Comment Re:Not likely (Score 1) 232
> Apple is not going to enter a market that is already in an aggressive price reduction war.
They're not going to enter it with the same product that everyone else is pushing. The point is that the current TV market, plagued with razor-thin margins for years, is making all those cheap TVs to meet demand, but none of the players are turning profits from doing so. 3D and internet/"smart" TVs (with apps) are grabs to differentiate their product. They all want something that's so clearly more than "just a TV" that you'll pay the premium required for them to start making money again.
They did enter a similar market with their box, the Apple TV, but they're just now starting to really differentiate themselves there too with Airplay, with more widespread coverage from iTunes and with Netflix. It's not like Airplay-like functionality hasn't been on offer for years; it's that it's been buried under seventy different acronyms, some of which map to competing and incompatible standards, and the vast majority of those who could potentially be using them didn't know about them, get around to it or get it working. Apple TV alone is not enough.
People started talking about an Apple phone years before iPhones, an Apple tablet before iPads and Intel Macs before Intel Macs. Even longtime rumors sometimes come true, although not ever on account of being longtime rumors. In this case, it certainly helps that they've been having an average time with Apple TV for years and that Steve Jobs was quoted as saying he'd cracked the secret to "television".
Let's go back to what will save "TVs". Computers and mobile phones be damned, this industry has been fundamentally unchanged for 80 years. All you've really gotten is a better picture and new ways of bringing a repertoire of channels to your house. Every recent TV innovation of any value has been a case of patching the current system or taking advantage of the inadequacy of the medium - making it suck less. If you rewind all this and build a TV from the ground up based on what people really want, fundamentally closer to YouTube and podcasts and maybe some Tivo-like features, the world is your oyster.