Apple AAPL -1.31% has always talked about its tele
Post# of 96897
Posted On: 11/23/2015 11:42:49 PM
Apple AAPL -1.31% has always talked about its television “hobby.” Carl Icahn expects much more.
In the billionaire activist investor’s open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday, Icahn laid out a bold path he expects Apple to talk in the living room — and it starts with selling an “UltraHD” (also known as 4K) television screen. Icahn wrote that television represents a large opportunity for Apple, and “while Apple has not announced plans for a TV set and may never do so, we believe we have good enough reason to expect the introduction of an UltraHD TV set in FY 2016.”
But Icahn isn’t just expecting Apple to release its own 4K TV — he expects it to dominate the competition at high price points. He forecasts Apple selling 12 million 55-inch and 65-inch TV sets in fiscal year 2016 and as many as 25 million the following year at an average selling price of $1,500.
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That would be a massive amount of sales for a device category that’s largely a curiosity for tech geeks at the moment. Last year, a report by Dataxis forecast a cumulative total of 35 million 4K TV sales between 2014 and 2017. Icahn may be overly optimistic if he expects Apple to sell more than that on their own.
Such a TV push would also be a huge manufacturing challenge for Apple, which already has a hard enough time meeting demand for its new larger phone, the iPhone 6 Plus, and pushed the release of its new watch back until 2015. The company sold 10 million “Apple TV” products in 2013, but those were just $99 set top boxes without an expensive screen.
Steve Jobs once thought he had the solution for making TVs simple and elegant. Here’s an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs:
“‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ 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.’”
In the billionaire activist investor’s open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday, Icahn laid out a bold path he expects Apple to talk in the living room — and it starts with selling an “UltraHD” (also known as 4K) television screen. Icahn wrote that television represents a large opportunity for Apple, and “while Apple has not announced plans for a TV set and may never do so, we believe we have good enough reason to expect the introduction of an UltraHD TV set in FY 2016.”
But Icahn isn’t just expecting Apple to release its own 4K TV — he expects it to dominate the competition at high price points. He forecasts Apple selling 12 million 55-inch and 65-inch TV sets in fiscal year 2016 and as many as 25 million the following year at an average selling price of $1,500.
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That would be a massive amount of sales for a device category that’s largely a curiosity for tech geeks at the moment. Last year, a report by Dataxis forecast a cumulative total of 35 million 4K TV sales between 2014 and 2017. Icahn may be overly optimistic if he expects Apple to sell more than that on their own.
Such a TV push would also be a huge manufacturing challenge for Apple, which already has a hard enough time meeting demand for its new larger phone, the iPhone 6 Plus, and pushed the release of its new watch back until 2015. The company sold 10 million “Apple TV” products in 2013, but those were just $99 set top boxes without an expensive screen.
Steve Jobs once thought he had the solution for making TVs simple and elegant. Here’s an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs:
“‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ 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.’”
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