Google TV: Is It Time For Apple TV to Drop Its “Hobby” Status?
Posted 03/18/2010 at 6:47am
| by J.R. Bookwalter
Google has announced its intentions to invade the living room with an Android-powered media box and partners Intel, Sony and Logitech. Will Google TV finally be a wake-up call for Apple to do something real with Apple TV at long last?
That’s the question
posed by MC Siegler over at TechCrunch, who notes that the increasing tensions between Google and Apple have now spilled blood in another front: The living room. And unlike the smartphone race where Apple still has a good foothold with the iPhone, the living room is totally up for grabs since no one has quite figured out how to mine that gold yet.
Google TV, as it’s slated to be called, will be based around the company’s open-source Android platform, which means there will already be plenty of third-party developers coming up with all kinds of cool stuff for it. Meanwhile, Apple TV has been a closed platform (despite methods to hack it to do things it was never designed for). But what if Apple totally reworked its media box to use the iPhone OS?
“The idea of running iPhone-style applications on the Apple TV has long been a sexy one,”
TechCrunch’s Siegler notes. “The main problem with developing iPhone apps for the Apple TV seems to be resolution. With the iPhone (and iPod touch), Apple offers only one screen size/resolution, ensuring developers have an easy time making great-looking apps -- while at the same time, making sure end users have a great experience.”
But that has all changed with the introduction of the iPad -- developers are now scrambling to update their apps for the larger canvas that the iPad offers. It’s not hard to imagine that Apple TV could be reworked to run those apps, instead of the hackneyed Mac OS X Front Row-style interface that it has now. (The Apple TV actually runs Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.)
Google has the advantage in this department, since Android “already runs on dozens of phones with different screen sizes,” and even portable non-phone devices such as the
Archos 5 Internet Tablet. For their part, Apple likely won’t take this fight lying down -- they’ve publicly stated that Apple TV’s “hobby” status is still something that they are very much interested in investing in, and for all we know there’s a few units deep within the labs at Cupertino already running iPhone OS or some other equally amazing thing.
Whatever Apple is planning to do to counter Google, it’s probably time to step up to the plate and knock one out of the park. We know you can do it, Apple!