I think you're completely wrong. I see Apple taking on any device that has a screen. Any device that has a screen and can use apps. After TV I fully expect them to get into cameras.
They are high end for consumer products, but they don't tend to do a lot of "pro" hardware. their computers are used professionally but they aren't specifically made as pro gear. Sure they have the Mac Pros, but they haven't updated them in ages and I think they mainly keep will keep them going to support the development of software for all the other hardware they sell. I don't think they want to get into a market where they might sell a few million DSLR or point and shoot cameras a years vs somewhere between 10 and 100 million iphones at $800 a pop.
I'll be the first to admit if I am wrong, they certainly could make a pretty awesome camera if they wanted to. Should be interesting to see what market/s they go after next!
Nope, they don't care. Things change, you either lead or you get your lunch eaten. It's better to lead the next market than to hold onto the old market.
Apple will be coming out with redesigned laptops ... Incorporating innovations from the Airs. I also expect them to start bringing some more iOS features to the desktop OS in the near future.
Their strategy has been to reduce the number of platforms and leverage technology... The iOS uses the same core as MacOS -- and I figure they will beef up the iPad while making the MacPro much lighter -- so either the MacBook Air will be fazed out or the consumer grade MacBook will... That will leave Apple with 4 device platforms instead of 6. I just wonder if the iPad will be used to create the Future Apple TV -- with a few tweaks and reducing costs by removing the screen and battery... It would be perfect.
Handheld mobile MP3 players had only been around for a few years when Apple rolled out its iPhone. They were simply joining a recently introduced market.
Television sets have been around for a century. At this point, there are antique television sets. There were no antique MP3 players when the first iPod debuted.
The current Apple TV does not replace a television set. It's an addon dongle for the set that lets it pick up entertainment/education video programming from Apple itself or from a local Apple device.
When Apple wanted to help music artist, they didn't roll out a guitar, drum kits, etc. Just Garage Band music editor/player application program and MIDI and USB support for third party devices.
When Apple's iPod joined the car industry, it did it through interfaces, not by an Apple-designed car.
Anyone can add TV reception to a Mac by purchasing an inexpensive EyeTV device from Elgato and plugging it into the Mac's USB 2 port. It integrates fine to the Mac OS, hardware, and screen. You can also play TV-recorded videos from it on your iPhone/iPad and I think on Apple TV as well, wirelessly, of course.
The EyeTV device costs about a hundred bucks. Apple sells the existing teensy little Apple TV device for $99. Why build a television set which is mundane hardware when you can take control of the screen and audio using a $99 device the size of a baby's fist?
With phones, things were different. Apple couldn't very well make a dongle for pocket sized phones like they already have for TVs. They had to utterly replace the whole beast.
They were the first guys to make a phone that was like a whole full fledged general purpose computer, not some "embedded systems" gadget. In that case, the only way to do it was with heavy duty retooling of the existing state of the art for such products.
With HDTV sets, which are already designed to work seamlessly with computer and computer devices, and are huge in comparison to a cell phone, there is no need to replace and the dongle is not at all a nuisance.
I agree, the MacBook Pro and the air will merge once the air gets powerful enough. I don't know if it will be the next generation or the one after that.
The iPad and the apple TV are already almost the same device, they are both iOS devices. If you use AirPlay, they work together very nicely now. I suspect any future apple TV will be iOS based and controlled by a touch screen and/or voice.
Stand alone cameras are on the way out. Sure, there will always be nicer big lens cameras but looking at the top cameras on flickr and other camera sites, already a majority of photography is done on camera phones and it's only going to grow. Apple doesn't go after the high end niche market so I don't see them going after the higher end dslr market and the consumer point and shoot market is where the camera phones are starting to dominate.
"I really doubt that Apple will ever do a traditional television set per se, as it really is not into "inventing" the past the way some other companies are."
I guess you must have missed that whole revolutionizing the portable music market thing right?
I think that the full size TV market would be a tough business to take over. There are lots of players selling almost identical products at very low margins.
What apple needs is a more advanced box to plug into all those screens, and (most importantly) some exclusive content deals. The current apple TV is fine (I own two of them), but it is limited by content. At this point, I can either buy content from iTunes or watch Netflix. I would love to be able to access paid content directly (i.e., subscribe to HBO directly without having to go through a cable provider) of have streaming acess to specific networks without having to pay for a cable package. Now, I pay for cable so I can watch about 1% of the content. The problem with TV isn't the hardware, it's the content and the way the content is packaged.
I agree, the iPhone is killing off the point and shoot camera market. Apple has no interest in competing with Nikon and Canon for the pro and prosumer markets. That is an entirely different business, and it isn't "broken" like music and TV.
They did major damage by reinventing the cell phone market; they invented the smart phone and changed the whole game. If there is an opportunity like that for TV hardware, I'm not smart enough to see it. I do think there are opportunities to reinvent the way content is delivered.
Actually, no. It has been reported for a long time that for a Windows tablet that worked to be sold, it would have to cost more than an iPad.
There were tons of complaints in the news from HP and other IBM personal computer "clone" makers that Apple was making it too hard to make imitation iPads by copying their hardware ingredients list.
As a result, HP said it could not compete, and threw the HP TouchPad which MS leader Ballmer misnamed slate 18 months earlier onto the junk heap.
HP was the biggest computer maker. Now, Apple is the mainstream computer maker and HP is playing second fiddle.
HP nearly exited the whole computer field entirely, because its CEO said they just could not make much profit selling PCs.
Windows 7 was going to be too expensive and power hungry for a tablet so Microsoft's whole plan to make a mobile computer died before it got to the launch bay. They are now, 2 years or more after iPad, shooting to try it again someday when Windows 8 comes out.
The fact is that Apple really doesn't have competition in the iPad niche of computing. In computers, the difference between an equivalent IBM PC clone and a Mac Mini system is not that difference price wise.
Stores are going under trying to support Windows with software sales or service. Egghead failed. COMP-USA failed.
Best Buy, which hosts the Geek Squad, guys who use expensive diagnostic tools and backup software to do simple stuff Mac users don't have to fuss with are in trouble now too. People just can't afford that kind of expensive help for extra problems in what, lets face it, should be simple computing appliances at this point.
Acer promised the PC industry a price war just a couple of years ago, trying to bolster consumer/investor confidence that it would move up a notch on the computer maker's rankings. Know what happened instead last year? Their revenue plummeted and their ranking fell accordingly.
Apple skyrocketed upward last year because it has the more affordable computing.
Kindle Fire is essentially, a 2-year old second hand computer. It doesn't even ship with last year's version of the Android OS. The non-Fire Kindle has an "experimental" web browser as if Amazon is not sure the Web will catch on yet and is not committed to R&D expenditures to support it, and the Kindle Fire has the slowest web browser you can hold in your hand.
Nobody is even sure how they got it to run so slowly. Amazon claimed it would be fast, so that is almost false advertising. That's low end in terms of business ethics not price/value.
The TCO of other Android based handhelds is not even projected yet. It's clear that trojans are a serious problem in the official & unofficial Android stores. To date, no one has amassed the cost burden that will represent for society and Android users/owners. Probably a lot, based on what you see in the contemporary IBM PC clone marketplace.
Apple might come out with a high end iPad in the future but right now there is just the one mainstream model with 3 different memory configurations, and the option to leave 3G off if you want to. They aren't forcing it on anyone.
If you look at Apple's trend, all the major products they introduced from 2001-2010 came down (gasp!) in price from what they were introduced at. The stand-up iMacs, notebooks, iPods, iPhones, productivity apps, home multimedia apps, and so forth.
Apple drove the price of music down for the whole industry and eliminated a lot of unnecessary costs: making CDs, trucking CDs cross country, storing CDs in warehouses/stores/landfills, etc. CD salesmen were toast, and Tower Records security guards were out of a job. A *lot* less pollution and waste were generated in the wake of the switch to Apple's way of doing music entertainment sales
Did you forget how album prices dropped from as high as $18.99 per album to $9.99, with the ability to pay just 99 cents if all you wanted off that album was a single track?
Look at movies. Apple cut their price to below ten dollars. Prior to Apple's price slashing, the industry was makin' and truckin' and storin' their DVDs all over the country. That set you back $19.95 to $34.95. After Apple got rid of the same wasteful overhead costs as CDs, the price of movies fell to less than a sawbuck.
Look at supposedly, good old fashioned PCs, the ones running Windows. Application prices typically run $20 to $60. Good price?
No! Apple slashed those prices as well.
One-third of iOS apps in Apple's iPad/iPhone app store are FREE. Many of the remainder cost only $0.99. The average price of all apps (sum of all prices divided by number of apps) is about three and a half dollars. Apple's own productivity apps like Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (Steve Jobs presentation program) sell for only $9.99.
Apple also slashed the price of its operating system upgrades. Whereas they had been costing $129 each, they cut it to under $30. And that forced Microsoft to do the same with some upgrades from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Apple also introduced an App Store of Mac OS X applications to the Macintosh computer, offering similar benefits for desktop computer users to the ones found when shopping for iOS based mobile device apps. Again, the prices in the store were lower than the prevailing prices prior to Apple making its move.
High end in terms of quality maybe but not high end in terms of price anymore.
scabnabbitFeb 11, 2012Buried
Actually, in this case it's a positive for Apple:
Tablets, phones, etc (so far) are being updated at a much faster pace then Desktop items.
I'm certainly interested in the (potential) Quad Core iPad 3.
But we'll see. Word is ASUS is fixing the WiFi issues on its Transformer Prime, plus there's whatever else is coming out.
It's a good time to be a geek.
norman619Feb 12, 2012Buried
If you have the money to spend on these toys.
theskinsfactoryFeb 12, 2012Buried
I think you're completely wrong. I see Apple taking on any device that has a screen. Any device that has a screen and can use apps. After TV I fully expect them to get into cameras.
theskinsfactoryFeb 12, 2012Buried
We'll see.
And Apple is the high-end market.
antialiasFeb 12, 2012Buried
They are high end for consumer products, but they don't tend to do a lot of "pro" hardware. their computers are used professionally but they aren't specifically made as pro gear. Sure they have the Mac Pros, but they haven't updated them in ages and I think they mainly keep will keep them going to support the development of software for all the other hardware they sell. I don't think they want to get into a market where they might sell a few million DSLR or point and shoot cameras a years vs somewhere between 10 and 100 million iphones at $800 a pop.
I'll be the first to admit if I am wrong, they certainly could make a pretty awesome camera if they wanted to. Should be interesting to see what market/s they go after next!
craig1958Feb 11, 2012Buried
Nope, they don't care. Things change, you either lead or you get your lunch eaten. It's better to lead the next market than to hold onto the old market.
craig1958Feb 12, 2012Buried
Not yet, but early March is starting to look very likely.
vitriolandangstFeb 12, 2012Buried
Apple will be coming out with redesigned laptops ... Incorporating innovations from the Airs. I also expect them to start bringing some more iOS features to the desktop OS in the near future.
Their strategy has been to reduce the number of platforms and leverage technology... The iOS uses the same core as MacOS -- and I figure they will beef up the iPad while making the MacPro much lighter -- so either the MacBook Air will be fazed out or the consumer grade MacBook will... That will leave Apple with 4 device platforms instead of 6. I just wonder if the iPad will be used to create the Future Apple TV -- with a few tweaks and reducing costs by removing the screen and battery... It would be perfect.
johnnysoftwareFeb 12, 2012Buried
Handheld mobile MP3 players had only been around for a few years when Apple rolled out its iPhone. They were simply joining a recently introduced market.
Television sets have been around for a century. At this point, there are antique television sets. There were no antique MP3 players when the first iPod debuted.
The current Apple TV does not replace a television set. It's an addon dongle for the set that lets it pick up entertainment/education video programming from Apple itself or from a local Apple device.
When Apple wanted to help music artist, they didn't roll out a guitar, drum kits, etc. Just Garage Band music editor/player application program and MIDI and USB support for third party devices.
When Apple's iPod joined the car industry, it did it through interfaces, not by an Apple-designed car.
Anyone can add TV reception to a Mac by purchasing an inexpensive EyeTV device from Elgato and plugging it into the Mac's USB 2 port. It integrates fine to the Mac OS, hardware, and screen. You can also play TV-recorded videos from it on your iPhone/iPad and I think on Apple TV as well, wirelessly, of course.
The EyeTV device costs about a hundred bucks. Apple sells the existing teensy little Apple TV device for $99. Why build a television set which is mundane hardware when you can take control of the screen and audio using a $99 device the size of a baby's fist?
With phones, things were different. Apple couldn't very well make a dongle for pocket sized phones like they already have for TVs. They had to utterly replace the whole beast.
They were the first guys to make a phone that was like a whole full fledged general purpose computer, not some "embedded systems" gadget. In that case, the only way to do it was with heavy duty retooling of the existing state of the art for such products.
With HDTV sets, which are already designed to work seamlessly with computer and computer devices, and are huge in comparison to a cell phone, there is no need to replace and the dongle is not at all a nuisance.
theskinsfactoryFeb 14, 2012Buried
Handheld portable players were around a lot longer than you're saying. Or did you forget about Sony Walkman?
macparrotFeb 12, 2012Buried
Why? He said some time ago that if anyone was going to cannibalize Mac sales, he'd want it to be Apple. It's still money in Apple's pockets
craig1958Feb 12, 2012Buried
I agree, the MacBook Pro and the air will merge once the air gets powerful enough. I don't know if it will be the next generation or the one after that.
The iPad and the apple TV are already almost the same device, they are both iOS devices. If you use AirPlay, they work together very nicely now. I suspect any future apple TV will be iOS based and controlled by a touch screen and/or voice.
antialiasFeb 12, 2012Buried
Stand alone cameras are on the way out. Sure, there will always be nicer big lens cameras but looking at the top cameras on flickr and other camera sites, already a majority of photography is done on camera phones and it's only going to grow. Apple doesn't go after the high end niche market so I don't see them going after the higher end dslr market and the consumer point and shoot market is where the camera phones are starting to dominate.
theskinsfactoryFeb 12, 2012Buried
And as far as your comment:
"I really doubt that Apple will ever do a traditional television set per se, as it really is not into "inventing" the past the way some other companies are."
I guess you must have missed that whole revolutionizing the portable music market thing right?
craig1958Feb 12, 2012Buried
I think that the full size TV market would be a tough business to take over. There are lots of players selling almost identical products at very low margins.
What apple needs is a more advanced box to plug into all those screens, and (most importantly) some exclusive content deals. The current apple TV is fine (I own two of them), but it is limited by content. At this point, I can either buy content from iTunes or watch Netflix. I would love to be able to access paid content directly (i.e., subscribe to HBO directly without having to go through a cable provider) of have streaming acess to specific networks without having to pay for a cable package. Now, I pay for cable so I can watch about 1% of the content. The problem with TV isn't the hardware, it's the content and the way the content is packaged.
theskinsfactoryFeb 12, 2012Buried
The said could have easily been said of the mobile phone market. They went into a market where RIM and Nokia owned it and did major damage.
craig1958Feb 12, 2012Buried
I agree, the iPhone is killing off the point and shoot camera market. Apple has no interest in competing with Nikon and Canon for the pro and prosumer markets. That is an entirely different business, and it isn't "broken" like music and TV.
craig1958Feb 12, 2012Buried
They did major damage by reinventing the cell phone market; they invented the smart phone and changed the whole game. If there is an opportunity like that for TV hardware, I'm not smart enough to see it. I do think there are opportunities to reinvent the way content is delivered.
johnnysoftwareFeb 12, 2012Buried
Actually, no. It has been reported for a long time that for a Windows tablet that worked to be sold, it would have to cost more than an iPad.
There were tons of complaints in the news from HP and other IBM personal computer "clone" makers that Apple was making it too hard to make imitation iPads by copying their hardware ingredients list.
As a result, HP said it could not compete, and threw the HP TouchPad which MS leader Ballmer misnamed slate 18 months earlier onto the junk heap.
HP was the biggest computer maker. Now, Apple is the mainstream computer maker and HP is playing second fiddle.
HP nearly exited the whole computer field entirely, because its CEO said they just could not make much profit selling PCs.
Windows 7 was going to be too expensive and power hungry for a tablet so Microsoft's whole plan to make a mobile computer died before it got to the launch bay. They are now, 2 years or more after iPad, shooting to try it again someday when Windows 8 comes out.
The fact is that Apple really doesn't have competition in the iPad niche of computing. In computers, the difference between an equivalent IBM PC clone and a Mac Mini system is not that difference price wise.
Stores are going under trying to support Windows with software sales or service. Egghead failed. COMP-USA failed.
Best Buy, which hosts the Geek Squad, guys who use expensive diagnostic tools and backup software to do simple stuff Mac users don't have to fuss with are in trouble now too. People just can't afford that kind of expensive help for extra problems in what, lets face it, should be simple computing appliances at this point.
Acer promised the PC industry a price war just a couple of years ago, trying to bolster consumer/investor confidence that it would move up a notch on the computer maker's rankings. Know what happened instead last year? Their revenue plummeted and their ranking fell accordingly.
Apple skyrocketed upward last year because it has the more affordable computing.
Kindle Fire is essentially, a 2-year old second hand computer. It doesn't even ship with last year's version of the Android OS. The non-Fire Kindle has an "experimental" web browser as if Amazon is not sure the Web will catch on yet and is not committed to R&D expenditures to support it, and the Kindle Fire has the slowest web browser you can hold in your hand.
Nobody is even sure how they got it to run so slowly. Amazon claimed it would be fast, so that is almost false advertising. That's low end in terms of business ethics not price/value.
The TCO of other Android based handhelds is not even projected yet. It's clear that trojans are a serious problem in the official & unofficial Android stores. To date, no one has amassed the cost burden that will represent for society and Android users/owners. Probably a lot, based on what you see in the contemporary IBM PC clone marketplace.
Apple might come out with a high end iPad in the future but right now there is just the one mainstream model with 3 different memory configurations, and the option to leave 3G off if you want to. They aren't forcing it on anyone.
If you look at Apple's trend, all the major products they introduced from 2001-2010 came down (gasp!) in price from what they were introduced at. The stand-up iMacs, notebooks, iPods, iPhones, productivity apps, home multimedia apps, and so forth.
Apple drove the price of music down for the whole industry and eliminated a lot of unnecessary costs: making CDs, trucking CDs cross country, storing CDs in warehouses/stores/landfills, etc. CD salesmen were toast, and Tower Records security guards were out of a job. A *lot* less pollution and waste were generated in the wake of the switch to Apple's way of doing music entertainment sales
Did you forget how album prices dropped from as high as $18.99 per album to $9.99, with the ability to pay just 99 cents if all you wanted off that album was a single track?
Look at movies. Apple cut their price to below ten dollars. Prior to Apple's price slashing, the industry was makin' and truckin' and storin' their DVDs all over the country. That set you back $19.95 to $34.95. After Apple got rid of the same wasteful overhead costs as CDs, the price of movies fell to less than a sawbuck.
Look at supposedly, good old fashioned PCs, the ones running Windows. Application prices typically run $20 to $60. Good price?
No! Apple slashed those prices as well.
One-third of iOS apps in Apple's iPad/iPhone app store are FREE. Many of the remainder cost only $0.99. The average price of all apps (sum of all prices divided by number of apps) is about three and a half dollars. Apple's own productivity apps like Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), and Keynote (Steve Jobs presentation program) sell for only $9.99.
Apple also slashed the price of its operating system upgrades. Whereas they had been costing $129 each, they cut it to under $30. And that forced Microsoft to do the same with some upgrades from Windows XP to Windows 7.
Apple also introduced an App Store of Mac OS X applications to the Macintosh computer, offering similar benefits for desktop computer users to the ones found when shopping for iOS based mobile device apps. Again, the prices in the store were lower than the prevailing prices prior to Apple making its move.
High end in terms of quality maybe but not high end in terms of price anymore.
norman619Feb 12, 2012Buried
You are quite the pro at talking out of your ass.
And yes they are toys.