“If you’ve been following tech for a while, you know that rumors about Apple building a TV ran rampant for years,” Nilay Patel writes for The Verge. “teve Jobs fueled the fire by telling his biographer that he’d ‘cracked it’ right before he died, and Tim Cook spent 18 months saying TV was an area of ‘intense interest’ in 2011 and 2012.”
“But after all that, the only TV products Apple’s ever produced are a series of Apple TV boxes and a couple of extremely middling reality shows,” Patel writes. “The HD flat panel business just never made any sense for Apple at the time: it’s a cutthroat, low-margin business, it’s impossible to fully own the interface because consumers plug so many things into their TVs, and the upgrade cycle is glacial compared to phones and even laptops… But after reviewing the new Apple TV 4K, I think it’s time to rethink some of those assumptions. A combination of changing habits around TV consumption, new technology, and consumer confusion means that there’s a big opening for Apple to upend the entire TV market.”
“One of the biggest and longest-standing issues in the living room: you want to run the TV display at a refresh rate of 24Hz when you watch 24fps movies, but animating a user interface at 24Hz looks like garbage. Apple and others deal with this issue by running everything at 60Hz, but that creates visual issues for 24fps movies — kind of silly because you buy all this stuff to watch movies, not menu animations. There are endless forum threads about adjusting TV settings to handle the motion problems that come with playing 24fps video at 60Hz,” Patel writes. “So, what if Apple made a TV with ProMotion that dynamically adjusted the refresh rate for the content being displayed, just like the iPad Pro? It would run at 120Hz on the homescreen and in games, slow down to 24Hz to display movies and TV perfectly, and ramp up again when you hit the home or Siri button to bring up the interface again. And live sports apps like NFL Sunday Ticket and MLB At Bat could run at 60Hz for smoother motion…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Sure, we’d buy it, but we understand the issues Apple would be solving/improving. The amount of education required to get Joe and Jane Six Pack up to speed – most people can’t even change inputs on their TVs or even understand why they’d want to – sounds like a big bag of hurt.
Gene Munster would be turning cartwheels, though, that’s for sure!
SEE ALSO:
Gene Munster gives up the Apple Television ghost – May 19, 2015
Behind Apple’s move to shelve their UHD TV project – May 18, 2015
Well, if Apple wants to manufacture a $4,000 boutique tv for film buffs, no one is stopping them. But it would sell in microscopic numbers.
Imagine walking into an electronics retailer and seeing an LG 4K for less than $600 – which I saw this weekend – and then seeing an Apple-branded screen selling for five to six times that. Where do I get those numbers? Think about it. A screen like that would have to have far more than just the refresh rate adjustments. Fine control of color temperatures, black levels and HDR. The color purity of the pixels would be more demanding, leading to more reject panels. The processing power would require more internal hardware, and mass-produced input jacks would clash with those $500 HDMI cables. So the economies of scale would disappear. LG can make a $600 4K tv because they can make and sell a ton of them using a common motherboard.
There’s absolutely no technical reason that it couldn’t be done, but financially it would flop.
To be fair, the LG 4K monitor is a total piece of crap.
Mine’s fine. You must have shit in your eyes.
How’s that cheesy case and flimsy, wobbly stand? Does the whole thing shimmy when the table gets nudged? I can’t believe Apple was willing to sell those, and I can’t imagine them allowing them on the rows of desks in the Apple Park building. What an embarrassment that would be.
If you could get a 32″, 36″ or a 42″ iMac why would you buy a TV???
I’m guessing you don’t own a 50+ inch TV.
i own a 7 year old 42″ Sony flat screen that won’t die, most of the video and audio, these days comes thru a 27″ iMac or a iPad.
Apple would sell them like hot cakes! Imagine a Siri powered smart TV. Housed in an iMac like case. Supporting UHD with built in App Store, Safari, FaceTime etc… etc… It would be amazing. The main problem with iPhone wannabes is they don’t build hardware and software together. That’s the main problem with my tv setup. Got my Apple TV hooked up to it but they’re not built to work together.
Then partner with an existing TV Company. VIZIO seems like a good choice. Apple builds the software and builds AppleTV into the TV.