Rumor: Apple said to have full television in the works

apple-television-ios — Image used with permission by copyright holder

In addition to all the iPhone 5 and iPad 3 rumors swirling around this morning, another report says that Apple has a full television set in the works that will run on its mobile operating system, iOS. That rumor comes via Daily Tech, who spoke with a “former executive” of Apple on a condition of anonymity.

Apple plans to “blow Netflix and all those other guys away,” says the source, with its own television set that combines Apple TV with iTunes. The device will be made in conjunction with a “major supplier” of televisions, says Jason Mick in Daily Tech, who guesses that partner will be Samsung.

Rumors of an Apple-branded television have been around for ages; the company does, after all, create beautiful computer monitors. So the leap to dedicated TV sets doesn’t seem like such a big leap. As Business Insider points out, some industry analysts — Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, to be specific — has been championing the idea of an Apple television for some time now. According to Munster, Apple could generate $2.6 billion in revenue in 2012 just from selling TVs.

Be that as it may, some say that an Apple television is about as unlikely as finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

“I don’t have much on this information beyond common sense. But that doesn’t mean I have no knowledge either,” says MG Siegler in TechCrunch. “With that in mind, I don’t have any problem going out on a limb and saying this isn’t happening.”

While there are a variety of thin reasons to believe the Apple television news, Siegler says that the most glaring detail that makes this whole rumor smell like bunk is that Apple will partner with another company to make the TV sets. And we have to agree — if Apple plans to jump into an entirely new industry, they’ll do so on their own terms, in their own way, and with a product that is 100 percent Apple.

Also, the moderate success of Apple TV — the set-top box that already exists — doesn’t make it seem as though enough people are out there clamoring to bring Apple into their living rooms to warrant the creation of an entirely new (and expensive to manufacture) product.

Of course, few people on the planet can say what Apple does and does not have in store. So, who knows? Maybe the rumor is true and we’ll all be parsing an iTV here sometime soon. (Daily Tech‘s source says end of this this year or next year for release.) Or we won’t. Which, at this time, seems to us far more likely.

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