AppleInsider Staff
The news, which was attributed to "informed sources" speaking to the China Business News, was picked up and translated by the WantChinaTimes earlier on Monday.
In particular, the publication cited its sources as saying that this initial build plan is taking place in one of Foxconn's Shenzhen plants as a trial production run, which typically produces a small number of assembly-line-quality prototypes for Apple to put through its design test verification stages. No further details were reported.
While Apple's foray into the big-screen, connected TV business has been a popular topic of discussion amongst industry watchers for several years, few — if any — reliable details surrounding the project have surfaced outside of a claim by the company's late co-founder Steve Jobs to biographer Walter Isaacson that he had 'cracked' secret to a simple HDTV.
Jobs's vision for a connected TV, disclosed vaguely to Isaacson prior to his passing last October, would see the device synced with all of a user's devices, and with Apple's iCloud service.
The simplified HDTV would reportedly spare users from having to use complex remotes for multiple devices like DVD players and cable boxes. More specifically, Isaacson wrote in the best-selling biography that Jobs "wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant."
Earlier this month, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou said his manufacturing firm was "making preparations" for an Apple television, but development or manufacturing had not yet begun. But days later, Gou issued a statement to reporters in which he backtracked on those claims, stating that "[a]ny reports that Foxconn confirmed that it is preparing to produce a specific product for any customer are not accurate."
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101 Comments
Waiting for the facebook TV. It'll tell everyone what I'm watching, and all of the ads will be based on keywords from anything I've ever posted.
Steve "cracked" the secret of any new technology...
Apple TV's will come with free porn
I wonder who is going to be presenting this new product to us on stage. I would choose Ive, but that's pretty unlikely I suppose.
Smart TV? That sounds as much like an oxymoron as an Athletic Couch. And yes, I know the "smart" is a reference to the clever design of the TV, rather than its long-lasting effects on viewers.
Apple is definitely on to something here. Almost all current TV/entertainment systems can be compared in the ease of use, not to Window 95, but to the command line miseries of DOS. To do something, you must decipher the cryptic meaning of all the obscure symbols on one of several remotes. Hit the wrong button, and your DVD ejects, condemning you to a tedious five-minute process to get back to where you were in that movie.
Unfortunately for Apple's bean counters, they won't find me a customer. I deliberately keep my TV small, outdated and clumsy so I use it as little as possible. And personally, I wish Apple would spend a bit more time making their products more efficient for work activities. In the 1990s, Apple had so little foothold in the business market, it had to target users at play. That's no longer true, but Apple still thinks their typical customer is someone in their mid-twenties on their day off. Text handling hasn't been improved in years. Huge sums get spent for new audio and video compression schemes that may make file size or quality a tiny bit better. Nothing is spent to create an innovative, efficient way to move documents from app to app or from print to digital. Years into the age of mobile digital devices, OS X still knows nothing about epub.
One telling example: OS X's built-in, open-source Hunspell spell checking is so dreadful, it fails to give me the right spelling about a third the time. I'm forced to use a fake Google search, whose "Did you mean:" is right about 95% of the time. Apple's spell-checking suggestions should be at least as good as Google's.
I really, really don't think the term "TV" is going to be a part of this. If Apple is smart, which they obviously are, they'll eliminate that term which is becoming increasingly irrelevant.