Rumors of an “Apple TV” have been circulating for over 15 years.
8 Facebook x.com Reddit Rumor Score 🤔 Maybe
Last updated 2 hours ago
Apple is said to be considering making a television, more than a decade after it abandoned the idea in favor of creating the Apple TV.
It's one of Steve Jobs's famous anecdotes, a claim reported by biographer Walter Isaacson, that Jobs said he had figured out television. “I finally figured it out,” he said in 2010, adding that his Apple TV would be “completely easy to use.”
Now, according to Bloomberg, Apple may be trying to realize those ambitions again. It's nothing more than a vague rumor for now, but Apple is said to be evaluating the idea again.
What’s new is that such a device could conceivably fit into a host of other rumors about Apple looking to expand its home devices. An Apple TV — or perhaps an Apple-branded TV — could be a key part of a range of smart home devices that Apple is said to be planning to release in 2025 and beyond.
Assuming it’s the current tvOS in a slightly larger box than the Apple TV 4K, it’s easy to see how Apple might do this — and hard to see why it would. Apple TV is already available as part of at least most smart TVs, and Apple would likely need to bring something new to market if it wanted to sell a lot of them.
It’s not like Apple is trying to lower the price of TVs, or any other product market it operates in. Still, it’s entirely possible that a TV maker would be willing to partner on such a device because of the value of the Apple brand.
But Apple already makes the hardware that goes into the Apple TV 4K, and LG already makes monitors for it. So then again, it’s entirely possible that Apple could bring its own TV to market.
There’s a reason, though, that Tim Cook squashed such reports back in the early 2010s. Apple’s then-chief operating officer flatly stated that Apple was “not interested” in the TV market.
Even Jobs didn’t seem so convinced. Not only did he oversee the transition from TV to the Apple TV set-top box, he also had Apple call the whole thing a hobby.
Apple doesn’t release sales figures for the Apple TV 4K or any other specific device. However, the latest available data shows that the Apple TV+ streaming service had just 3% of the market in 2022.
That 3% figure includes everyone watching through the Apple TV 4K and all smart TVs that include the service. So it's not like Apple TV has a promising track record — although at the same time, these numbers show why Apple is expanding the number of services that support Apple TV+.
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