Apple TV Effort Said to Be Led By ITunes Creator

[dkf]

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is turning to the software engineer who built iTunes to help lead its development of a television set, according to three people with knowledge of the project.

Jeff Robbin, who helped create the iPod in addition to the iTunes media store, is now guiding Apple’s internal development of the new TV effort, said the people, who declined to be identified because his role isn’t public.

Robbin’s involvement is a sign of Apple’s commitment to extending its leadership in smartphones and tablets into the living room. Before his Oct. 5 death, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson that he had “finally cracked” how to build an integrated TV with a simple user interface that would wirelessly synchronize content with Apple’s other devices.

“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine,” Jobs told Isaacson in the biography “Steve Jobs,” released yesterday by CBS Corp. (CBS)’s Simon &
Schuster.

Trudy Muller, a spokeswoman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to comment. Outside of Jobs’s remarks in the book, Apple hasn’t acknowledged that it’s developing a TV set. And according to one person, it’s not guaranteed that Apple will release a television.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/apple-effort-to-develop-tv-is-said-to-be-led-by-itunes-creator-jeff-robbin.html

[leveymg]

1. Why would anyone pay for an Apple TV screen? Just Bluetooth the I-pod.

No great mystery about the interface, other than Apple's own proprietary OS and desire to exclude other developers from coming out with these obvious applications.

[dkf]

2. Well that's the big secret right?

I'm looking forward to hopefully being surprised.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

3. Apple was so paranoid about losing that guy

that he was more or less kept in a dungeon and wasn't even allowed to acknowledge he worked for Apple or on what after Apple acquired SoundJam. Steve Jobs even had a tempter tantrum with the publisher of TIME demanding they redact his name from an article.