Not Quite

The rumors of an Apple-branded HDTV have been around for a long time (although perhaps not as long as the iconic iPhone). For many reasons and for many years, this didn’t make sense. Having an Apple-branded phone was ludicrous since so many other companies controlled the market in terms of handset design, technology, carrier availability, etc. Apple had no leverage; they were just getting their feet under them after recovering from an almost-inevitable downfall, and they weren’t seen as competitive in the marketplace due to the highly exclusive nature of their products. Then they started designing their own hardware, coupled it with some amazing software, and all that changed.

Now, the world looks to Apple for guidance on just about everything.

Now, we’re seeing the same thing with TVs, and it smacks of WebOS.

One of the big announcements that came out of the HP Think Beyond event was that webOS will be shipping on every PC, laptop, and some printers that they sell by the end of this year. We have pondered what that will do to the scale of webOS and how HP would implement it.

To be honest, I don’t know how this is going to play out, but it looks like these companies want to get their OS into everything in your home. I think the idea here is to have a network of appliances, devices, and screens that are discoverable and OS-aware, meaning that they can sniff out other devices/appliances on the network and interface with them. A person might be able to control his or her washing machine with a phone, or monitor the state of the vegetables in the refrigerator by glancing at a widget in the dock of a tablet, or activate a Roomba to clean the floors while he or she is away. The more devices run your flavor of OS, the more is possible on the network. Naturally, this might also lead to Skynet, but whatever.

It’s the “home of the future”, and it started with your phone.