An “Apple television” has been rumored for more than 15 years.
Apple is said to be considering making a television set, over a decade after it abandoned that idea in favor of creating the Apple TV set top box.
It’s one of the famous Steve Jobs stories, a claim relayed by biographer Walter Isaacson, which Jobs said he had figured out television. “I finally cracked it,” he said in 2010, adding that his Apple TV set would be “completely easy to use.”
Now according to Bloomberg, Apple may yet be having another go at fulfilling that ambition. As yet it’s no more than a vague rumor, but Apple is said to be once again evaluating the idea.
What’s new is that such a device could conceivably fit in with the many other rumors that say Apple wants to expand its home devices. An Apple TV set — or perhaps an Apple-branded set — could be one key part of an array of smart home devices Apple is said to be planning for 2025 and beyond.
Assuming that this would be the current tvOS in a somewhat bigger box than the Apple TV 4K, it’s both easy to see how Apple could do it — and hard to see why it would. Apple TV is already available as part of at least most smart television sets, and Apple would presumably need to bring something new to the market if it were to sell many.
It’s not as if Apple would try undercutting the price of TV sets, or any other product market it works in. Still, it is quite possible that a TV manufacturer would be willing to partner on such a device, because of the value of Apple’s brand name.
But then Apple already makes the hardware that is in the Apple TV 4K, and it already has LG making monitors for it. So again, it is possible that Apple could bring its own TV set to market.
Yet there is a reason that back in the early 2010s,Tim Cook, squashed such reports. Then Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, he expressly stated that Apple had “no interest” in the television market.
Even Jobs didn’t seem that convinced. Not only did he oversee the switch from a TV set to the Apple TV set top box, but he also had Apple refer to it all as a hobby.
Apple does not publish sales figures for the Apple TV 4K, nor for any other specific device. Yet the latest available figures show that in 2022, the Apple TV+ streaming service had only 3% of the market.
That 3% figure encompasses everyone watching through Apple TV 4K and all of the smart TVs that include the service. So it’s not like Apple TV has an encouraging track record — although at the same time, the figures show why Apple is expanding how many services carry Apple TV+.
