Seamless and simple: the Steve Jobs television dream
AFTER Steve Jobs realised he was terminally ill, he made a dying wish. “When I was diagnosed with cancer, I made my deal with God or whatever,” he said in 2007, “which was that I really wanted to see Reed [his youngest son] graduate”. Tragically, he didn’t get the chance: Reed Jobs is due to graduate from Stanford in 2014.
The second most important thing on his bucket list was to disrupt and then dominate the TV industry, much as he did with the music and mobile phone sectors. It is unclear whether he felt able to tick this item off but, shortly before he died, he told his biographer he had “finally cracked it”.
Jobs described an “integrated television set that is completely easy to use… seamlessly linked with all of your devices…. no complex remotes… the simplest user interface you could imagine”. Apple doesn’t make TVs, but if it did they would be the best TVs in the world.
Or rather Apple doesn’t make TVs – yet. Yesterday, shares in luxury German TV maker Loewe surged on rumours that Apple was poised to snap it up. There are reasons that this rumour moved markets while others don’t. Such an acquisition appears to fit the Apple mould.
We like to think of Apple as an inward looking company, mistrustful of outsiders and fiercely protective of its ever-growing cash pile. But over the years, Apple has often made small, bolt-on acquisitions in areas where it lacked expertise. In 2000 it bought SoundJam, an MP3 player which became the platform for the now famous iPlayer. It acquired FingerWorks, the company behind the multi-touch gestures that are so crucial to the success of the iPhone and iPad, five years later. Siri – the voice recognition software on the iPhone 4S – was also bought off the peg in 2010.
So it makes sense that Apple, which knows nothing about making TVs, would look for outside help. Enter Loewe. Its TVs are incredibly slim, a must for Apple, but still contain a 500GB hard disk drive and sophisticated streaming abilities, useful if you want a TV that is “seamlessly linked to your devices”. The rumoured price of $113m also looks about right; Apple has no interest in paying big for the likes of a Panasonic or Samsung.
There are reasons to doubt the deal though. Firstly, Loewe’s TVs are astronomically expensive, starting at £700 for a base model and going all the way up to £5,000 – too pricey even for Apple aficionados. Second, they are imperfect products, beautiful but flawed. Still, Apple’s scale and its perfectionist culture could overcome these problems, and it tends to make acquisitions because there are one or two things it likes about the firm – not because it is the finished article.
If Loewe isn’t the one, you can be sure that Apple is looking for someone. When it finds the right firm, its approach to the TV industry will follow the Jobs textbook to the letter: control the content, control the technology and control everything about the user experience. Makers of TV sets and shows beware.