with childlike, incessant rambling is just meaningless GET OVER IT or write Mr Cook and tell him. Not the forums!
I’m no lover of iOS 7’s look but the people who keep going on about it really are getting a bit scary. Fact is Apple were between a rock and a hard place, the OS had been derided for dome time as dated and in need of a refresh yet only a fool would have done a serious and total re visualising which would have been derided in equal measure. If Forstall had done his job properly and improved the OS (fail) and refreshed the look (fail) then we wouldn’t have needed this hurried Ive work over.
The look of iOS7 is the design disaster in the history of Apple.
Whatever time passed, be it six seconds, months, years or decades — no amount of time will erase a historic Apple misstep.
Steve Jobs visual PERFECTION tossed in the dustbin of history. For what — colorful CLIP ART?
Apple needs to restore some semblance of balance because they erred not offering visual CHOICE before throwing legendary VISION BY STEVE under the bus …
Offer alternative visual skins, Apple. Think different. Problem solved.
@BLN: Get over it! You’ve made your point and we all know your opinion and we don’t want it in threads not even remotely having anything to do with that subject!
BLN, you’re fast becoming like “the boy who cried wolf”. People started to “tune him out” eventually and with your incessant rant against IOS 7 you are fast becoming irrelevent. We get it, you hate IOS 7. Move on, unless, of course, you’re one of the paid shills for Samsung/Microsoft/ Google or whoever else is still chasing Apple these days. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only part of your”name” that fits seems to be nut.
Obvious you disagree with BLN. Personal attacks and snippets of blog comment history aside, please enlighten us what is WRONG with his personal opinion?
Honestly, I’d really like to know.
TV is a completely different market to music. With music they were just agreeing a price and acting like any other retailer (albeit an online only one) and selling essentially the same product.
With TV it’s not just selling individual shows (tracks) or seasons (albums), there’s the live element, new material, old material. With the exception of out of print rarities you could go into pretty much any shop and buy any music and the difference would be price. With TV you don’t have a myriad of retailers, and in a way the retailers are also the publishers, which is not the case with music. Amazon and Netflix are bypassing this to an extent by making their own material, but for any solution to take off like music did it has to offer everything, and there are so many different providers and services out there for TV that it’s very hard, it’s going to take a lot of time, and probably a lot of false starts. Add to this that the markets are completely different in every country, it’s not just striking the same sort of deals, any company like Apple will need to strike completely different kinds of deals.
What Apple miss about Steve Jobs is that he was very clever and very good at what he did, but he didn’t have a 100% track record, so to say he would have done it by now is stupid. Much of the heavy lifting behind his successes was done by the same people who are around now. To hold him entirely responsible is an insult to the talent at Apple. He was a genius, but his genius utilised the help of others.
RE: “Whatever negotiating needed to done would have been wrapped up and all the dotted lines would have signatures on them.”
Steve’s genius wasn’t able to sway the video content publishers when he was alive. After the great success of iTunes music store, I think the control issue of video content only increased and producers of video content became even more wary of such a paradigm. Another factor is probably greed.
Here’s a video of Steve Jobs that Michael Simon from Mac|Life obviously forgot:
You can’t sell a radical idea when the hundreds of ears are closed for discussion. It’s a VERY hard sell when Apple might in the future have the capability to replace the same people they are trying to negotiate with.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m beginning to wonder if Steve’s “I finally cracked it.” is equivalent to Steve’s/Apple’s version of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Conversely, many of us know of the Star Trek project at Apple where they had versions of Apple System software, Mac OS, and Mac OS X (at various times) running on Intel processors for well over a decade before The Switch to Intel processors. So, sometimes Apple takes a LONG, LONG time before committing to a specific, shipping product.
“… we may never truly know.”
Indeed, and such statements are hard to counter since they’re so ill-defined.
Since Steve didn’t elucidate, we are left to speculation. But to be sure, Steve’s statement spoke of an experience, not an item. He knew not to telegraph his moves, lest the industries react to counter his intentions. He changed Apple’s strategy from a purely new products focus to a strategic experience focus, with some products laying the groundwork for follow-on products as the worth was proven. A TV probably was never the end goal.
Sorry to divert from the fringe conversations, but back to the point of the article. In year 2000 Steve had a 25 years of history of making canny tech decisions and predicting outcomes that actually came to fruition. Steve’s words carried weight. When he described the future of computing, they weren’t just visions, they were blueprints that inspired action and realization. Steve was just smart, articulate, self-possessed and utterly unique in his time. The author is right. No one at Apple can stand toe to toe with hard-nosed, obstinate CEOs and convince them that not following Apple’s lead is the most irresponsible and stupid thing they could, like Steve Jobs. In his liberal arts way, he was always the smartest guy in the room.
I’m getting tired of hearing all the recurring lamentation about how this and that person is no Steve Jobs and how Steve Jobs would have done things better, differently, etc…. Steve’s gone. He left behind a great legacy. How about we stop dwelling on the past and look forward to a great Apple and Co. regardless. How about being optimistic and not worrying about every bump or apparent bump in the road? Something like, it’s going to be ok, heck better than ok. It’s going to be great.
Apple needs to follow Netflix’s lead and develop their own shows. Examples like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black released all at once are paving the way of new content delivery without the middle man. Maybe Netflix finally cracked it