Forrester Research has released “a new report that imagines the Apple products of 2013. But rather than predict Apple jet packs or other outlandish new directions, the research firm uses the company’s recent history as a guide to forecasting,” Nick Wingfield reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Forrester’s conclusion: While much of Apple’s great successes have been mobile products such as the iPod and the iPhone, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home,” Wingfield reports.
“Among the new products Forrester predicts Apple will create are wall-mountable digital picture frames with small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play media, including photos, videos and music, stored on a computer elsewhere in the home. Such products already exist, but Apple could put its own twist on them — for example, by adding its design panache and a touch-sensitive screen that lets viewers flip from image to image with a finger swipe, a la the iPhone,” Wingfield reports.
“For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network. Possible, too, is an ‘AppleSound’ universal remote control, also with a touch-sensitive screen, that lets users browse their music collections and change the songs playing through their stereo as they stroll around the house,” Wingfield reports.
Full article here.
More info about Forrester Research’s US$279 report, “The Future Of Apple Inc. – By 2013, Apple’s Product Mix Will Make It A Credible Hub Of The Digital Home,” by J.P. Gownder and James L. McQuivey here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Winston” for the heads up.]
Who pays these people for this crap?
How can this be?
Everyone knows that the End of the World is in 2012!
To NeverFade: (re: beyond 2012)
I didn’t see a reference in the summary to Earth. Maybe that’s why they’re charging $279.
I think it’s more likely that Apple will license iTunes to third parties for accessories like picture frames and alarm clocks. I don’t see them being bothered with these little things, but it’s obvious that iTunes is shaping up to be the content hub of the future. The sooner, the better, I say. I want Apple to make a DVR so badly.
$279???
We can get that for free and more reliable on Macrumors.com
How come I get the feeling that Steve Jobs cringes in embarrassment when he reads this. An Apple clockradio in 2013? God, is this the best Forrester can come up with?
Picture frames? Alarm clocks? They are obviously predicting SJs death before 2012.
Executive Summary
Consumer product strategists frequently ask Forrester how Apple’s product strategy will evolve: What will Apple’s product portfolio look like five years from now, and how is Apple preparing for that future today? Forrester notes that Apple has completely remade itself from a PC maker to a consumer devices and digital music leader over the past eight years — thus setting the precedent for additional radical change over the next five. While there are a number of speculative industry hypotheses for the future of Apple — including scenarios like Apple as a media pure play or Apple as the “American Sony” — Forrester sees a future that ties together many of these hypotheses into a coherent consumer product strategy: Apple will aim to become the hub of the digital home, offering eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the HDTV-stereo audio-visual infrastructure in consumers’ homes. To fulfill this strategy, we predict that Apple will launch new products, re-engineer the Apple Store, and expand into in-home installation services.
http://web2.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,44244,00.html
1. Few can predict with any accuracy what Apple will release in 5 weeks, 5 years is too big a stretch.
2. If these ideas are so incredibly marvelous why haven’t they been successfully developed years ago?
3. Analysts can’t see the trees because of the “Forrest”.
Yea- and they will perfectly match my apple refrigerator and my apple toaster in teh kitchen!
And I totally heart my apple bidet and apple showerhead in the bathroom. Don’t even get me started on my iTP dispenser!
Dumbest theory I ever heard, forrester dood.
His almighty already predicted that the future would be in creating a seamless home system that combined everything ages ago while he was planning AppleTV, iphone and Airport express.
Have these analyists nothing better to do with their clients money? or are they waiting to claim prior concept when said almost similar products are produced??
I am worried about MS’s sync getting a foot hold in as the digital hub for cars.
I know one thing… I went to CES in Vegas for years and saw Microsoft’s “digital home” product…… what a joke! It made no sense…. was never a finished product… the unanswered questions, were MANY….
I’ll take my chances that Steve has no problem beating that…. I would not be surprised at all to see Apple expand well into our kitchens, bedrooms, livingrooms…. bathrooms????
@NeverFade
Here’s how it’s gonna go down:
1) Apple iPhone 3.0s will be able to web browse into the future.
2) Seeing humanity’s demise, Apple will build a space plane into their next iMac.
3) The space plane will be called a total failure by every pundit who has a Dell or an iPhone knockoff. A really big fireball will prove the pundits correct.
4) The lack of stupid pundits will jeopardize MDN’s business model forcing them to resurrect Think Secret from space.
5) At the 2013 Macworld Expo Steve Jobs will introduce something utterly revolutionary the likes of which we will not have seen since the world got hit by that fireball thingy…
6) Steve will call it a “living room”
7) But since space planes don’t have [ahem] space for a living room, it will have to be a digital living room. But that’s okay since most of us will be able to fit everything we own into a MySpace account tied to Second Life.
It has been estimated that if every household in the US had one of those digital picture frames, another 3 average capacity power plants would be needed to be built to power them all.
What is going to power all this new gear from Apple?
“What is going to power all this new gear from Apple?”
Didn’t you see the Matrix? It will be a grid powered by vast numbers of unemployed MCSEs.
Absolutely no imagination! Glad they don’t work for Apple! LOL!
“‘AppleSound’ universal remote control”… The iPhone / Touch will be just that. I’m betting that the first iPhone / Touch application that Apple will make will be a remote control for Apple TV.
I’ve posted this 10 times now, but I just don’t get why people think Apple is going to make another device to control an Apple TV… No new keyboard (for Apple TV anyway), and no new remote.
Same goes for a game console… Apple is hell bent on getting rid of discs. They want everything to be downloaded. With that said, the games for an Apple game console would be downloaded through iTunes, to a console running OS X that connects to your television. Apple TV is an OS X box that connects to your television.
Apple’s hardware is in place. There is an OS X box everywhere they need one. It’s all about the software updates & content now.
Before we know it, we’ll be plugging our iPhones into the USB port on the Apple TV as an option to charge it, buying a bluetooth game controller for Apple TV, and controlling our music / video with our iPhones.
Predicting the future based on the past works until it doesn’t. The trick is to retire before then. This approach [the MW, btw] always leaves a few late followers in the lurch. The trick is to make sure none of them know your retirement address.
Hmmmmmm “Apple is hell bent on getting rid of discs. “
If that is so, then why was iTunes designed to let disks be downloaded to it and why are 80% of songs on iPods from CDs???
Discs will be around for a long time. They make a good fit with downloads.
Just a thought.
en
Your iPhone will be the clock radio. You place it in Yet another dock and the display stays on all night ( the dock of course is plugged in).
Who the hell is going to get up and “flip” through pics on a wall mounted display? Sad.
The obvious thing that’s missing is real control of the TV, not just a box for streaming content from a computer or the internet to the TV but a way to simplify presentation of, and access to, the VAST amount of cable TV content, most of it useless. We need software that can look at the content of programs for days ahead and present us with things that we are likely to want to watch based on input from us and past viewing habits. We need to be able to integrate that content with content on our computers and in the iTunes store. We need to be able to download and/or automatically record those programs in the background for future viewing. And we need remote controls that greatly simplify use of the TV and our other gadgets and allow us to watch multiple programs from different sources simultaneously. Bits of this dream already exist but they hard to use (TIVO drove me so crazy that I eventually unplugged it and threw it in the trash) and they are very poorly integrated with each other. You need a PhD in electronic engineering to hook them up. Because this is primarily a software and usability challenge, there is a huge opportunity for Apple here and I expect them to fill it.
Why would Apple sweat the small stuff? Jobs has his sights set on inventing the future from Apple’s blueprint.
What’s in the blueprint? How about dominating mobile, consumer, and enterprise and gov’t mkts, globally?
I think Apple will be valued at $2500 in 2013. CE and gadgets will help a little towards that valuation, but the real value will be in the OS X group, iTunes and Apple Stores, the App Store, the OS SDKs, and mobile devices (including off-the-shelf adoption by the military and black bag cultures, globally).
Apple will have the highest valuation of any US company. Pretty bold vision, no?
@ ElderNorm:
What I mean is Apple doesn’t want to make hardware that includes disc drives. That’s why they didn’t make a portable CD player, but instead made the iPod and created iTunes. That’s why the Apple TV has no disc drive, and the MacBook Air is the first step in getting them off the portables all together.
Of course you are allowed to import your old CDs and such, but the generation that is just getting their first iPod has little or no interest in CDs. They are growing up downloading songs, and have never been to a Tower Records or Warehouse.
Apple’s ultimate design goal is to make smooth rectangular objects that do as much as possible with as few parts as possible.
Besides the lack of disc drives I mentioned above, here’s some other examples:
1.) The latch is gone on the MacBook & MacBook Air. Expect that on a future MacBook Pro.
2.) The iSight light on my MacBook Pro is invisible when off, as is the light on the wireless keyboard (really cool when you look for it).
3.) Besides the functionality of the MagSafe power adapter, it brings the overall design closer to not being there at all.
4.) They’ve even tried to get rid of the fan inside the G4 cube.
5.) No BluRay, which I’m sure would be great for backups. Time Capsule was introduced instead.
I know I got a little carried away on the design side, but that’s how they approach it… Why have a disc drive if we can do without it?
Of course this is all stupid guessing, but I have to say – I’d love to see more and more (nicely integrated, smart) stuff from Apple. If there will be one company I’d trust to build my “smart house” with, that would be Apple.
@ Basil Ganglia:
Here’s another way Apple thinks: Forget about what is out there and how we can integrate it. Change it.
Instead of having something recorded, wouldn’t you rather just find it and download it? It’s almost the same thing, except you get to do it all at your own leisure. Apple will skip the cable networks entirely and try and get the content themselves. It’s all about giving the consumer 100% control of their media.