Apple build a 24-inch touchscreen TV for your kitchen
Just in time for this week’s iPad event, rumors about Apple building a TV set started popping up again.
The company announced no such plans at the event, but that won’t stop
fans and analysts alike from forecasting that Apple will unveil plans to
take over the living room any day now.
But is that really what Apple should do? Margins in the TV space are
thin, consumers only buy a new TV every five or seven years. And there’s no sign that Hollywood and the pay TV industry are going to allow unbundling, or even just Apple taking over Comcast’s UI, any time soon.
That’s why I’d like to propose a different product: Instead of trying
to go big in the living room, only to compete with established players
like Samsung and Vizio, Apple should go small, and target the kitchen
with a 24-inch touchscreen TV.
The case for the kitchen
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably found yourself using the
iPad, or any other tablet, in the kitchen quite a bit. I like to watch
the Daily Show when I wash dishes, catch up on video podcasts
when I cook, and of course use the web as my cookbook. Only I find
myself constantly frustrated by the experience.
Cooking is a great time to watch something in the background,
especially during those many little breaks where you essentially just
wait around for things to finally become edible. At the same time,
you’ve got to have your recipes accessible, and you don’t want to
constantly switch from one thing to another, especially once you get
your hands dirty.
As a result, I’ve started to use two tablets in the kitchen. One for
entertainment, one for recipes. It’s a completely ridiculous setup that
takes up way too much counter space, and frequently results in the need
to clean tomato sauce off of not one, but two screens.
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Cooking for the iPad works, but it’s not a great experience.
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Of course, Apple wouldn’t be the first one to give the kitchen a shot. HP has been trying to get its touchscreen PCs into America’s kitchens for years.
But in the end, these machines are first and foremost computers, and
you don’t need keyboards, spreadsheets or CD drives in the kitchen.
At the same time, there are plenty of things that computers are just
so bad at that Apple could easily own this space by just offering a few
extra features. Like, for example…
The family whiteboard
I know what you’re thinking: Isn’t a 24-inch touchscreen TV just a
giant iPad? Yes, with a key difference: The iPad is mobile, an Apple
kitchen TV would be mounted in place. That fundamentally changes how a
device like this would be used. Even if shared, mobile devices are
personal, and there is barely ever a strong connection between utility
and location. A display with a bigger screen size on the other hand is
necessarily communal, and a fixed location dictates usage patterns.
That’s why you sit on your couch when you want to watch TV together.
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The TV in your kitchen could double as your shopping list.
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But make the display more approachable and interactive, and you got
yourself the perfect canvas for a whole range of additional
functionality. One is the family whiteboard. The 24-inch TV in your
kitchen could easily double as your grocery shopping list, or the space
where you leave quick scribbled messages and video recordings. Sure
there’s an app that does all of that on your phone, but what if your
kids don’t have a phone yet? How are you going to leave a message for
the baby sitter, or the person watching your house while you go on
vacation? In other words: What is going to replace the sticky note on
your fridge?
The personal news feed
When TV and set-top box makers think about the future of television, they envision giant displays that cover our living room walls,
offering up both linear TV and personalized news feeds. Local weather,
the morning commute, headlines and news clips to topics that matter to
us.
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A wall-to-wall TV screen, as envisioned by NDS.
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That may well be the future of TV sets, but for now, big screens
remain very expensive — and big touch-screens are completely out of
reach for years to come. So why go big if you could display a lot of the
same information on a smaller screen. And why display all of that
information in the living room if everyone is crowding in the kitchen
every morning anyway?
The command center for the connected home
I actually had a spirited debate with Stacey Higginbotham, Gigaom’s resident internet of things expert,
with regards to this point, on our internal discussion system. Stacey
believes that the connected home shouldn’t need a command center. I
think a single screen, located centrally, where you can go to check your
home’s vitals, and quickly adjust the air conditioning, make sure that
you’ve turned off the light in the garage, or take a peek at other
sensors would be great, and help people to get more comfortable with
connecting everything. Plus it would place Apple at the center of the
house, which is a pretty great place to be for the company.
The window connecting you to your loved ones
Real-time communication is another great use case for a stationary display. Imagine that 24-inch kitchen TV with a microphone that’s always listening for hot words,
and a camera that’s always ready to jump into action and establish a
connection to your partner’s kitchen. Or the house of your parents. Or
anyone else you care about, and would love to be closer to.
A mounted display could turn Facetime’s one-off communcation into ambient telepresence.
Vancouver-based video startup Perch has been working on this kind of ambient telepresence for a while.
The company initially wanted consumers to mount iPads to their walls,
and establish a direct connection as soon as you’d look into the camera.
Perch recently changed course and is now using the same technology to
connect distributed work spaces because it found that consumers just
don’t want to dedicate an iPad solely to becoming a telepresence device.
But give them a device that offers enough other functionality and
that’s already mounted in the right height, and you may just have a
killer app at your hands.
Source: Gigaom
