The “I finally cracked it” quote from Walter Isaacson’s authorized Steve Jobs biography has gotten fans excited and sparked a new round of speculation involving a full-fledged Apple television set with the Apple TV functionality built-in. Analysts are calling for a 2012 launch, claiming Apple’s been prototyping a television set for a while. Now Nick Bilton chimes in with an article in the New York Times, saying Jobs’s comment probably relates to Siri being the perfect remote control replacement for the confusing user interfaces found on today’s televisions.
As you recall, Jobs told his biographer that “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine”. Be that as it may, Bilton does not rule out the possibility of an Apple-branded television product, hinting at what the pundits have been hoping for all along:
Apparently, Apple’s been prototyping a television set for some time, if Bilton’s sources are to be believed:
Even if Apple is not working on such a project at the moment, Bilton writes, the company has it on its roadmap:
And how would Siri tie in? Pretty seamlessly:
Of course this experience goes beyond just playing TV shows or the local news. As the line between television programming and Web content continues to erode, a Siri-powered television would become more necessary. You aren’t going to want to flip through file folders or baskets of content, checking off what you want. Telling Siri to “play videos of cute cats falling asleep” would return an endless YouTube stream of adorable napping fur balls.
