Analyst: iTelevision ‘Only Logical Step’ For Apple
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Might your next television carry the familiar Apple logo? That’s the suggestion of one analyst who sees a Cupertino-branded TV as the next likely move beyond the iPod and iPhone.
“Apple’s fantastic abilility to create exceptionally user-friendly products could revolutionize TVs just like the iPhone changed the mobile phone market,” argued Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.
Although Apple expressed its usual reticence about the comment, Munster said such a product would be the “only logical next step” for the company.
Munster points to a $500 million January deal inked with South Korea’s LG Display to provide “a massive amount of LCDs to Apple.”
Although Apple’s finance chief Peter Oppenheimer in July 2008 announced “a future product transition that I can’t discuss with you today,” most took the comment to indicate an upcoming refresh of an existing product.
However, Munster feels a move into televisions meshes with Apple’s desire to “only move into a new market in which they can ‘solve a problem for consumers.’”
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
