Apple may have finally unveiled its first smartwatch, but what about its other long-rumoured new product category: a television? Chief executive Tim Cook’s latest interview will fuel that speculation.
“TV is one that we continue to have great interest in – I choose my words carefully there – TV is one of those things that, if we’re really honest, it’s stuck back in the seventies,” said Cook, in an appearance on the US Charlie Rose show.
“Think about how much your life has changed, and all the things around you that has changed. And yet TV, when you go in your living room to watch the TV, or wherever it might be, it almost feels like you’re rewinding the clock and you’ve entered a time capsule and you’re going backwards. The interface is terrible. I mean, it’s awful!”
Cook’s company already has one product trying to improve that interface: its Apple TV set-top box, which now has more than 20m users.
Apple has long been rumoured to be working on an actual television, though, with the wait for its introduction thought to be less about the device and more about the necessary licensing deals with broadcasters and producers.
“I don’t want to get into what we’re doing in the future. We’ve taken stabs with Apple TV, and Apple TV now has over 20m users, so it has far exceeded the hobby label that we placed on it,” Cook told Rose.
“We’ve added more and more content to it this year, so there’s increasingly more things that you can do on there. but this is an area that we continue to look at.”
In the interview, Cook also talked about Apple’s $3bn acquisition of Beats Electronics earlier in the year, praising co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre as “creative geniuses” and citing the company’s Beats Music streaming service as a key factor in the deal.
“This subscription service, some people think they’re all alike. Well, let me tell you, I went into the thing sceptically. Not into the acquisition: into their service, because Jimmy had told me how great it was,” said Cook.
“One night, I’m sitting playing with theirs versus some others, and all of a sudden it dawns on me that when I listen to theirs for a while, I feel completely different. And the reason is: they recognised that human curation was important in the subscription service. The sequence of songs that you listen to affects how you feel.”
When Beats Music was announced in early 2013, its founders hired a team of editorial staff drawn from the radio and music journalism industries to create a range of playlists for subscribers to listen to once it launched.
“Right now, these things are all utilities: ‘Give me your credit card, here’s 12m songs, and good luck’. We don’t think that’s gonna stick,” said Iovine at the time.
However, rivals like Spotify and Rdio have also been investing heavily in similarly-human teams of curators, even if their work was unappreciated by Apple’s chief executive in his evening of streaming-music research.
“I couldn’t sleep that night, so I was thinking ‘we need to do this’,” Cook told Rose.
After Apple announced its smartwatch, Cook told US broadcaster ABC News that the company had started work on the product after the death of its former chief executive Steve Jobs. However, in his interview with Rose, he stressed that Jobs remains a key influence on Apple as a business.
“If you think about the things that Steve stood for at a macro level: he stood for innovation, he stood for the simple not the complex. He knew that Apple should only enter areas where we could control the primary technology,” said Cook.
“All of these things are still deep in our company. They’re still things that we very much believe.”
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