“At least twice over the past decade Apple has been close to announcing its own television,” Robert X. Cringely writes for BetaNews. “Not the Apple TV set top box but actual big screen TVs with, well, big screens. But both times I’ve heard about this Apple backed away at the last minute. The reason why they did was because even an Apple television would be just another television with an Apple logo. Steve Jobs realized that TVs had become a commodity and there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to make Apple’s television special.”
“I’m not here to say Apple has finally found its TV design path as suggested in Walter Isaacson’s book and will be doing a big screen TV after all. In fact I’m pretty sure Apple will never sell its own TVs,” Cringely writes. “But I think Cupertino has finally figured out a way to grab an important and profitable part of nearly all TVs, controlling the future of video entertainment in the process.”
“The technical area I think Apple wants to dominate is High Dynamic Range (HDR) video — technology for making displays of all types brighter and display more colors. Right now there are two major video advances entering the market — 4K and HDR — and tests show HDR is a much more obvious improvement than 4K for viewers,” Cringely writes. “At around $6 billion Dolby would be cheap for Apple to buy. The quality of Dolby engineering is such that Apple would be thrilled to have the people, too, not just their technology. And as a part of Apple the resources Dolby engineers could command would grow exponentially.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dolby would be Apple’s biggest acquisition, but with only about 1,700 employees, it’d certainly be manageable if Apple considered Dolby’s IP compelling enough.