A job posting on Apple's website suggests the company may be looking to bring its brilliant display tech to full-blown television sets.

Cupertino is currently advertising for someone to work on "Apple's next-generation Macintosh platforms spanning from notebook computers, desktop computers, servers, standalone displays, and TV."

The posting which is specific to "new power management designs and technologies" has many speculating the Apple might be preparing to enter the television game.

Apple TV for real?

The hype obviously arises from Apple's use of the word "TV" in the job description but, while it's fun to speculate, it would be difficult to see Apple entering an already-congested gogglebox market.

We'd hope for continued upgrades to the affordable, yet feature-shy, Apple TV set-top box.

http://www.techradar.com/news/televisio ... ns--929747

An Apple TV will obviously be an iOS device, and will have the Apple TV unit built in. Their focus will be on iTunes content, so I would guess that they would make it harder to connect HDMI (they’ll use a micro or mini HDMI port) than other TVs.

They already do such a device really - the iMac which runs proper Mac OSX.

So it'll be an Apple TV TV?

Jon

Yes an Apple Television would really just be an iMac with a tuner built in.

Quite a nice idea really. I use my iMac for watching more television than my big TV already thank to iPlayer.

CC

So I can buy a good TV from anyone else for X amount, or pay Apple an extra 10-20% for a similar spec one just because it says Apple on the front.
Thanks, but no thanks.

Well the point is you won't. Apple's monitors are way above spec compared to any TV of a similar screen size you can buy - in colour reproduction, resolution and refresh rate. They're (to put it bluntly) way too good to be a TV. In fact, most decent LCD computer monitors are - they're designed to have you sat a foot or two from them for a whole day, which no TV of a similar size is up to the task of.

So what you'd actually be doing is paying about five times the price for a screen which, as a TV, you'll only be using about a quarter of the capability of. It's stupid. In fact, anyone who buys any computer monitor primarily to watch TV on is a looney, or has way way too much money to spend.

So the idea that Apple are just going to take an iMac and put a tuner in it is, well, nobody is daft enough to pay a grand for a 27" TV. they mights ell a few to people who would otherwise have bought 'tunerless' iMacs and some Elgato device, but that's peanuts. If Apple were going to do anything they'd buy in standard, decent TV screen parts - say Panasonic for example - and stick the circuit board from an AppleTV in the back and then wrap it in an 'Appley' case. And charge maybe 100 quid more than the vanilla TV costs. Because that's all they could get away with.

But I can't see why they would. Pretty much every 'household name' TV maker already has a range of 'internet ready' TVs with widgets or gadgets or whatever they want to call them. They can all do some of the things an Apple TV can do and some of the things it can't. I can't really see why Apple would go to the effort of remanufacturing TV screens and adding in AppleTV functionality, when they can just make AppleTVs and sell them to everyone who has bought whatever brand of TV they like. I can't see there are a lot of people who would buy an 'Apple Telly' to get AppleTV functionality who won't just buy an AppleTV anyway, and the TV is a commodity part with minimal available margin. I can't see how Apple would make any more money than they already do - they'd have the whole hassle of R&Ding the kit and setting up a manufacture chain, probably for little extra profit on a per unit basis.

It just doesn't make any business sense at all. Why go to all the extra effort to provide people with something they can already get in a myriad of places for less, when you'll make next to no money doing it?

Jon

In other words they are going to release it next year then

While we're on the subject of TV's, can anyone answer me this.
Is it the compressed digital broadcast or the rubbish LCD TV's that cause colour banding on modern TV's? ie where a colour is supposed to gradually change, but you can see clear lines where the colour changes?

I know cheap TN LCD monitors have that issue as they can't reproduce all colours, but having seen the difference in picture quality since my parents actually got sky HD, I'm thinking it may be the broadcast.

Does anyone know?

Compression artefacts. I see it a lot on broadcast signals, but not on BluRays or images I’ve created myself. There is another phenomena to look out for. It’s where the colour appears to move independently of the detail. Again this is down to the level of compression. You’ll see it on most channels, but more on the channels which appear to compress their signals more.

Another great con of the modern age. They told us that digital pictures would be better than analogue ones.

Digital TV has always loomed crap in a decent TV. When I bought a decent CRT screen over a decade ago, I was staggered by the quality ifnpicture from a DVD player. I was less impressed by the picture I got from cable, and over the years as cable TV has "improved" (ie more channels, more crap) so the picture quality has degraded enormously. Some you could argue is done to the source signal. It seems that Star Trek TNG will always look rough because it was filmed on videotape, no doubt in NTSC. However, it seems that there is a heirachy of picture quality on cable channels with some looking more like teletext artwork at times.

On my HD TV, the poor picture quality seems more degraded. It's upscaling can only work well when the source image is good.

I remember Tomorrow's World demoing a TV signal based on a fractal pattern instead of a scanning line and a fixed array of pixels. It promised really good upscaling for TVs with bigger screens, but meant that the same signal could be viewed on smaller screens with no real loss of detail.

Yeah, there is (or was..) a picture format based on that too. The problem is that while it's pretty easy to decode the picture, it's phenomenally hard work to 'compress' it in the first place. Basically you have to figure out which fractal formula will give you the image you want. You can make things easier by splitting the image into tiles, but the more tiles you have the worse quality you get, so you have to figure out the 'sweet spot' as well. Back when this was news, PCs simply weren't fast enough to be able to encode stuff in anything like reasonable time, even with dedicated maths processors.

Nowadays of course PCs (and the inbuilt hardware in TVs and set top boxes) is much, much faster than it was then. So maybe it's possible to look at it again. However the question would be whether it ends up looking better at the same bandwidth than H.264, which can be very good if the encoder is decent.

Jon