It looks like we might finally have some solid intel on Apple's iTV and not from some anonymous "people with familiar with the matter." This news appears to come directly from Foxconn chief Terry Gou, the man whose factories actually build Apple products.
I have no doubt that Apple is going to become one of the most powerful video distribution networks by nature of its existing customer base. The sooner TV networks see things like Apple’s distribution vehicle as a critical way to get their content to the masses quickly, the sooner they can fine tune business models to take advantage of the new era of video content.
As expected, Apple debuted a new version of its hockey puck-sized Apple TV media player, trumpeting new features like 1080p video playback and iCloud support.
Join us at 1pm ET (10am PT) for moment-by-moment news from Apple’s San Francisco event, as it happens.
Over the course of his career, Steve Jobs revolutionized three industries — personal computing, digital music, and mobile communication. Before his death last fall, he had turned his attention to a fourth — television.
On March 7th at 1pm ET (10am PT), Apple will hold an iPad-related media event at one of its favorite venues, San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens. Whatever the news turns out to be, I’ll be sitting in the audience furiously relaying it to you right here in liveblog form, with color commentary from Techland’s Doug Aamoth.
My experience from 30 years of scrutinizing Apple and Steve Jobs makes me think that there are probably three key goals behind the company’s strategy to reinvent TV.
Apple is just now looking into display capabilities for an Apple television, according to the latest scuttlebutt, which means a product launch may not happen until the end of this year or early 2013.
Onward, tablets, smartphones and post-PC (yet still just as much “personal computing”) devices — call them whatever you like, 2012 will see a glut of me-too mobiles designed to untether us from stodgy office desktops and augment our everyday, ordinary activities by slipping into our everyday, ordinary surroundings.
Can anything measure up to what we want to see from Steve Jobs’ last Apple device? We may only be a few months away from an answer, after a new rumor that an Apple-branded television could be released as early as the second or third quarter of 2012.
We’ve reached another milestone in the Apple product rumor cycle, in which the Wall Street Journal drops a big story based on unnamed sources. The topic now is an Apple television set—not to be confused with the existing Apple TV set-top box—and the WSJ mentions several features we can expect if the product becomes real, based on talks Apple has held with unnamed media company executives.
