“The Wall Street Journal finally (hopefully?) ended the era of dumb Apple-idiot-box rumors last night,” Brian Barrett writes for Wired. “The WSJ patiently explained that Apple abandoned any HDTV plans well over a year ago.”
“This isn’t to say that Apple didn’t explore the possibility of making a television set. It certainly did, as the WSJ and others have pointed out over the years,” Barrett writes. “But experimenting with new products is far from actually putting them on shelves — especially when that product has virtually no upside to a company that values little else.”
“It’s not impossible to make money selling television sets, but it is very, very hard. More importantly, it’s not the kind of money Apple likes to make,” Barrett writes. “The company’s projected gross profit margin for 2015 is bumping up against 40 percent, four times what a television typically commands. And thanks to sluggish iPad sales, it’s found out the hard way that products with long lifespans don’t look so hot on its earnings reports.”
MacDailyNews Take: Thanks, actually, fundamentally, to how well Apple builds iPads. They last and last and last. That’s why sales are “sluggish.” Sluggish is a relative term, of course: Appel sold more iPads in the last 90 days than Microsoft sold Surface tablets, ever (including all of the freebies they send out to be iPad shields on TV studio desks, NFL sidelines, etcetera).
“In a world where television sets are so thoroughly commoditized, there’s simply no killer feature Apple can provide that makes it worth the trouble. Even Munster, the Don Quixote to Apple’s HDTV windmill, has finally admitted as much, saying in a note to clients that he ‘incorrectly assumed that a combination of Siri, FaceTime, a TV app store, and PrimeSense based motion control could be compelling enough as a unique feature set for the device,'” Barrett writes. “Besides, Apple already has the perfect path into your living room. It has Apple TV.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Gene Munster wasn’t the only one who “incorrectly assumed that a combination of Siri, FaceTime, a TV app store, and PrimeSense based motion control could be compelling enough as a unique feature set for the device.” Apple did, too.
Claiming that “An Apple HDTV Never Made Any Sense” as this Wired article is headlined is ludicrous. At one point it made sense even to Apple, which undertook the R&D project in the first place.
As with many products, some of which we’ll likely never even hear about, after doing their due diligence, Apple said “no.”
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things. ― Steve Jobs
Related articles:
The ‘Apple Television’ lesson: You can’t hurry R&D, you’ll just have to wait – May 19, 2015
Gene Munster gives up the Apple Television ghost – May 19, 2015
Behind Apple’s move to shelve their UHD TV project – May 18, 2015