Apple Has No Plans For A HDTV

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Apple’s COO Tim Cook made an appearance at a technology investor conference and said some revealing things about the Apple TV and Apple’s future (or lack there of) in the HDTV market. Cook revealed that Cupertino will continue to support the Apple TV, but they’ve got no interest in producing HDTVs or Apple TV-embedded HDTVs.

When asked about the Apple TV, Cook stuck to the Apple party line of “it’s just a hobby.” Ignore the fact that Steve Jobs called it the future of media when they introduced the Apple TV three years ago – it’s been selling mediocrely and Apple has pigeon-holed the device as a hobbyist device every since.

Cook did say that they’re going to stick with the Apple TV, despite its poor sales, because they believe the digital media aggergator market is underdeveloped. Cook told the analysts that all of Apple’s other markets (computers, MP3 players, phones) are huge and feature big competition, but the digital media set-top market is pretty small by comparison.

Cook was then asked about the possibility of an Apple-branded HDTV or possibility a HDTV embedded with the Apple TV technology. He said they had no interest in that direction, but Apple will continue to invest and develop the Apple TV “as a hobby”.

Of course, this could change at any moment. In Steve Jobs’ second reign at Apple, he declared (at different times) that they wouldn’t make a music player, they wouldn’t make a cell phone and they wouldn’t make a tablet – all of which they now are selling.

Although Apple hasn’t said anything, some pundits in the tech space are speculating that the Apple TV could get the iPhone OS, based on earlier rumors that the iPhone OS will be expanding outside of the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices.

It’s worth noting that in the three years that the Apple TV has been released, it’s only gone through one hardware revision, which was a new model with an increased hard drive.