Has Apple "Finally Cracked It"?

Three words. Three little words have sent the Apple rumor mill's heart aflutter the past 24 hours. And it was just an aside in a longer report about Apple's new square screen home device thing. From Mark Gurman's Bloomberg newsletter:

If the product does catch on, it will help set the stage for more home devices. Apple is working on a high-end AI companion with a robotic arm and large display that could serve as a follow-up. The company could also put more resources into developing mobile robots, privacy-focused home cameras and speakers. It may even revisit the idea of making an Apple-branded TV set, something it’s evaluating. But if the first device fails, Apple may have to rethink its smart home ambitions once again.

I highlighted the key words, just in case you skimmed right past them. But the real key are the last three: "something it's evaluating." Everyone is well aware by now that Gurman is the best-sourced Apple reporter on the beat, scooping feature after feature, product after product, year after year. If he says Apple is evaluating something, they're very likely evaluating it. Or at least were at some point.

Of course, Apple has evaluated a television set before. In fact, it may be the longest-standing Apple rumor out there – certainly the longest ongoing one for which we have nothing to show for it. Well, except the Apple TV set-top box. But again, this is not that. The product that has hearts pounding is an actual television set. A giant slab of glass that nearly everyone has in their living room.

No one questions the market, they question the margins. As in, they're razor-thin. Apple likes their hardware margins close to 40%, cheaper televisions are closer to 10%, some are even lower. Of course, Apple would not make a cheap television set. But they were never going to. They clearly have done work over the years to figure out how'd they do a television set, and still determined it not worthy of their time and attention. Likely multiple times. And that's despite Steve Jobs famously telling Walter Isaacson during his final days that "I've finally cracked it."

A few years prior to that, Jobs unveiled the first Apple TV set top box on stage during the same event where he unveiled the iPhone! Talk about burying the news – he also repeatedly referred to the product as a "hobby" for Apple. That was in part because while they wanted to get into the living room and ideally would have done so with a television set, they couldn't figure out the right path, clearly.

Nearly 18 years later, we still have that same Apple TV box. It's smaller and faster, but it's more or less the exact same device. Whatever Apple and Jobs cracked, it hasn't broken through.

At the same time, Apple arguably has revolutionized television sets. If you were to ask any number of children how they consume video content, it's undoubtedly via an iPad. Or an iPhone. It certainly doesn't seem like a stretch to think these are the devices on which most television content is consumed these days – certainly for certain demographics.

At the other extreme, the Vision Pro's first true killer feature is content viewing at a screen size scale that would quite literally be impossible without a headset. 3D content is awesome on the device. Apple's own 'Immersive' format is even better.

But again, a television set is different. It has long been the central point of living rooms around the world and unlike the iPhone or iPad – and certainly unlike the Vision Pro – it's communal. It still feels like a market Apple would indeed love to crack. And this first square screen thing – use case questions aside – may be the first (new) step in that direction, per Gurman's report.

It's undoubtedly very early and the likelihood of any such product ever actually seeing the light of the living room feels thinner than the thinnest screen possible. But maybe if these other new home devices work out, Apple will have a path. The biggest question there may be if it's a touch screen television or a traditional one? We argue about this element of the Mac a lot, but my daughter was quite annoyed the other day when touching an icon on our TV did nothing. Is looking past fingerprints in our TV-viewing future? (Shudder)

Seven years ago, I laid out how I thought Apple should fix the Apple TV. I think it holds up pretty well if implemented – in particular the always-on assistant. And this was an era well before the current AI boom. Siri was, well, awful. But if you squinted, you could see it. You still can. It sort of looks like the new home device thing. But bigger. And less square. A television. Imagine that.¹

¹ For the record, my bet would be that the only way some product along these lines ever sees daylight is if there's some major breakthrough in screen technology, such that it rolls up or the like, for Apple to do something interesting, new, and undoubtedly expensive here.