Thursday, December 6, 2012

Apple Television

I'm pretty sure I've now purchased more iPhones and iPads than I've bought computers in my lifetime.  Definitely that's true for in the past 10 years of purchases.

But my main TV is now over 10 years old.  It is a nice big projection HDTV that was expensive but not crazy at the time I bought it; only now are flat panel ones getting big enough and cheap enough to think about replacing it someday.

The screen on any recent TV will do fine for many years, just as mine has done.  It would be incredibly wasteful and silly to upgrade them the way we upgrade phones every few years.  If I buy an Apple Television, I'll want it to last 10+ years like the last one.  

But what if Apple sold so the screen had a detachable and upgradeable CPU/memory/logic box.  The "Screen" part that really was only the display, and that separate box that slid into a socket that had all the CPU and memory.   They likely could do it so the box was size of an AppleTV now.

Then in a couple years when you can get a new logic box (for something like built-in LTE for watching Internet TV truly without a cable, and who knows what other cool stuff) you'd just pop out the old module and plug in a new one and that's it.  

It's even a good business model:  sell TV now for $X99, sell upgraded CPU every 2 years for $99.  Seems better than other model:  sell TV now for $X99, hope it breaks then sell another TV when it does.

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