Don't forget the problem of consumers even knowing they are watching HD content. People still buy HD TVs, hook up SD content, and think they're watching HD since it looks better than their old TV.
As long as it looks good, I think consumers will be happy. Having a scaling engine that turns 1080p content into 1184p content better than the competition is not something I think will change a lot of buyers minds. If you're at 99% optimal and Apple is at 96.5%, almost no one will care.
Having a simple remote, easy access to content, or a responsive user interface will win people over a lot faster than the technical quality of your scaling. Think of all those "important" things the first iPhone didn't have (memory cards, user replaceable batteries, keyboard, 3G, etc). Look at all the things the iPhone still doesn't have. The average customer has pretty obviously made their choice that those limitations were acceptable.
> Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
> “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
But, really, what does anyone expect incumbents to say? They know that they can't compete with Apple on the ecosystem. They know that they can compete with Apple on the quality of the picture, because that's the part that they will likely be supplying to Apple anyway. It's clever to try to shape the direction of the discourse away from the stuff Apple will be trying to compete on and back to what Samsung try to compete on.
> But, really, what does anyone expect incumbents to say?
Exactly. It's not like a Samsung rep is going to get up on stage and talk about how one of their competitors entering another of their core businesses is bad for Samsung. You have to sound confident, and in the case of TV they probably ARE much more confident regarding competition with Apple. Whether that confidence is warranted remains to be seen.
Apple has an established track record of not getting what people want from a TV. Ala carte TV shows and a crippled set-top box is not very inspiring.
Palm wasn't exactly a superstar before the iPhone's launch. I had a Treo... the only thing that could be said about it was that the crappy web browser was better than BlackBerry's crappier one.
I think Apple's strategy is to provide the best user experience. Clearly they don't always succeed in this but this is their focus. And they have shown over and over again that they can deliver a very good user experience without using the latest and greatest hardware.
Their goal is to provide this with commodity hardware where possible. Every other manufacturer thinks the goal is having the greatest hardware instead of the greatest user experience. Samsung should be worried if Apple does indeed enter the TV market.
Few of Apples products have the latest, best hardware in them. Yet they sell very well, and are extremely profitable. This situation reminds me a lot of when Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone.
I'm not saying that Apple will deliver the best display, but I also know they will not deliver one that can be considered even remotely close to bad. With all the potential an Apple TV has, with the iOS-ecosystem, with Siri-voice control, streaming media from your Macs (the list goes on), I'd be very scared if I were Samsung.
Few of Apples products have the latest, best hardware in them.
Whenever Apple launches a new product, they do generally have the latest, best hardware in them. The "everyone else is chasing specs" argument seems to appear a bit later in the product cycle when competitors have jumped ahead.
With all the potential an Apple TV has, with the iOS-ecosystem, with Siri-voice control, streaming media from your Macs (the list goes on), I'd be very scared if I were Samsung.
I have a Samsung TV. My smartphone acts as a remote with a cute little app. I can "throw" pictures, videos, and music to it. I can't run Android apps on it, but it is one of their "Smart" models with a bunch of apps on it.
I use zero of that functionality. Instead I just use the on and off button and the functionality of my cable box. If Apple thinks they're going to disrupt the content business, har de har har.
Sidenote -- my cable box is from Motorola, which is now Google. So Google just reentered the TV business in a very, very big way (after the rather dismal failure that was Google TV).
Did Apple disrupt the music industry in any meaningful way? Digital music could be bought before Apple, including without DRM, so I would say no. That they're a retailer is like saying 7-11 disrupted the candy bar industry.
Everyone wants to get in the content chain business because you can try to essentially monetize other people's content. Only in the television arena the creators are very aware of such mechanisms, they already have an avenue to the consumer, so they vigorously fight against "disruptions". Google quickly discovered that with Google TV.
"Digital music could be bought before Apple, including without DRM, so I would say no."
I would say yes.
Apple owns over 70% of the music download market. Before iTunes, download sales were a minuscule fraction of physical CDs sales. They're now larger. Basically, around 35% of all music sales now go through Apple.
Retailers with that kind of market share have serious clout.
I think you're definitely stretching it a little. It's like saying "Did Apple disrupt the smartphone industry in any meaningful way? You could email and run apps on smartphones before."
Maybe they didn't change the industry as much, but purchasing content and getting it onto devices definitely was not as accessible before for the general public.
First, I doubt the iTV will be an actual television, it will probably be a set-top box like the current TV. Maybe it will obviate the need for a cable box. Television screen are a low-profit margin business, and people don't want to upgrade to frequently. More info here: http://www.torontostandard.com/technology/why-apples-itv-won...
Second, I think this article is dead wrong. Consumers will care more about a TV being "smart" and having nice functionality, not how crisp or large the pictures is like Samsung claims. Any modern TV is nice enough that manufacturers need to compete on other features, like the accessibility of content. While there is a lot of content available over the internet now (legally and otherwise), viewing it is never painless, and this can be made easier. This is a space ripe for disruption and Samsung is apparently burying their head in the sand.
A normal TV last's 5-20 years a smart TV get's outdated in 3-5. Consumers have long been aware of this which is why small TV's come with built in DVD players but large TV's don't.
However, Apple's business model - at least for iPod/iPhone, maybe MacBooks - has been to make a decent profit on hardware (estimates as high as 30%), and to incentivize the higher price with peripherals, such as a large support network, good compatibility and a plethora of apps.
The same can be said of PC's. Apple came in and changed that.
The iMac turned around things for Apple because they were cheap, all-in-one computers. I considered getting one at the time just as a kitchen computer.
Apple played the existing game with the iMac. Even now in their computer products if you spec out a comparable competitor, the pricing is very similar.
Apple makes big money in nascent new markets -- tablets and smartphones. Tablets because they can draft int the pricing of computers, and smartphones because most of the cost is hidden by subsidization (if everyone had to pay the total upfront cost of the device things would rapidly change).
Swapping out bullshit about how the iTV will fail, with bullshit about how the iPhone would fail. So familiar...
”We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the cellular reception category,” Moseley said. “They don’t have the best baseband firmware in the world and they don’t have world renowned call quality that has been awarded more than anyone else.” Read on for more.
“Phones are ultimately about voice and call quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about call quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on call quality,” Moseley told Pocket-lint. “So, from that perspective, it’s not a great concern but it remains to be seen what they’re going to come out with, if anything.”
Assume for a second he's right, that picture quality is the current primary factor in purchasing a TV (I disagree but thats not the point here).
What Apple has always been able to do is change "what is important" in consumers minds (a phone isn't just for calls, its for apps) - and thats what Samsung needs to be afraid of.
My prediction is that exactly this will happen. Of course TVs will get apps, etc that come with iOS territory. The real game changer will be the remote. No TV manufacturer really cares about the remote. They have been following the same formula for as long as remotes have existed. If my guess is correct about Apple, a year from now TVs will be judged by their remote "experience" and not their picture quality. It will be an amazing shift to watch.
Agreed wholeheartedly. Before the iPhone, the telephone industry, cell phone manufacturers and carriers thought that size and call quality were the primary factors in purchasing a cell phone.. Enter the first iPhone in 2007 with abysmal call quality, the paradigm shift in the industry thereafter, and the rest.. is history.
If TV is "ultimately about picture quality" then BetaMax would have won out over VHS in the VCR wars. Instead, consumers sacrificed a little picture quality for larger recording capacity. And if it comes down to convenience and usability, Samsung should be plenty scared of Apple.
You may be thinking of Minidisc. Recording time was a principal issue in the tape wars – Betamax could do 60 minutes per tape while VHS variants were good for 120 to 240 minutes. Hollywood movies couldn't fit on a Beta tape.
"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."
Are people on here aware that Apple already makes Apple TV? By many of the comments I have to guess no, given that many seem to miss that Apple has already demonstrated what intelligence and ease of use they bring to TVs.
The TV industry is a massive, hyper-competitive industry with extremely tight margins (I can buy a good quality 46" LED 1080p smart TV for less than the price of an iPhone 4S). TVs have -- by design -- tried to focus on the display side, leaving the content side to whatever myriad of boxes you have pushing content to it, and that's how customers differentiate.
I don't see Apple being successful at TVs at all, or even why they would want to be beyond what they offer with Apple TV.
> I don't see Apple being successful at TVs at all, or even why they would want to be beyond what they offer with Apple TV.
Apple could bring a lot to the TV watching experience. My current setup... sucks. I have 4 "content" boxes multiplexed by a receiver and an ill-setup sound system that, honestly, I've never bothered to fix simply because my family doesn't watch TV that often.
I pay for several services which we only use lightly.
If Apple came out with a dead-simple setup that solved the mild-moderate TV usage case (ie, for example, integrated with a cable/ISP provider) that improved on the quality and integration between the content and the screen, they wouldn't be able to keep the screens on the shelf.
This would require as much human-factors innovation as it would payment/cost innovation.
Everyone knows UX is where Apple excels, but pricing/cost is another area where Apple has heavily innovated
Two cases - prior to the iPhone, getting mobile data was a $45/mo charge for my Treo - for limited data! - I actually saved money and increased my mobile data utility by getting the orig iPhone. Also, prior to the iPad the concept of seamless on-demand prepaid mobile data was simply unrealized and to many, unfathomable. The iPad succeeded on this factor as much as the device itself.
Apple has a big hill to climb, but they're proven the can do the unthinkable before. Don't count them out yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
IMO it is a bad idea to /not worry/ about apple hedging into your vertical.