An Inside Look at Why Apple Hasn’t Revolutionized Television
No surprise they went to Gene Munster for a comment. Munster is the dweeb predicted Apple would make their own TV for 6 years running, and frantically pestered Apple on investor calls to make it happen. This despite the fact that the entire Television market is a tiny fraction of the PC market, let alone the smartphone&#x2F;tablet markets, and it never made sense for Apple to ever make a TV set.<p>Most analysts have no clue what it takes to run a business, they are focused on balance sheet and income statements separate from the reality that created them (which is the exact opposite of what Buffett does). The Apple Watch was about as successful as was possible (probably the best selling watch in history by revenues), and some analysts flipped out that it wasn&#x27;t as big as the iPhone (even though Apple Watch outsold iPhone in their first year).<p>The latest AppleTV is great, a substantial improvement to the previous model, and very competitive in every way other than cost (it&#x27;s ease of use premiums is worthwhile though IMHO). I use Siri, play games with my kids, subscribed to HBO&#x2F;Netflix, etc. The only reason sales declined over the previous model is that it&#x27;s significantly more expensive. But the reality is the hardware can&#x27;t ever be a big product for Apple, other than opening the door to getting a piece of subscription revenues for streaming content.<p>The only thing left holding back AppleTV, Xbox, Roku, Fire, Google, et al, is access to live and current tv content. Apple hasn&#x27;t been able to crack the code to get live TV channels yet, but neither has most anyone else. The real problem is the cable business model, and it needs to fracture a little more before it breaks entirely and all the set top boxes get access to all the content.