Apple to ignore media centre market
Rather odd news from Apple. In an interview last week CEO Steve Jobs told the press that the company wasn’t interested in producing a media centre type product (which includes a TV and video recording software) as he saw the market as being a small one.
“Generally what they want to view on television has to do with turning their mind off,” he told reporters. He added that video recording is processor intensive and is best left to a device that is not doing other things such as playing games or running spreadsheets. “When I want to record ‘The West Wing,’ I want to make damn sure it records ‘The West Wing,'” he said.
It was expected that Apple would unveil a media centre type product to take on microsoft next year. Some analysts were predicting that the big consumer electronics battle of the future would be for the wireless home. They had predicted that a product using an Apple operating system, would stream video/audio to monitors/devices across the house and go head to head with similar microsoft powered devices from Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and other CE/PC makers.
We think he’s bluffing…
One thought on “Apple to ignore media centre market”
I doubt that he’s bluffing. There has been a serious amount of social research that shows people use PCs and TVs in a fundamentally different way. Simple convergence doesn’t work (millions have been spent on trials and experiments).
What does work (and what he mentions in the talk with analysts – I recommend listening to it) is making TVs smarter and giving them their own capabilities. He did mention smarter TiVo like devices (at the headend or next to the TV) – he even said it would be a huge market. He didn’t offer if Apple would get into the game, but he was making a real case against vanilla convergence.
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