“Apple almost certainly made a sound decision by giving up on the idea of developing a television set,” Leonid Bershidsky writes for Bloomberg View. “Nonetheless, Apple could still change the way the way we watch television and movies if it decided to create a smart projector. There is a market for these devices that Apple, with its gift for making user-friendly gadgets, could take by storm.”
“People buy projectors because they can produce an image of almost any size. A screen or a flat white wall turns the room into a cinema. Kids love it, and on big game days you can turn your apartment into a sports bar,” Bershidsky writes. “There’s a price to pay, however: Even the best of these devices is stuck in the past. If you’re a connoisseur of 1970s interfaces.”
“This is the kind of market that is ripe for Apple to work the same kind of magic as it did with music players and mobile handsets,” Bershidsky writes. “According to Bloomberg Intelligence, almost 229 million LCD TV sets were sold last year, compared with 8.3 million projectors. The opportunity for Apple is to turn projectors from a niche product for geeks into a mainstream alternative to TV sets. That could truly change the way we watch at home, taking us from the 1970s into the 21st century.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Now there’s an idea… that leaves us cold.
Ambient room light, expensive bulbs with short lives (LED might fix that), pull-down screens and/or roughly-textured flat white walls, noisy fans, costly… it seems like a bag of hurt and just too niche.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “BD” for the heads up.]