Alex Watson
Apple is pitching the Apple TV as a way to stream TV shows and movies from iTunes, but will this new clarity be enough to persuade us to buy it?
One of the things I remember Steve Jobs saying when he first introduced the iPhone in 2007 was that ‘everyone hates their phone’. How wrong he was, I thought. My phone was pretty great. It made phone calls. I could text on it. It even had a five-megapixel camera that took decent photos.
It was only when I upgraded to an iPhone 3G (white, of course) that I begrudgingly accepted Jobs had a point. Once I’d used an iPhone, there was no way to look at any of my previous phones with much in the way of a positive feeling. Except, perhaps, the Nokia I had at university: as good as Plants vs Zombies is, the finest phone game ever made is the version of snake the came with the Nokia 3210. Fact.
For Steve Jobs, the idea of ‘everyone hating’ the products they own isn’t just limited to phones – indeed, in an old Wired piece, he describes buying a new washing machine with his family. The family discussed their options every night. For two weeks.
Jobs is obsessive and a perfectionist. Few things measure up to his high standards. Under his leadership, Apple shares these characteristics. Things must be done its way. It’s relatively easy for Apple to take this approach when it comes to computers, as Apple makes both software and hardware. With the iPhone, Apple had to push the phone networks hard to get the control it wanted so it could deliver the phone as it intended. The partners agreed, kept happy thanks to an exclusivity period on the deal with Apple and the chance to offer higher tariffs and lower handset subsidies to customers.
Just as people hated their pre-iPhone phones, Jobs probably thinks most people hate their TV, but so far Apple TV has failed to create damascene conversions on a comparable level as the iPhone has, and in part it’s because the Apple TV has to slot into a complex web of hardware and content companies, none of which are that keen on bending to Apple’s will.
As I write, Apple has just announced another re-spin of the Apple TV, and it represents a dramatic change in both hardware design and features. The new machine is sleek, black and very small. At the time of writing, they’ve yet to go on sale so we haven’t been able to take a closer look, but it does seem clear that everything has changed.
The old Apple TV featured an x86 Intel CPU and hard disk, meaning it was clearly derived from computer designs – and as such, its price of around £200 was going to be hard to drive down lower. The new Apple TV is going to retail for £99, thanks to the fact it’s actually descended from the iPad/iPhone/iPod touch. Inside it is the Apple A4 chip and a small amount of flash storage.
The A4 is already cheaper for Apple than an x86 CPU, and as silicon gets cheaper to produce as volumes rise, the more devices the A4 goes into the better for Apple and its accountants. It’s powerful enough for HD video – at 1024 x 768, the iPad’s screen packs in about three quarters of pixels of a 720p TV panel, so you’re not talking a huge step up in workload. Dispensing with the x86 CPU means a lower power draw so you can keep the motherboard, power circuitry and cooling kit simpler and cheaper, and as with the CPU, flash memory gets cheaper the greater the volume you make it in.
While its hardware means it has much in common with other iOS devices, there’s no sign of iOS staples such as Safari and the App Store. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them show up at a later point, but for the time being, Apple has decided it needs to clarify what the Apple TV is and what it does. It’s being pitched as a way to stream stuff from iTunes – specifically, the iTunes Store. It’s a next-generation DVD player, basically.
Will the new Apple TV be a success? We need to consider Apple’s competitors, which fall into four groups: first, you’ve got companies such as A C Ryan and Western Digital, which make media streaming boxes against which the older Apple TV competed. These companies are much smaller than Apple, their hardware doesn’t look as good, they’ve not got well-known brands and their software isn’t slick. Crucially, however, their products are more open in terms of file format support and getting files onto the device, and when it comes to playing back digital video, when much of it is either torrented or ripped from discs, that matters. The older Apple TVs were never flexible nor open enough to attract this crowd – who value power and features over ease of use – so the decision to really focus on simplicity is a good one, and not ignoring these users enables Apple to deliver a better mainstream product.
Competitor group number two are the cable and satellite TV companies – Virgin and Sky in the UK. Like Apple, they sell hardware and content, and while their set-top boxes aren’t as sophisticated as the Apple TV, both Virgin and Sky have gradually added TV recording, timeshifting and on-demand services such as iPlayer to their boxes. They both remain far stronger than Apple in terms of content and, more importantly, in terms of clarity for consumers.
It’s clear what you get when you buy them. The problem older Apple TVs had when competing against incumbents such as Sky and Virgin was that it didn’t really compete against them: no-one would really buy an Apple TV instead of Sky or Virgin, and once you’ve got cable or satellite, the old Apple TV did too little over and above them to justify its price.
While the iPhone was a revolutionary product, it was still a phone and could be understood by consumers as such: you bought it to replace the traditional Nokia or Sony handset you owned beforehand. The Apple TV doesn’t replace anything traditionally found in the living room and has found few takers at its previous price. Dropping the price is a reasonable tactic, but the iPhone and Apple’s new Macs show consumers will pay extra for a quality Apple product – price isn’t the central issue for the Apple TV. The problem is no-one knows what the Apple TV is for, or worse, they do but they don’t care. This is why Apple is really trying to reduce the amount of stuff the new Apple TV does, and is really focusing on pushing it as a box for renting stuff from iTunes. ‘Instant TV rentals. Just 99¢,’ says the product page, and that seems to be pretty much all it does (there’s more, of course, Apple just wants to focus on that message). This simplification is what it needs to do, but it puts Apple into territory where it’s least confident and, to date, least successful: selling services. The Apple TV has always existed because iTunes sells and rents movies, not the other way round. The Apple TV is perhaps the only major Apple product that exemplifies a ‘service first, hardware second’ approach.
This approach is the one Google takes, and it won’t surprise regular readers that, once again, Apple vs Google is where we end up. Apple TV’s third competitor is Google TV. Slated to launch before the end of the year, it integrates a range of Internet services – YouTube, a version of the Chrome browser and a very iTunes-esque media browser – into either a small set-top box (made by Logitech) or the TV itself, made at launch by Sony.
This leads us on to the fourth set of competitors for Apple TV: TVs themselves. High-end TVs from Sony, Samsung and Panasonic already feature Internet-aware apps that connect to web services such as iPlayer, YouTube and Flickr. They’re not fantastic, but they’re clearly defined products with the Internet services as a nice added extra. It’s clear to the consumer what they’re getting and why you’d buy one.
Making the Apple TV cheaper and more obviously connected to its hugely successful iOS devices are fine moves, but if Apple wants to sell a box whose main job is to connect to a service, it’s the service that needs work: for most consumers, iTunes was an unconvincing back end to the original Apple TV. It still holds the key to the success of the new Apple TV and will likely need a big shot in the arm if a new Apple TV is going to be anything more than a hobby for Apple.
