Apple isn’t talking, but some deep throats are, confirming Engadget’s report that the new Apple TV will be an “iPhone without a screen.”
That means iPhone/iPad apps on your TV screen of choice. With the iPhone 4’s new operating system routing video streams from the cloud, some in 1080p HD.
It gets better: The price for the new Apple TV will be $99, according to Engadget.
If true, this means the death of Apple TV as we know it … and don’t love it. The unveiling of Google’s TV effort at roughly the same time as this Apple news leak appears to be a coincidence, however.
The old Apple TV (pictured) — old meaning it was never updated — never caught on and was subsequently excused as “a hobby” by Steve Jobs.
Google TV debuts in the fall, with Android apps. It will run on cable boxes and Sony HDTVs, along with other entertainment hardware TBA.
The Apple TV box would be right in line with the Jobs aesthetic — power in and video out, Engadget says. The Apple Time Machine feature allows for external hard drive storage, if you like. There’s a mere 16GB of flash memory on the TV box, meaning it’s all about the cloud.
Apps, among many other functions, provide a world of addictive games, as TechCrunch points out. Assuming they look snazzy in living room resolutions, we’re looking at an industry shake-up on the casual games front. (One possible victim of the dueling TV systems: Microsoft’s Xbox Live.)
The Apple TV streaming also will allow for easy access to your iTunes treasures — not all that difficult to achieve now via AirPort, but a bother nonetheless.
The price difference might be the first front: Google TV’s devices (inside Sony HDTVs, for example) would run on the expensive Intel Atom chips. Apple TV would rely on the company’s new A4 chips, already showing their economy on the iPad.
Meanwhile, the Fire Horse Trail blog has a somewhat creepy post about the privacy implications of the Google TV ad model.
Know how targeted ads follow you around on the Web? Coming soon to a TV near you, eventually.
Soon the TV ads will be greeting you by name, meaning the world of “Minority Report” is not so far away.
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