Piper Jaffray: Apple is already building prototype TV sets
The solution Steve Jobs said he “finally cracked” could be a $6 billion business by 2014 — Click to enlarge. Source: www.patentlyapple.com — In a note to clients released Monday, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster seizes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Gene Munster's Monday note extends a running Piper Jaffray thesis that Apple's next act after the iPhone is the living room, anchored to Steve Jobs' claim that he had 'finally cracked' television. The firm sizes a full Apple TV set at $6 billion in revenue by 2014, and Bloomberg's same-day pickup adds that the effort is reportedly led by the creator of iTunes — two independent signals that this has moved beyond idle analyst chatter.
The pattern rhymes with Apple's own recent history: back in August 2009 the same kind of supply-chain-and-analyst reporting flagged a $1.2 billion tablet computer months before the iPad shipped, so markets have learned to treat these pre-launch notes as early positioning rather than noise. With Jobs' health and succession dominating the news cycle, any credible map of what he 'cracked' carries extra weight.
First-order effects
- Apple investors get a new, quantified addressable-market narrative — a $6 billion TV business by 2014 — layered on top of a quarter already buoyed by record iPhone 4S launches at Sprint and AT&T.
- Incumbent TV manufacturers now face a rumored entrant that would arrive not as another panel maker but bundled with iTunes content and Apple's retail distribution.
Second-order effects
- Display and component suppliers gain a prospective second mega-customer for large panels, tightening supply and pricing across the TV hardware chain if Apple orders at iPhone scale.
- Content owners and cable distributors face renewed leverage pressure: an Apple set built around iTunes shifts bargaining power toward app-store-style à la carte pricing over the traditional bundle.
Third-order effects
- If the Munster thesis holds, the living room becomes the defining post-PC battleground, with control of the interface and content pipeline — not screen quality — deciding who captures TV economics.
- Analyst-driven rumor cycles of this kind increasingly function as de facto product roadmaps, shaping competitor planning and consumer expectations during Apple's deliberate silences.
The trend: Television is emerging as the next great post-iPhone platform contest, with Wall Street research and supply-chain leaks filling the information vacuum Apple deliberately maintains.