Foxconn Chief Confirms The Apple iTV | Hacker News Reader

Foxconn Chief Confirms The Apple iTV

techcrunch.com

33 pointsnikunjk35 comments

Apple must build an iTV. Remember XBox? Microsoft still hasn’t made its investment back, but what it did do was buy them another decade of Windows dominance on the desktop, because gaming consoles could have been the post-PC devices that took over from PCs.

Now it turns out that phones and tablets are the post-PC devices, but thing might be very different if everyone owned a Sony PlayStation that also streamed movies and music into the home.

So what about Apple and their post-PC devices? If someone else figures out how to replace televisions with a connected device, they can also roll sideways into tablets and phones. If you subscribe to game of Thrones on your TV, you are going to want to buy the tablet that integrates wit the TV so you can watch an episode in your bed. You are going to want the phone that integrates with it so you can use your phone as a remote... From anywhere in the world.

Apple cannot allow anyone else to make this happen. Either televisions need to remain dumb terminals connected to coax, or Apple needs to own them. Apple cannot sit on their hands and watch Google (or maybe Amazon) figure this out.

If the Foxconn chief said it, then that can only mean one thing - it will now be built by Quanta.

TVs with integrated computers have never made much sense to me. How would this ever be preferable to a set-top box, which, incidentally Apple already sells? Good TVs are very expensive and people tend not to upgrade them very frequently (10+ years seems commonplace). Whereas the computer components are pretty cheap (~$100) and tend to get upgraded frequently. But few will buy a $1200 TV every two years.

If you were Apple, would you rather sell a high margin, inexpensive product or one that is low margin and very expensive?

As a counterpoint, the iMac suffers from these same issues to a lesser extent and sells very well.

A really great integrated TV experience could have, among other things:

- WirelessHD with CoverFlow input selection (no rat's nest of wires, physical input slots or keep-pressing-the-button input select)

- an integrated AirPort (no cable-company modem/router)

- Fully modular, wireless, THX sound that always works (even with Bluetooth headphones)

- Built-in Blu-Ray and program guide that don't suck

- Siri, of course

- Always-on AirPlay (regardless of input or power being off)

- TV programming packages and customer service provided by Apple

And most importantly:

- One remote, or an iPod touch, or an iPhone, or an iPad, and oh yes, the iPad can watch ESPN while your TV is tuned to Dancing With The Stars.

All of it can be achieved with a set-top-box and a TV as long as you ignore half of its electronics and use it as a dumb monitor.

Yeah, and I think for most of here, there will be a "what's the big deal" factor when it comes out.

Those of us who have no problem containing our video setup inside our head, who have a Harmony remote, who have a mental picture of what goes where -- we're not really going to care that much. I think we'll appreciate a fully integrated TV experience, but I don't think we're the people who will get excited about it.

But let's put it this way, if you're staying at someone's house (i.e. babysitting or housesitting), the one thing you must hold a debriefing session on is how the TV, boxes and remote(s) work. That's kind of messed up. That's where the big advantage is for an Apple TV set.

That's the point - a TV remote should have 2 buttons at most - input select and on/off. And that's if selecting an input doesn't turn it on and selecting "off" from the input list doesn't turn it off. Or none, if it turns on or off according to the presence or absence of signals in its selected input.

The set-top-box remote, OTOH, could be no more complex than an Apple remote - menu/back, play/select/pause, directions.

One day I'll try tearing out every button off my TV remote and leave just the power and input buttons. Should be an interesting experiment.

It's only smarter to put the electronics in an add-on box that you can upgrade more frequently if people actually upgrade add-on boxes more frequently.

But do they?

Tivos, VCRs, DVD players -- very few get replaced with an 'upgrade' by regular people. [1]

And gaming consoles, the case to study for set-top boxes that people do upgrade, get replaced only every 5+ years. And they have massively lower market penetration.

[1] Notwithstanding early adopters replacing limited early-run devices with later ones, as with early dvd players getting replaced by those that did dual-layer without a pause.

With a gaming console you have a commitment in the form of the titles you own and people upgrade them to get access to improved content. A game console has to offset its cost with the increased attractiveness of its improved content.

A TV set-top-box is much cheaper to build than a gaming console (or, at least, should be) and the commitment will probably be with the subscribed content - and people won't upgrade them unless the new version offsets its price with enticing features. TV makers already noticed that and the push to digital is a form of making standards flexible enough to accommodate things like 2160p and 3D, shortening product life to levels analog TV sets and long-lived standards wouldn't be able to achieve.

Isn't that exactly what introduces the biggest usability problem that televisions have today: knowing how to set the monitor source channel to correspond to the set-top box one wants to use?

- facetime - receive/switch call to tv

So true. I can't wait until they add fax support so I can get fired by my boss in Japan.

Here's one: Visual mute. Broadcasters have taking to making commercials "flash" with bright, momentary images, in order to distract/attract attention. When viewing live, I find that the (audio) mute button is no longer sufficient. I'd like the screen to e.g. go 50% gray, where I can still see what's happening when I look at it, but it's no longer distracting me by "flashing" in my peripheral vision.

Given that TV's all have some degree of computerization, these days, I want mine to be open source, for reasons precisely like this.

Good TVs are very expensive and people tend not to upgrade them very frequently (10+ years seems commonplace)

This would give Apple a 10+ year lock-in to their ecosystem. They could then sell iPads as controllers and additional displays. And if the computing power in them starts to get underpowered for what people want to use them for they could sell add-on boxes connected via Thunderbolt that would have as low latency as anything inside the TV housing.

Someone has to take this market. It's a mess. I've got a Boxee, XMBC, previous has Windows Media Center and various other Windows based MCE's. I've looked at Wii, XBox, PS3, XStreamer and a dozen other products and found them wanting. I've followed YouView, Google TV and Apple TV with interest and mounting disappointment over the lack of progress. My wallet is out for the first product that does a good job at this.

I think it's the content producers that are mainly to blame for killing this sector.

My Boxee has BBC iPlayer, my Wii has Netflix and I'd need to buy something else if I wanted LoveFilm. Many video sites have stopped working on Boxee as they require a version of Flash that isn't available for the Linux version that Boxee uses and they don't have any alternative delivery mechanism. LoveFilm switched to Silverlight to get the DRM strong enough to win over some of their content suppliers.

It's crazy that I can't switch on a device that allows me to pay to stream any film produced in the last 20 years, view the free-to-air programmes that I can already watch on my TV set and play my local media collection with a half-decent 10-foot interface.

Roku + Amazon for rentals + Hulu Plus for TV

edit: and then I realize you are British so you swap the BBC Player for Hulu Plus and you are done.

Last time I looked Roku didn't do local media. Has that changed?

There are a few addons that are available. I've used Roksbox successfully for a year or so.

Is this some official appstore add-on mechanism or does it require hackery?

Originally, I didn't see an argument for Apple getting into the TV set business, when they could just continue to ship the stand-alone box. [1]

But the longer they go, being able to deliver eye-popping margins while simultaneously being untouchable on price-performance with competing tablets and PMP devices, the more it makes sense.

The AppleTV as-is, is price-bound by willingness to pay for add-on set-top boxes. There's not much room for Apple-style profit there. [2] But consumer willingness to spend on TVs themselves is much higher.

If Apple brings their supply chain magic direct to displays, there's far more profit to be had. And given the longer upgrade cycle on living-room gadgets, the larger up-front margin is almost necessary to make it worth Apple's time in the long run. [3]

It just falls into place when you think about it in terms of Apple doing to the TV market, what it did to mobile devices: they define a new set of expectations at the mid-to-high price points that their competitors just can't compete with. Their competitors still dominate the lower price-points with notably lesser offerings, but there's not much profit there, so Apple just won't care.

In short: it wouldn't be able Apple selling $1000 sets to compete with Samsung's $400 sets. It'll be about Apple redefining the $1000 segment with quality, integration and services that Samsung and Sony will be unable to match for $1000, even on thinner margins.

[1] People don't upgrade their TVs like they do mobile devices or other gadgets. It was possible they might upgrade a set-top box that way though.

[2] You can make Apple-level money selling $100 MP3 players with a 30% margin because they get lost/damaged/upgraded/given as gifts/etc. But $100 set-top boxes? Normal people (Apple's target market) barely buy them. And if they do get one and it works, they go out of their way to not change things to avoid angering the vengeful spirits of living room electronics.

[3] The opportunity cost for Apple to pursue any middling business would be massive. And at this point I'm sure they have plenty of evidence on whether people buy and upgrade set-top boxes. If the early adopters aren't really doing it, there's no hope the normals would.

From: t.cook@apple.com

To: gou.t@foxconn.com.cn

Subject: Re: leak

No worries. I understand how sneaky the press can be. Why, just now I accidentally let slip to a WSJ journalist about what really happened to your Chengdu workers. But no-one in China reads the American press, so no problem, right?

===

From: t.cook@apple.com

To: leekh@samsung.kr

Subject: Re: Masterplan

It's all going well. As we suspected, Foxconn can't be trusted; it looks you're our only true Asian manufacturing partner. Good thing we only gave them the plans for the fake prototypes -- can't believe the fools think a better TV is our next revolutionary advance.

PS: Love the latest prototypes you sent us. Not sure about the name though. iBrain? Also we'll have to go back to using monkeys as test subjects -- only thing I'll miss about our Chinese ex-partners is their supply of expendable humans. And lemme know when the new chips are done; Johnny's itching to finally test his iTelepathy app.

I really don't see how they're going to differentiate themselves in a market that's already so well established. I probably said this about the iPhone, too, but... this time it makes even less sense.

Imagine a giant iPad you hang on your wall. It is touch based, and you can use your iPhone and iPad to control it.

I can think of a few ways:

1) Siri integration.

"Let's watch the Cardinals game." "What movies are on HBO tonight?" "Facetime with my mother."

2) Convergence with other iOS devices/tools. iMessage/FaceTime on your TV. AirPlay mirroring. Play your stuff off iTunes. Remote control from your existing iOS device.

3) Well known, deep catalog of music/video content for purchase or rent.

If it works well, it'd be huge.

With an iTV Apple could control your entire media experience. Your snapshots from your iPhone, the music and movies your purchased would all transparently sync to your TV. They also know how to run an app store. I can imagine made for TV games that eat away at the console market by dominating casual gaming.

Add to that the fact Siri makes much more sense as part of a TV than a phone. The jump from the iPhone on screen keyboard to voice recognition was minor, the jump from a crappy remote control to voice is absolutely massive. A TV is not constrained by bandwidth or power so imagine how much more useful an always-on Siri would be. It could recognize your voice and integrate into your iPhone.

Apple aren't starting from nothing here. They have millions of customers who have bought into the Apple ecosystem. That is something other manafacturers cannot compete with.

There are a lot of possibilities, even without the Siri experience. I wrote a Quora answer early this year about the opportunities:

http://www.quora.com/Apple-TV/If-Apple-ever-releases-a-TV-th...

All they'd have to do to differentiate themselves in this market is:

Create a clean, easy-to-use, app-store-enabled experience, without lots of cables, multiple boxes, and ugly UIs.

Carson? Doesn't he mean Sullivan?

Let's assume this is correct: will that TV do 3D?

If so: how? I do not see Apple requiring goggles.

If not: will it be the reason the product fails or, if it succeeds, what does that mean for the future of 3D?

Apple invents "The Telescreen: for the rest of us."

(I've already got a laptop with microphone and camera in my living room ... )

Sweet! competition is on with Google TV

Google isn't making displays at this point, are they? I think this is talking about an actual TV display not a set-top box.

Sony integrated it into a display, and it always seemed pretty clear that Google's intent was to get others to do this as well.

Strictly speaking no, but LG's going to release TVs with integrated Google TV systems in a couple weeks. ( http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/07/net-us-google-lg-i... )

(And [like jsight said] Sony released a couple also, although they're apparently focusing on set-top boxes now: http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/09/sonys-second-try-at-googl... )

I'm mostly a Google fan, but I will laugh if Apple takes over the smart TV market from Google, when Google had a 2 year head-start. That would be crazy, and pretty humiliating on Google's part I think. At least that's how I'd feel if Apple did that to me.

I think Google failed so far with Google TV because they focused too much on the TV part (and they didn't even do that very well), and they almost completely ignored the software part (games, apps, Siri-alternatives, Google Talk video-chat, etc). A cause for that is also Intel's hardware which made the Google TV set top boxes very expensive, and not even compatible with the Android Market.

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