On Twitter, David Marsden asked me for some thoughts on his piece on upcoming Apple kit. As is almost law these days, the Apple TV got a mention, with Marsden quoting The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple on a formal launch of an Apple television product.

Nope.

Marsden subsequently mulled over the possibility of an Apple TV SDK, and suggests that could start a progression towards a fully-fledged TV unit:

Let it sink in what the platform is about, then release the SDK at WWDC with big players on day one [… and] start the ground work for a fully fledged TV system late this year, or early next.

I’ve on occasion been very wrong about Apple in the past. I don’t still have a link, but one ex-MacUser wag once dug up my scathing dismissal of the original iPod, and I also once wrote about iPhone gaming, arguing it would end up floundering in the shadow of the DS and PSP. (Months later, I at least took my lumps and said “hey, what a total idiot I was” and set about yelling from the rooftops about iOS gaming at  every opportunity.)

The idea of an Apple TV still makes no sense to me though. Apple makes money on regular hardware refreshes. It would have to convince people to refresh televisions every two or three years. This is a very big ask. Marsden on Twitter suggested Apple would “need to have it as a screen with a swappable Apple TV brain”, but that runs counter to the Apple of today, which won’t even let consumers upgrade RAM in their laptops. The idea of enabling consumers to increase the longevity of an expensive unit by offering an inexpensive upgrade sounds more Windows PC than Apple TV.

Also—and importantly—the more interviews I do with media folk, gamers and the like, the more people talk about the ‘second screen’ taking over from the first. I don’t imagine televisions will vanish from sitting rooms any time soon, but people are now increasingly likely to watch video on mobile devices, and so concentrating effort on better iPads, iPods and iPhones seems savvier than working on a standalone television unit.

However, the existing Apple TV remains an interesting component—a relatively cheap ‘link’ to get what’s on your iOS device on to the television the Apple TV is connected to. The box itself isn’t that impressive (its innards being roughly the same as a cheap iPod touch), but what it does is modularise the ‘smart’ bits of ‘smart TV’, while remaining cheap enough to upgrade on a semi-regular basis. Furthermore, the software itself can be updated whenever Apple wishes, adding new services and content. Now that sounds very Apple, hence, I guess, why Apple’s actually released the thing!

To that end, I still don’t see an actual television in Apple’s future. Perhaps on this subject I’m lacking in imagination, but it seems no better a market to enter into than making a games console—Apple’s existing products already overlap with traditional media, and there seem few—if any—advantages in spending many millions of dollars going up against existing players.

On the current Apple TV, I expect to see more services—primarily US-centric ones—being drip-fed out over the coming months and years. I do hope Apple improves that particular situation. Although AirPlay is very handy, too many companies stupidly block video feeds, meaning the obvious tactic of starting a show on your iOS device and firing it at your TV via the Apple TV is too often scuppered. Beyond that, there’s perhaps some scope for bettering gaming on the Apple TV (most notably, reducing lag), but with the majority of iOS titles designed for touch interaction on the screen you’re holding, anything created specifically for the Apple TV will almost need to be thought of as being aimed at a different system entirely.