Since when did the four-legged chair become a three-legged stool?

“We've got two strong legs on our chair today — we have the Mac business, which is a $10 billion business, and music, our iPod and iTunes business, which is $10 billion. We hope the iPhone is the third leg on our chair, and maybe one day Apple TV will be the fourth leg.” 

Steve Jobs, in USA Today

Apple TV Take Two has been out in the wild for a while now, and what a force for good it truly is. With the recent European launch of movie rentals, and the massive expansion of TV shows on iTunes in the UK, even users on this side of the pond can finally get the benefit.

Trouble is that despite Apple’s excellent efforts with Take Two, they clearly don’t have much interest in promoting the service. Competitors in the UK, such as BT Vision, Virgin Media and Sky are spending big bucks on advertising. Apple TV is conspicuous by its absence. And this comes at a critical time - the UK is about to switch off analogue terrestrial TV, in favor of digital. Consumers are out there right now, shopping for set-top boxes. Many of the PVRs, DTRs and IPTVs that they may purchase will take them off the market for subsequently acquiring an Apple TV. It’s now or never - where is Apple?

Apple’s US-centric focus is in part to blame. Whilst Virgin Media are doing an excellent job in leveraging their (bizarre) exclusivity with the BBC iPlayer, Apple has failed to do a similar deal - despite the British-broadcast-monopolist’s publicly professed interest in the platform.

At last week’s keynote, Steve Jobs showed us a three legged stool, where once there had been a chair. The stool has three legs, representing their three businesses (Mac, iPhone and Music). There once was talk of a four-legged chair, with Apple TV as the fourth leg. And yet, Apple TV is nearly invisible on Apple.com, and Apple appears to be making no effort to hold their own against substantial advertising investment from their competitors. Historically, this area of marketing has been one of Apple’s strengths.

Even more bizarrely, the UK Apple TV website has been broken for days. Is no one managing this division of the company? Did Apple just rip off the fourth leg of their chair and hurl it away, deciding that a stool would do just as well?

Scrap the stars, Steve

OK, so this is not so much a prediction as it is a wish – a wish upon a star, if you will.

When I first saw Time Machine, demoed at WWDC ‘06, words failed me. I was truly astonished that Apple would come up with such a tasteless user interface concept. Don’t get me wrong, I think that representing the historic state of an application window in 3D space as a metaphor for tracking archived changes is truly inspired (albeit some alternative methods of navigating Time Machine wouldn’t go amiss). No, I have no problem with the basic premise of Time Machine – my problem was with the Star Trek-style background visuals. I haven’t seen a user interface concept that intrusive and inappropriate since Microsoft saw fit to introduce a cartoon dog into Window XP’s search functionality.

At WWDC ’06, I wrongly assumed that since it was a sneak preview, the concept would be refined before final release and the stars would be toned down at the very least. Far from it. Instead, Apple saw fit to really go to town with the whole Star Trek motif. Not only is it on the Mac OS X product packaging, it’s even the default desktop pattern. That may not be such a big deal for Windows users, who are quite used to their default desktop “wallpaper” being polluted with intrusive marketing messages, but Apple used to have a tasteful default desktop image – so much so that I always used to stick to it.

As if the stars in themselves weren’t enough, Apple saw fit to include a gaudy pink nebulae – which oddly highlights the problem that MacBook Pros have with displaying millions of colours (check out that banding!)

The trekkies at Apple have come a long way from Time Machine and Leopard. Their work can now also be seen on marketing for Time Capsule and Final Cut Studio. There’s even a suggestion of a space theme on Apple TV (don’t even get me started on lens-flares). What happened to form following function; to Zen-like simplicity; to design being about how things work, not how things look? Please Steve, scrap the stars!

Apple iServe with iTunes Server [Mockup]

Earlier this month, at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, Steve Jobs was asked about the possibility of an “XServe Mini” to bring Leopard Server-style services to consumers at an affordable price. AppleInsider reported that “Jobs seemed like he wanted to say something, but then punctuated the awkward silence with the typical refrain of not being able to say anything.” Why did Jobs hesitate? Perhaps because he had just such a product in mind.

For what it’s worth – here’s what MacPredictions thinks that it might be (all speculation, as usual, no inside sources).

As consumers are buying more and more content from the iTunes Store, storage is becoming an increasing issue. Put simply, sooner or later your Mac or PC will run out of disk space. And this problem is only going to get worse as consumers increasingly switch to HD content. A home server is the obvious solution, but there are some problems to address:

• It needs to be easy to setup and administrate
  
• It needs to be extendable – consumers storage requirements will continue to grow
  
• It needs to be resilient
  
• It needs to be affordable

The solution that MacPredictions envisages combines several products:

• AirPort Wireless Base Station
  
• Apple TV
  
• Time Capsule
  

So it would sit in your living room, under your TV, it would store all of your iTunes purchases, so you can watch or listen to all your content on your home entertainment system. It would provide a simple backup solution for all the Leopard-based Macs on your network. And it would serve internet access wirelessly to the entire household.

The final component would be a new software tool – iTunes Server, that would automatically sync content purchased from iTunes onto the server, and it would serve iTunes content seamlessly to all authorised clients on the network, as if the content was stored locally. It would enable the user to set rules to determine which content is synced to which clients, and it may even provide the ability to remotely manage Macs – so for example, parents could set the parental controls for their kid’s Mac.

The server would offer some RAID options, with the ability to dynamically add addition capacity to a single logical volume, with a neat hardware enclosure design enabling drives to be stacked in a tower configuration, without any hassle with cables.

Blu-Ray Apple TV

Apple TV has clearly not lived up to expectations, since Steve Jobs now refers to it as a "hobby". The product was always a little ahead of its time, in two respects. Firstly, it envisages a day when optical media (such as DVDs and CDs) are abandoned, despite the fact that Blu-Ray and HD DVDs are just now hitting shelves, and secondly, the iTunes Store does not yet offer a large enough range of movie downloads, and no high-def or rentals.

As a result, Apple TV is effectively a product in search of a market. In my view, the solution to this is clear - address early adopters with the best solution for a Blu-Ray player (better still if it can play both Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats, but since Apple's in the Blu-Ray camp, this is unlikely).

Right now, a lot of people are considering purchasing a high-def player, and for those who don't go for a Playstation 3, a Blu-Ray Apple TV could become the most popular choice.

Combined with an improved Apple Remote (see previous article) the one other enhancement that would broaden the potential market for Apple TV is a display. This would make it ideal for hooking up to audio systems to play music without the need to turn on a TV set to navigate menus.

A Blu-Ray drive and a display will inevitably push the price up, but could potentially turn this much-forgotten product into a smash hit. Naturally, at some point in the future, the optical drive can be dropped in favour of downloads again!

Apple TV 2.0

January 2008 will mark the 1 year anniversary of Apple TV - Apple's fledgling line of set top boxes. But will it enjoy many happy returns? Right now, the chances don't look too good. Sales have apparently not been so great, and Steve Jobs himself even referred to Apple TV as a "hobby" in his interview with Walt Mossberg at D: All Things Digital earlier this year.

So it seems that Apple TV has not delivered all that Apple had hoped for. However, given the strategic importance of this product line for Apple, I think it's unlikely that they'll give up on it anytime soon. In fact, I think it's more likely that they will put their A-Team onto the product to try and sort it out.

Why hasn't the product been a hit? Several reasons I suspect:

• Lacks support for legacy TVs (only has HDMI and component video support)
• Expensive (it's probably a low-margin product from Apple's perspective, but $299 [£199] is still a lot for a set top box)
• Lack of rental product for movies
• Lack of choice on iTunes store (especially outside the US, where with the exception of the UK, there's nothing but music videos to purchase for video download)
• Lack of High Definition downloads
• Frustrating remote control (it looks great, and doubtless most remotes have too many buttons, but the Apple remote surely has too few)

I predict that Apple will make the following Apple TV announcements at MacWorld in January:

• New improved Apple Remote - larger, with more buttons (sure Steve Jobs loves the current one, but he loved the hockey-puck mouse back in the day, and he conceded defeat on that one too). This will probably come with all new Macs as well, and heck, why not sell it separately to the Apple fan-boys like myself who must have one 
• Price cut (even if this means they'll initially be selling them at a loss - after all, isn't that how games consoles are marketed?)
• New Movie Rental Service accessible directly from Apple TV (no need to use iTunes)
• Support for Composite video and SCART for legacy TVs
• Larger hard drives
• Dashboard (which you can configure in iTunes)
• Games (which you can buy from iTunes store. Apple may take a leaf out of Wii's book here, and come up with a special games controller)

Oh, and as a crowd-pleaser for existing Apple TV owners, all of the above will come as a free 2.0 software update, but will require the new remote to access the Movie Rental service and play the games. That's my guess anyway. We'll see in January.