At least twice over the past decade Apple has been close to announcing its own television. Not the Apple TV set top box but actual big screen TVs with, well, big screens. But both times I’ve heard about this Apple backed away at the last minute. And the reason why they did was because even an Apple television would be just another television with an Apple logo. Steve Jobs realized that TVs had become a commodity and there didn’t seem to be an obvious way to make Apple’s television special. I’m not here to say Apple has finally found its TV design path as suggested in Walter Isaacson’s book and will be doing […]
Why Apple doesn’t sell televisions
Final Prediction #10: Apple will buy Dish Network
A third of the people who read this column don’t live in the USA so maybe this prediction isn’t interesting to them, but I think Apple will buy Dish Network, the American direct satellite TV broadcaster. It’s the only acquisition that will give Apple the kind of entry point they want into the TV business, allowing Cupertino to create overnight an over-the-top (OTT) Internet streaming video service — effectively an Internet cable system.
Buying Dish would be a bold move for Apple because all the benefits Cupertino seeks aren’t obviously available. True, Dish has 14 million U.S. subscribers (I am one of those) who get 100+ channels of TV from the sky. True, Dish […]
Lost Prediction #4 — My Steve Jobs movie returns to Netflix
At least one reader pointed out that I somehow missed 2024 Prediction #4, so let me throw something in right here. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview will shortly return to Netflix worldwide!
Our movie was on Netflix in the USA and Canada for a couple of years (it’s still streaming on Netflix in the UK) but the North American deal ended sometime in November when rights reverted from Magnolia Pictures back to John Gau Productions. The film had already disappeared from iTunes and Amazon, etc., but we hadn’t noticed because, well, Magnolia didn’t bother to mention it and we’re only pretending to be movie producers.
You don’t work directly with these streaming outfits if your body […]
Prediction #8: Apple WILL NOT buy Time Warner
If my last prediction about the Internet of Things becoming a security nightmare seemed a no-brainer to half of my readers, as some commenters suggested, this prediction that Apple won’t buy Time Warner will probably be a no-brainer for the other half, simply because it is always easier to say an acquisition or merger won’t happen than that it will. But I think there is something to be learned from why I don’t think this acquisition will take place — something that says a lot about Apple as a company.
That this topic comes up at all is because, as frequently happens these days, activist investors are trying to bully Time Warner into selling all […]
2016 Prediction #1 — Beginning of the end for engineering workstations
First a look at my predictions from one year ago and how they appear in the light of today:
Prediction #1 — Everyone gets the crap scared out of them by data security problems. Go to the original column (link just above) to read the details of this and all the other 2024 predictions but the gist of it was that 2024 would be terrible for data security and the bad guys would find at least a couple new ways to make money from their hobby. I say I got this one right — one for one.
Prediction #2 — Google starts stealing lunch money. The title is 100 percent smart-ass but my point (again, […]
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