Apple’s New Move into Living Room
Posted on June 28, 2010
A couple of weeks ago Apple introduced a “redesigned” MacMini computer. It’s the unit’s biggest upgrade in five years making it especially attractive as an Internet gateway and media center for televisions.
Download audio to iPod, iPad, or iPhone.
A MacMini is a computer typically sold without a monitor. Increasingly it is often mated to an HDTV, just like a DVD player or video game console. As a result, the television becomes a gigantic computer monitor. Users often buy a wireless mouse and keyboard in order to control the MacMini from a convenient viewing distance such as the living room sofa.
The unit includes lightning fast dot-11n WiFi enabling it to connect over a home network to the Internet. Consequently, broadband ISP subscribers get high speed Internet right on their televisions. They can choose to watch conventional TV with a one-button click on their TV remote by selecting, for example, the CATV input. Alternately, they can chose Internet access on the TV with a one-button click on the same remote by selecting the socket where the MacMini is connected. Read more…
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Evaluating Apple’s Go-to-Market Analysis
Posted on June 14, 2010
During the past few months Apple twice implied the Digital Living Room of the Future is not a good market for the company. In February Tim Cook said that AppleTV remains a “hobby” since its potential is considerably smaller than the markets for mobile and tablet devices. Partly in response to GoogleTV, earlier this month Steve Jobs amplified Cook’s point with analysis.
Download audio to iPhone, iPad, and iPod here. (six minutes)
Essentially, Apple minimizes the Digital Living Room because there can be no “go-to-market” strategy. Jobs reasons that modernizing television requires replacing conventional set-top boxes with better designs. While readily conceding that Apple could develop such designs, he assumes they could not profitably sell them because the cable and satellite industries rent current set-tops for artificially low fees cross-subsidized by programming charges. By way of example he notes that TiVo, ReplayTV, Roku, Vudu, and similar products failed to tap into the mass market. Read more…
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There is Something There at AppleTV
Posted on March 15, 2010
Phil Leigh
Tim Cook, who is Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, was recently interviewed at a Goldman, Sachs investor conference. He repeatedly minimized the company’s market opportunity in the Digital Living Room of the Future. Instead he implied that portable devices would be the prime growth engines in the years ahead.
For example, he commented that Apple has “no interest” in the TV market and that “AppleTV” remains a hobby because the market size is small by comparison to that for portable units. In contrast he observed that the “vast majority of Apple’s revenue now comes from mobile devices and content purchased for those devices.” Read more…
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