14 DAY TRIAL // The biggest advocate to the theory that Apple plans to leave a dent in the television industry, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster is at it again following the 60 Minutes interview featuring Walter Isaacson who said Steve Jobs had “finally cracked” the full fledged television solution.
Not missing one opportunity to express his belief that an Apple-branded HDTV is on the way, Munster points out to remarks made by biographer Walter Isaacson regarding Jobs’ desire to revolutionize yet another segment of the consumer electronics market - the TV industry.
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson said. ‘…I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use’, he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud’. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it’.”
Munster has his own info to throw in. First of all, he suggests that such a TV solution could use the new Siri in iOS 5 "to bolster its TV offering and simplify the chore of inputting information like show titles, or actor names, into a TV."
This makes sense. In fact, Siri makes even more sense for an Internet-connected TV than it does for a phone.
Next, in an investor note issued this week, Munster recalls that he attended some “Jan-11 meetings in Asia (not with component suppliers),” based on which his firm believes “Apple is investing in manufacturing facilities and securing supply for LCD displays. These displays could range from 3.5" mobile displays to 50" television displays,” Munster wrote, according to Fortune.
“More recently, in Sept-11 we met with a contact close to an Asian component supplier who indicated that prototypes of an Apple television are in the works,” the analyst boasted.
He added that Apple could sell as many as 1.4 million Internet-connected flat panel TVs in 2012, and that the business would rise to add $2.5b or 2% to revenue in calendar year 2012, growing all the way to $6 billion in 2014.
According to other reports on the matter of Apple building a full-fledged TV, these efforts are said to be led by Jeff Robbin, an Apple executive who helped create the iPod and the iTunes media store.
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Apple’s late co-founder considered Robbin an invaluable asset.