“The funny part about Apple’s success is that customers, shareholders and sometimes even employees think there’s a magic formula that will roll out groundbreaking products with a steady predictable and assembly line cadence,” Larry Dignan writes for ZDNet. “Let’s paraphrase the Supremes: You can’t hurry R&D. You’ll just have to wait. R&D don’t come easy…”
Dignan writes, “And sometimes you just have to scrap the product that everyone and their mom thought Apple was going to release: The Apple TV [sic “Apple Television”], also known as the most famous product never launched.”
“The R&D lesson—and Apple’s discipline—is worth noting as the latest Carl Icahn-Apple skirmish. In YALTA (yet another letter to Apple), Icahn praises Apple’s share buybacks and dividends and then goes through the rationale why shares are undervalued. One big reason is the Apple TV [sic “Apple Television”],” Dignan writes. “Cue the leak to the Wall Street Journal trick to tell Icahn to cool his jets.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple TV is a long-shipping product currently in its third iteration and likely to soon be in its fourth. Don’t use “Apple TV” to refer to the mythical “Apple Television.” It’s needlessly confusing.
When Apple looks at what categories to enter, we ask these kinds of questions: What are the primary technologies behind this? What do we bring? Can we make a significant contribution to society with this? If we can’t, and if we can’t own the key technologies, we don’t do it. That philosophy comes directly from [Steve Jobs] and it still very much permeates the place. I hope that it always will. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, March 18, 2015
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Gene Munster gives up the Apple Television ghost – May 19, 2015
Behind Apple’s move to shelve their UHD TV project – May 18, 2015