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> Say buying a $200 desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Most people don't want to plug a desktop into their TV and use a keyboard and mouse to watch Ne

> Say buying a $200 desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Most people don't want to plug a desktop into their TV and use a keyboard and mouse to watch Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Video. It's a TV, you want to use a remote, and a user interface that has been designed for a remote. The Apple TV isn't competing with low-end HTPCs, it's competing with the Roku, Fire TV, Chromecast, and other plug-and-play media devices.

voltagex_ 11y ago
Definitely. Again, Apple will come into a market where a lot of their competitors make reasonable hardware but the software is complete trash. An example is a DVR I encountered. The "smart" part of the interface takes ~30 seconds to activate, loads icons from a remote server somewhere (how long will that stay up?) and appears to run on some unholy mashup of HTML and an old version of Flash. Don't even get me started on the UX. Apple's coming in with previous experience of TV interfaces, a slick design team and a software team who actually prioritise performance. And I'm no Apple fan.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  > Again, Apple will come into a market where a lot of their competitors make reasonable hardware but the software is complete trash. I've worked for a number of consumer electronics hardware manufacturing companies. For all of them, software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software. Their business is turning raw physical materials into physical widgets, stuffing those widgets into plastic packaging, putting them on trucks, and shipping them off somewhere. Almost universally, the software produced by these companies is crap. For whatever reason, most hardware companies just don't grok software. They see it as just another cost of manufacturing--a line item on the BOM just like screws and sheet metal. In order to move these widgets onto store shelves, we need to source these parts, assemble them with these steps, test the electronics like so, environmental, stress, UL testing and, oh, by the way, we need to spoon in some of this software stuff or nothing shows up on the screen, but keep it cheap! It's almost seen as a nuisance, a necessary evil: Just slap something together so we can get on with our real business of shipping widgets. Go to leadership in one of these companies and start talking about software best practices. User experience, A/B testing, unit testing, re-usable code, refactoring, hell--source control! They'll look at you like you're wearing a horse head mask. Software is just not a priority--it is seen as an unfortunate cost, not as a differentiator. So, yea, when a software company (not just Apple, anyone who fundamentally gets software) enters their market with their own product, expect it to be light years ahead.
  - kejaed 11y ago
    "software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software." The funny thing is that this perfectly describes Apple.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      That's not true in any real sense. Apple sells consumer electronics, and the software has always been an integral piece of that puzzle as well as a differentiator.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Not only hardware companies. This is how software is seen in all sectors whose main line of business isn't shipping software.

voltagex_ 11y ago

Definitely. Again, Apple will come into a market where a lot of their competitors make reasonable hardware but the software is complete trash. An example is a DVR I encountered. The "smart" part of the interface takes ~30 seconds to activate, loads icons from a remote server somewhere (how long will that stay up?) and appears to run on some unholy mashup of HTML and an old version of Flash. Don't even get me started on the UX. Apple's coming in with previous experience of TV interfaces, a slick design team and a software team who actually prioritise performance. And I'm no Apple fan.

ryandrake 11y ago
> Again, Apple will come into a market where a lot of their competitors make reasonable hardware but the software is complete trash. I've worked for a number of consumer electronics hardware manufacturing companies. For all of them, software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software. Their business is turning raw physical materials into physical widgets, stuffing those widgets into plastic packaging, putting them on trucks, and shipping them off somewhere. Almost universally, the software produced by these companies is crap. For whatever reason, most hardware companies just don't grok software. They see it as just another cost of manufacturing--a line item on the BOM just like screws and sheet metal. In order to move these widgets onto store shelves, we need to source these parts, assemble them with these steps, test the electronics like so, environmental, stress, UL testing and, oh, by the way, we need to spoon in some of this software stuff or nothing shows up on the screen, but keep it cheap! It's almost seen as a nuisance, a necessary evil: Just slap something together so we can get on with our real business of shipping widgets. Go to leadership in one of these companies and start talking about software best practices. User experience, A/B testing, unit testing, re-usable code, refactoring, hell--source control! They'll look at you like you're wearing a horse head mask. Software is just not a priority--it is seen as an unfortunate cost, not as a differentiator. So, yea, when a software company (not just Apple, anyone who fundamentally gets software) enters their market with their own product, expect it to be light years ahead.
- kejaed 11y ago
  "software was an integral part of the product, but at the end of the day, what they're making money from is selling hardware, not software." The funny thing is that this perfectly describes Apple.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    That's not true in any real sense. Apple sells consumer electronics, and the software has always been an integral piece of that puzzle as well as a differentiator.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Not only hardware companies. This is how software is seen in all sectors whose main line of business isn't shipping software.