Instead, Jobs was going to focus his energy on one very specific, secret project: Apple’s reinvention of TV — including the TV set itself.
Walt Mossberg, Recode’s editor at large and an executive editor at the Verge, says Jobs called him on the night he announced he was formally handing over control of his company to Tim Cook, and told him about his TV ambitions.
“I think we figured out a way to do it, and it’s going to be fantastic,” Jobs told Mossberg, and invited him to see what he was working on.
Steve said that he had “cracked it” to his biographer. I wonder how much he shared with Apple.
Jobs worked on a lot of things that never saw the light of day. That was how Apple determined what not to do, as well.
Just bought a new LG set. Good but reminds me of Jobs talking about the first smartphones with ‘baby software’.
Gene Munster is probably feeling vindicated.
Ha! Yeah – if he told anyone at Apple how he’d ‘finally cracked it’, they are still keeping totally mum about it.
Might have been scrapped. Didn’t they also talk about how TV’s do not get replaced often (4-8 years) and so it is hard to roll out new models and get adoption. The key may be in access to content and treating the glass as just that. Unless maybe you build in a module such as an Apple TV that you can replace, integrate the set-top box. But why do that even? I hardly use interface of my ‘smart’ tv after I have set it up.
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Walt’s not as important anymore since he left the WSJ. And when Steve Jobs passed, Walt’s journalism was supplanted by the rumor monger machine.
My guess is that he had a strategy he believed would get both Networks and Cable providers on board – which apparently never came through. It probably had to do with offering a unified program listing, rejected because providers believed that showing other show competition prominently would lose more audience every half-hour. Now Apple seems to be launching an API for that very thing, and first movers who jump on it will probably be exposed to a larger impulse-viewing audience than ever before, but the major providers are going to get hurt before they accept that customers want this.
yeah, WM’s voice has taken on a more desperate tone, and prone to doooom. he may have a case of acute old-fart-itus.
So many people forget about the display technology. When you go into Costco and see the 4K displays, nothing’s changed – the colors, and the picture in general looks just like what a bunch of screeching banshees would sound like. People ask me “is that a good picture?” and I say just look to your left and right and compare what you see on the screen to the real world you are in at this moment. Not even close. But it is on my Plasma.
Plasma was able to produce photographic quality images, and OLED promises to do the same without the need for all the “compensating measures” that LED LCD’s suffer from – e.g. the “soap opera effect.”
Apple may be waiting for OLEDs to mature so that if they do release some glass, it’s something they will be proud of.
LED LCD is, without question, a cheap and awful display technology. I’m sticking to my Panasonic Plasma until the OLEDs finally go mainstream with HDR and all that. Why would we have double standards? One for our physical photos, retina displays, and another for our TV’s?
This is an old conversation easily forgotten, with a clear unmistakable truth.
A friend has a Samsung “smart” TV. He thinks it is dumb and he is correct! The TV itself is fine, though … Maybe next year….
This again?
Seriously. It’s kind of funny how we’re again hearing these quotes from Isaacson’s interviews, only slightly modified to add the word “set” to “tv.”
i’m pretty sure it was “TV” that Jobs said he cracked in Isaacson’s 2011 bio.
Maybe, but I think it’s possible that Walt was never that good a writer and just had a great editor behind him at the WSJ that he’s lost.
Then again, Hanlon’s razor says “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I like to add to that “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by apathy.”
So maybe he just doesn’t give a shit about quality anymore.
That’s what Isaacson said, but honestly, can we trust him? I don’t know. He seems to have misunderstood so much else.
I feel like Apple cracked TV when they released the iPad.
The phone was once a centrally located, shared device in the home. Then families got a second line. Then went cordless. Then multi-room cordless. Then added cellular + land line. Then dumped the land line. And here we are with everyone having their own phone.
TV could be following a similar path. A lot of anecdotals about family tv time transitioning to phablet/tablet with the big family room TV reserved for events and movies.
Is Apple seeing this? Is that what Tim means by the future of TV is apps? Could Steve’s last great act as CEO be this story that sent every TV competitor chasing the wrong rabbit? Time will tell.
They are trying to make flast screen – LCD/LEDs better with HDR. I guess it is working.
As for a “glass” or shiny display, those are the worst – unless maybe – you can control the light in the room, yet I find they typically try to lower glare by making them brighter, yet that only works if the colors are ‘bright’. Dark movies, look like a mirror … that is the worst.
People seem to forget the 90’s with the large, heavy, flat, glass CRTs … and cumbersome anti glare screens.
If its smart, why would anyone need to “set it up”? I could see putting in some account info… maybe.
… and the dinosaurs go extinct, just as scheduled.
All the more reason for me to dismiss these newest rewrites.
Neither Mossberg nor Isaacson provide anything beyond speculation that Jobs was referring to a real TV set. And, let’s aside our idolatry for a moment and remember that Jobs was a visionary, a great manager but not a technical wizard. He had the ability to find and manage engineers and designers who crack it. He himself was not doing any cracking.