Beyond the Apple Television
(or why an Apple television makes sense)
This was written in February of 2012, when iCloud was first announced.
Apple gets it. It’s been a long time coming, but they are now about to change everything…again…massively. You got a sense of this when iCloud launched and when they shifted the MacOS to look more like iOS, but until today, I didn’t really see the bigger picture.
Mountain Lion makes it blindingly obvious that apple is no longer selling devices. They are selling an ecosystem. They are selling windows into your data. It explains why a television makes sense.
Everyone thinks an Apple television will be all about the interface or some cool new way to interact with the television. I agree that is a big part of it–-a television doesn’t work well with a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen, so they need something new. But people are forgetting that a television with the coolest interface ever is useless without the desire to watch it. So, what’s going to be on there? Cable (does anybody watch cable anymore?) iTunes content? You can already get that through an AppleTV (the little black box).
So what’s going to be on an Apple television? In short, everything you care about.
The television is going to be your computer, just like your iPad is, just like your phone is, just like your MacBook and iMac are. They are all your computer because what makes your computer yours will not be on one single device. It will be on iCloud. The television and iPhone and iPad and MacBook and iMac will all just be windows into the same data.
What’s really cool about this is this really frees any one device from being the centre of your digital life, which means that any one device could easily be used to control another. This means your iPhone can become your iPad’s remote, or your television remote, or your MacBook can control your iPhone (make a phone call), or your AppleTV. All of them just sharing your data back and forth.
And ultimately what is happening here is that Apple is free to put a screen on anything. Perhaps your iPhone starts your car, or your car queues up a show on your media player when you get home, or your child does homework on your coffee table’s screen and then review it with you on the television.
It’s not the hardware (i.e. the ability to put the internet on your fridge) that makes this all possible, it is the removal of the data from any one device that makes this possible. And that is only possible if the OS on all devices supports that.
This is why Apple is so far ahead. With all of their OSs aligning and taking more and more advantage of iCloud, they are perfectly poised to make this happen. Many companies have bits and pieces of this vision, but no one else has this level of integration. No one else has your documents, apps, media, personal files, email, preferences, etc. as well as has your consumer electronic dollars being spent in their hardware. No one else has the big picture.
