With the publication of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, the internet exploded over the following quote about an Apple TV (as opposed to the Apple TV):

It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud… It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it

Without the book, I’m not sure in what context the quote was placed, but the idea of an Apple TV isn’t new. And, predictably, opinions range from the extremes of thinking an Apple TV would be the best thing ever, to people who think Apple would be crazy to enter the TV space.

I’m in two minds. People argued cellphones were a crazy move for Apple: they were cheap, regularly disposed of, and there was little potential for disruption. The iPhone has since proved otherwise. I’d certainly be interested to see how Apple could ‘reinvent’ television, but there are hurdles the company would have to clear.

Televisions are not devices that are regularly upgraded, and I’m not sure even Apple churning out shiny bi-annual upgrades would change this. Therefore, whatever kit Apple released would have to have longevity beyond even the sturdiest of iOS devices. It would also have to be competitive within the current market—not impossible, but certainly a tough ask.

Apple would also have to convince a sizeable chunk of the media industry to radically change its thinking. At present, television and movie studios are clinging to the wreckage of the 1990s, still for the most part believing in keeping media expensive and relatively inaccessible. Digital TV shows are priced on iTunes in excess of the RRP of DVDs and Blu-ray, to keep you buying shiny discs, and region-blocks of all kinds mess with worldwide commercial access to shows, despite the same shows being available as torrents mere minutes after broadcast.

Having mulled this thinking over on Twitter today, I’ve had responses along the lines of “but what about the music industry?” It’s true that Apple was disruptive there, and was also largely responsible for the current DRM-free and affordable model for individual tracks and entire albums. But whether the lesson the TV/movie industry’s learned is more along the lines of “and there’s no way that’ll happen to us” rather than being inspired will be key to any hope Apple has of making it in the world of television.

The Apple TV unit and iTunes have already shown that Apple’s clout—even while Steve Jobs was involved—isn’t always enough. TV shows remain expensive. Movies are regularly removed from rental, so users can be ‘forced’ to buy them, and then they’re plonked back once the studios realise there’s a sequel on the way. There’s no consistency to this, nor in availability worldwide. The USA’s rental and purchase selection is massively superior to the UK’s, and yet plenty of UK shows aren’t available in the US. And then there’s the TV-show rental debacle, where Apple only managed to get Fox, the BBC and Disney-related properties on board—and even then, many hit shows were absent.

But there’s still plenty of potential in the Apple TV. Drop pricing and up the range of shows and it moves from being quite a nice device to a must-have. (If you’ve a networked PC or Mac and AirVideo, it’s a suitable unit for watching shows in any format, too, rather than just those sitting in iTunes.) And so if Apple can fix these things, perhaps an Apple-branded television could also have a shot in the market.

Pocket Gamer’s headline writer seems to have made a massive typo. I’m pretty sure that Top 10 tablets that could topple the iPad 2 should have read Top 10 tablets that won’t topple the iPad 2, although one of them will replace it and another might cause it a bit of grief. Tsk! You just can’t get the sub-editors these days, can you?

Entering serious mode for a moment (sorry), I wonder why publications continue to churn out the same old list, including tablets that haven’t made the slightest dent in the market. As has been remarked by various writers, there really isn’t a tablet market right now—there’s an iPad one. Hardly anyone cares about the PlayBook and the Galaxy Tab 10.1, and even fewer people are excited by whatever Asus, Motorola, Toshiba and Lenovo are firing on to store shelves, cunningly forgetting to back up their efforts with the kind of ecosystem that made the iPad the success that it is.

Here are my predictions for 2012, regarding the tablet market:

• The iPad 2 will continue to sell like hot cakes.
• The iPad 3, assuming it’s released, will also sell like hot cakes.
• Idiot tech hacks will leap on any slide in the iPad’s marketshare as proof the iPad is finally ‘doomed’ and that Android tablets are ‘gaining ground fast’. Said Android tablets will remain, relatively speaking, a niche concern, with one important exception…
• The Amazon Kindle Fire will sell like hot cakes, appealing to people who can’t afford an iPad and/or only want a device primarily intended for media consumption. Hacks will use the Fire’s sales as further proof of Android’s impending dominance, ignoring the fact Amazon’s tablet is far from a standard Android device and that Amazon itself barely mentions Android at all.
• Assuming Windows 8 ships on time, it’ll grab some of the market, but it won’t be nearly as dominant as Windows on the desktop, in part because Microsoft’s late to the party (see also: Windows Phone), but also because Windows 8 for tablets is looking like it will be a ham-fisted amalgamation of radically different interaction models, rather than an entirely user-friendly touchscreen experience.

I think that’s it. Next year won’t be all about the iPad, but it will be all about the iPad and the Kindle. I’ll be very happy to be wrong about this—Apple and Amazon could both do with extra competition, in order to push them even more towards making the best devices possible. But where’s it going to come from? Which other companies have shown even the slightest understanding of what people really want? Which of them cater for what people want to do rather than just checking off bullet-points on a list? And which have the ecosystem to support their tablets?

I finally got round to watching the TechCrunch TV video interview with Steve Wozniak, where he shares his last conversation with Steve Jobs and also provides some insight into Apple’s future. Woz sometimes gets lambasted by the press, in part due to his seemingly ‘un-Apple’ engineer-focussed worldview. Too often, I’d say he’s misquoted or his words are taken out of context. In the linked video, he showcases that he has one thing that could be hugely beneficial to Apple: empathy with Steve Jobs.

Interestingly, Woz says the last conversation he had with Jobs was about him maybe coming back to Apple, because Woz understood the technical things. Woz’s response:

Knowing who’s telling the truth and what people really want and how they think and what products they like and not like—that is worth so much more.

But his understanding of these things backed by his technological knowledge is a reason why Woz could make for an interesting sounding board at Apple. He worries that with Jobs gone, Apple could lack a single person who would keep things simple and beautiful, eventually going the way of Sony. And he points at a couple of stumbles in the recent iPhone 4S event, where Apple spent some time talking about dual-core processors and the ‘split antennae’. Woz argued Jobs would typically simplify or remove such references, instead focusing solely on what’s really important to the device’s users. His main point about the technological aspects:

They matter to engineers.

But not to anyone else.

To be fair to Apple, the previous event played out with the senior teams knowledge about Jobs’s health and that he was dying. Coupled with this also being the team’s first event without Jobs’s involvement, it would be crazy to not cut Apple a little slack. It takes time to get things right, not least when you’ve had such a strong presenter and figure leading your keynotes for many years. But the next keynote, whenever that happens (best guess: the next iPad, some time in 2012) will show whether there’s cause for concern in terms of Apple’s razor-sharp focus and direction. If the event concentrates on what you can do with the device, that will be encouraging: if it has a Retina display and it talks of its beauty; if the device is simply ‘faster’ and ‘more powerful’. But if there’s too much talk of technology, of processors, of RAM, and of the other things that really don’t matter to anyone not of a technical bent, perhaps it’d be time to let Woz have a once-over of those presentations before they happen, so the engineer can remove all the engineer stuff.

Update: TechRadar reports that Al Gore says Jobs was “against leaving a legacy at the company of trying to second-guess what he would have done”, citing issues at Disney where people would ask what Walt Disney would have done. His argument: “Follow your own voice.” That’s fair enough, and I certainly don’t disagree that people at Apple should follow their own mind and not be slavish to the past, and they should certainly never be nostalgic. However, there’s nothing wrong with sanity-checking whatever you’re doing against how Jobs would have presented it. Getting excited about new technologies or concepts that Jobs didn’t care about (gaming, say) could be a fine thing; but banging on about complex technology in a keynote because that’s your passion and your voice—that’s when you should be asking what Steve would have done and react accordingly.

Apple: We’re going to make $LOTS!

Analysts: We predict Apple is going to make $UNICORN!

Apple: Uh…

Time passes…

Apple: We made $LOTS plus!

Analysts: *NOUNICORNSADFACE*

Very little time passes…

AAPL down over five per cent.

So, Apple is making money hand over fist, and bettered its own guidance, but it fell short of whatever figure analysts dreamed up (MG Siegler provides insight into the main error analysts made), and so Apple’s results are disappointing and its shares have been hit. In case you’re wondering, here’s what disappointment looks like in the world of Apple financials:

• Quarterly revenue of $28.27 billion (up from $20.34 last year)
• Quarterly net profit of $6.62 billion (up from $4.31 billion last year)
• Gross margin was 40.3 percent (up from 36.9)
• 17.07 million iPhones sold (21 per cent unit increase)
• 11.12 million iPads sold (166 per cent unit increase)
• 4.89 million Macs sold (26 per cent unit increase)
• 6.62 million iPods (27 per cent unit decline)

So, bar the iPod’s inevitable decline (although with half the iPods sold now being the more expensive iPod touch, unit sales aren’t as important as income in that sector), Apple’s doing quite well, unless you’re say, a numbskull analyst or tech hack who believes the words and figures coming from analysts rather than the actual figures.

Meanwhile, in what’s, surprisingly, not another reality altogether, Yahoo! managed to announce a 26 per cent fall in earnings and watch its shares rise, because the fall wasn’t as bad as investors had feared.

In conclusion:

• Be hugely successful but not as successful as idiot analysts think you might be, with little justification for their idiot figures: SHARES GO BOOM!
• Be a crap, directionless company without focus, but don’t screw up quite as much as people think you will: SHARES GO FWEEEEE!

*96 headdesks*

Apple’s sold four millions iPhone 4S units to date (i.e. in one weekend)—more than Windows Phone has managed in a year. That clearly smarts for Paul Thurrott, he of Supersite for Windows fame:

There’s a long-running joke that Apple’s fans would buy anything the company sold, no matter the quality

— he began, setting up the article in totally unbiased fashion.

But this past weekend, the joke became reality when the Cupertino consumer electronics giant sold 4 million units of a smart phone, the iPhone 4S, which even its most charitable supporters have described as an evolutionary update over its predecessor.

Evolutionary is bad, folks! Everything should be revolutionary, just like all those Android and Windows Phone devices!

“iPhone 4S is off to a great start with more than four million sold in its first weekend—the most ever for a phone and more than double the iPhone 4 launch during its first three days,” said Apple senior vice president Philip Schiller in a prepared statement. “iPhone 4S is a hit with customers around the world, and together with iOS 5 and iCloud, is the best iPhone ever.”

Schiller’s comments are apt, as the iPhone 4S’s hardware appears to be nothing special:

Which, by extension, means the iPhone 4 was nothing special either. And so a much faster version of it with superior features is only selling because deluded idiots are being deluded by Apple-flavour delusions.

It features exactly the same form factor

Apple in “not changing the form factor every time it releases a new device” shocker!

as its buggy predecessor,

The one that wasn’t, in fact, buggy, but had the same antennae issues as every other smartphone. Issues that, incidentally, are reportedly dealt with in the new update.

the iPhone 4S, with the same small screen

That everyone seems to like, apart from hacks who favour other operating systems.

and an updated version of its Apple-designed CPU.

To which I’m surprised Thurrott didn’t say “smells of wee”.

Of course, Apple’s fans are more interested in spending money than they are with facts.

This chestnut is now so old that it’s fossilised. Well done, Thurrott! APPLE USERS ARE IDIOTS, SEE? THEY DON’T LIKE FACTS! THEY JUST SPEND MONEY FOR SHINY SHINY! Right.