Having been out for almost 4 years now, the Apple TV has consistently struggled to gain traction in the market. Indeed, Apple CEO Steve Jobs often refers to it as a "hobby" rather than as a legitimate competency of Apple. Still, that doesn't mean that Apple isn't trying.
Having been out for almost 4 years now, the Apple TV has consistently struggled to gain traction in the market. Indeed, Apple CEO Steve Jobs often refers to it as a “hobby” rather than as a legitimate competency of Apple. Still, that doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t trying.
Apple has periodically upgraded the Apple TV over the past few years, but Apple’s little grey box, which lets users purchase or rent HD movies and stream iTunes content to their set top boxes, just hasn’t grabbed the attention of consumers. To be fair, no web/TV combo has had much success at all in the market. For a variety of reasons, no company has successfully figured out a winning strategy to control the living room.
But with the recent announcement of Google TV, it appears that the battle for the living room is ready to kick into high gear – and if a recent rumor proves correct, Apple may be upping the ante in a big way.
Citing a source close to Apple, Engadget recently reported that Apple’s next iteration of the Apple TV will be a doozy and will come with Apple’s speedy A4 processor, full support for 1080p HD playback, and will retail for the shockingly low price of $99. The current model goes for $229.
Notably, the next-gen Apple TV will reportedly be about the size of an iPhone and will come with only 16GB of flash memory. Translation? Apple is positioning the Apple TV to be all about streaming content from the cloud.
For those still interested in keeping their content close, there will be an option to utilize a Time Capsule as an external storage component, but the main course will be all about streaming. The new ATV will do away with its current OS X-lite variation as a operating system, and will instead adopt the iPhone OS for the underlying experience.
And oh yes, an Apple TV running the iPhone OS opens up some new possibilities such as running apps right on your big screen. Apple may not go down this route, but switching over to the iPhone OS is certainly an intriguing move.
There’s no word yet on a release date, but I imagine Apple will hold one of its patented special media events sometime down the line to tout its latest attempt at controlling the living room.
But until then, WWDC is just one week away.
