Don’t Rule Out Apple Ruling Your Living Room
And yet, at a Sept. 1 event in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced that Apple is bringing out a less-than-revolutionary cable duct upgrade. The new Apple TV looks different—it’s black, not white, and at 3.9 inches square, is 75 percent smaller than cable trunking the old one—and you now rent rather than buy movies and TV shows. (The price has also fallen, from $229 to $99.) Otherwise, its function is mostly unchanged. “You’re still looking at a product for the Apple fanatics,” says technology wire duct marketing consultant David Clarke of BGT Partners.
So why bother? Even Jobs concedes the device is mainly for tech hobbyists, and most of the Sept. 1 event was dedicated to the revelation of a new line of iPods and a social networking feature that works within iTunes. What Jobs didn’t say is that Apple wants to become king of the living room. He tells Bloomberg Businessweek that when the time is right, Apple could open an App Store for the TV that could do for television sets what all those apps have done for the iPhone. Asked if the iPad could evolve into the TV of tomorrow, Jobs shrugs and plastic channel says, “That’s how I do most of my TV watching today
