WSJ: Apple shelved its HDTV plans last year
Ever wondered what happened to that Apple HDTV we've been hearing rumors about for years ? According to The Wall Street Journal, those rumors weren't baseless speculation, as the company did work on a television set for nearly a decade. Unfortunately, you won't be seeing one anytime soon: the project's reportedly been shelved since last year, because Cupertino couldn't come up with anything to make its television different enough from competitors'. Apple apparently toyed with the ideas of 4K TVs, using a transparent laser-powered display and even adding sensor-equipped cameras that can move to capture the speaker's face during FaceTime calls. In the end, none of those seemed "compelling enough" for the company's bigwigs.
At the moment, Apple's concentrating on giving the Apple TV box a slimmer design and creating an online TV service, the WSJ said. Cook and cohorts are already talking to people to offer TV channel bundles, which could be announced as soon as June and launched this fall. Despite the publication's report, billionaire investor Carl Icahn, one of Apple's largest shareholders, has published an open letter to Tim Cook that forecasts a "push into the TV market" for 2016. Whether Icahn's prediction comes true remains to be seen, as Apple didn't completely kill its TV dreams -- it just put them on hold for now.
