The audacity of the value proposition will enable Apple to finally retire support for the PowerPC and the Carbon API. It will wreak havoc among the Wintel crowd who have squeezed all the margin they can out of their architecture. Anyone who says Apple relies on premium pricing hasn’t listened to Oppenheimer and hasn’t paid attention to Apple’s $199 iPhone or $49 iPod.

I blogged about the projected hardware and software specs for this unit, plus my rationale for the pricing at (link)

1) Apple tablet pc - they already understand touchscreens so I don’t see why it can’t scale

2) A real Apple TV - LCD with a built-in Mac mini and a Wii-like remote would be a killer convergence device

My only worry now is that I was planning on upgrading my 2 year-old Macbook Pro soon but it looks like I better wait.

When? My guess is August 19, 2008.

An iTouch with GPS and VOIP would be a killer product. Especially with a larger screen and day long battery power. Many people use the iPhone more as a surfing platform — via WiFi — than as a phone.

The PC hardware has caught up and passed the Apple notebooks.

This would be a costly transition, but will increase Apple’s share of the laptop market bigtime.

What about reinventing the set-top box experience in the same way they re-invented the mobile phone?

That would be a logical rev of the Apple TV, you can imagine the mass adoption price point, and I am guessing the cost of goods sold would be beefy, accounting for lower margins.

Plus, I think that if they are going to continue to grow iPod, they need to fuel demand for the iPod touch, and it is now a remote for the Apple TV and shares media libraries with it.

How far of a reach is it to imagine apps that are hybrids between of the two (ATV/iPod), and built using the iPhone SDK and integrated with App Store?

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Mark

With over-the-air broadcasts, you have to tie in a programming guide, a schedule, the variability of signal reception, and the ability of a recording device like an Apple TV to be tasked potentially with decoding and playing back MPEG4 high-def video at the same time as it’s supposed to be reading and recording native DTV broadcasts, and that’s with a single tuner. Two tuners may be de rigeur today, too.

While there’s a CableCard requirement for terrestrial cable, in practice that’s been hard to get, although it’s apparently improving. Apple doesn’t like to have slots in its products, because it can’t control that experience. So the idea that Apple TV would interface with Cable TV systems seems tricky. Likewise the IPTV systems that AT&T and Verizon have deployed.

For satellite, there’s zero requirement for CableCard, and there’s no assurance that anything will change. Apple might partner with one satellite TV provider, but then what about the customers of the other(s)?

For analog inputs, such as the composite or even component outputs of DVRs and satellite receivers, you then have the complication of either requiring an IR blaster or coordinating recordings or some other nonsense. Apple doesn’t like ugly stuff, so running a cable with an IR blaster that might not always work seems unlikely. And Apple doesn’t like to rely on or support third-party add-ons in their initial releases.

I may be wrong about all of the above; Apple might have a unique approach to tuning. But just as Jobs didn’t release a phone until he could control everything he thought was important, TV tuning seems to be in the same boat. So much is out of his control.