Apple's ambitions in the home entertainment sector are growing by the day. Their tiny $99 TV set-top, the Apple TV, had several hints last week of becoming Apple's first real attempt at tackling the Big Three of console gaming. The prospects of having a small and inexpensive gaming console in your living room may sound remotely interesting. But what if you can do away with a separate set-top and have the unit in your television instead? Gaming from a wall-mounted TV in your kitchen, perhaps? Or perhaps something that goes beyond what today's TV manufacturers are offering, such as what Sony introduced in this year's refresh of their Bravia HDTVs.
Imagine this, without that little black box in front of the TV.
According to CNET, Gene Munster, a senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, predicted in a note last month that Apple is preparing to enter the HDTV market next year. His predictions may turn out to be true after all. Earlier today, sharp-eyed bloggers at 9to5mac noticed a new job posting on Apple's website. It called for new people eager to work on new power management technologies for "Apple's next generation Macintosh platforms." Those platforms being their laptops, desktops, servers, their monitors, and... TVs?
And there it is, right at the end. There is a possibility that it could have been an employee's intention to write a "set-top box" instead of "TV," but considering how the word immediately follows "standalone displays," and given how power consumption is already an impressively low 2.5 watts on load for the 2010 Apple TV, we can only assume this to refer to a yet-to-be-announced Apple HDTV in the works.
Image Credit (screenshot): 9to5mac.com
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