One of the projects that I've always believed to have been on Apple's roadmap was that of a Smart-HDTV – even when Apple kept insisting publicly that it was just a "hobby." Year after year Apple's patents were indicating that the HDTV project was still alive and well. In fact there was enough evidence to call it an official trend worth following. So we opened a special Apple TV archive on our site to keep tabs on this project's progress. Today, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been working on this project until the very end and that Apple may have finally cracked the Smart TV mystery.
The Smart-TV Mystery Finally Cracked
The Washington Post reports that Steve Jobs had told his authorized biographer Walter Isaacson that he'd "like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," and that "It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud." Steve Jobs went on to state that "No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
The "seamlessly synced with all of your devices" aspect of that quote was echoed in the patent graphic noted above that was only revealed this past June.
Another recently published Apple HDTV related patent that was published in January of this year pointed to the Cloud or iCloud playing a role as you could see in the patent figure below.
Of course, until Steve Jobs' biography is officially out, we can't tell if there's another shoe to drop here or if at some point in time Steve Jobs simply changed his mind. But at the moment, the dream is definitely still alive.
