The New iTV Concept?
For those who like to watch and predict the Apple forecast, the next big thing could very well be an Apple television set (possibly called iTV?). Just like any Apple product, we want to know what it can do but even more important is what it will look like. Artist Guilherme M. Schasiepen has a few ideas about what form the iTV might take and has shared them on Flickr. For those of you that tend toward being more right-brained, his predictions are also available in 3D.
In his own words, Jobs promised we wouldn’t have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels, but little is known about what this means. A safe guess would likely say that these television sets will use a version of Apple TV that accesses subscription or pay-per-use services for their content. This may not work as well for those of us who have considerable investments into BluRay and other media formats, though it seems unlikely that any hardware of this sort could be successful without accepting connections from other peripherals (especially console gaming systems). But, maybe Jobs wasn’t looking to please those consumers who want to hook up this that and the other thing. Perhaps there is enough of a market without those people.
It probably goes without saying that the design would be elegant and that it should sync with all of your other Apple products and services including iCloud. What I want to know is whether it will let me play my iOS games on the big screen!
Maybe I’m romanticizing it a little bit, but I’d like to think that Steve Jobs mentioning in his biography that he had cracked how to create a complete integrated television set with “the simplest user interface you could imagine” is his way of giving us his final ‘one more thing.’
Do you think Apple can make an iTV successful? Is your first reaction that you need to have one or are you thinking Apple would be crazy to go this direction?