[schmidp]

Why would Apple acquire Sony?

Blue-ray? Apple thinks optical media is dead.

Playstation? Apple has it's own gaming devices: Mac, iPhone/iPod, Apple TV (if they add an App Store).

TVs? Apple can build it's own TV hardware, they don't need Sony.

Talent? Takeovers of this scale are very hard. Apple probably has a very different culture than Sony. Apple could get key talent significantly cheaper than acquiring the whole company.

Components? Same as talent and licensing is probably much less trouble and cheaper.

Music/Movies? Creating content is not what Apple is about. Apple creates tools for content creators and content consumers.

B2B? Apple/Steve is mostly interested in the consumer market.

The article also mentions Disney as a target. I thought Steve is the or one of the biggest single shareholders of Disney. Jobs is also on the Disney board, so he already has influence on Disney, without spending huge amounts of Apples cash.

[dfox]

Well, Apple probably can't make TV hardware in same sense as Sony can make it. Sony is almost completely vertically integrated when it comes to TVs and consumer electronics.

[hugh3]

Why would Apple want to be making TVs, at least in the sense that TVs currently exist? The profit margins must be razor thin, because you're competing with a damn-near-indistinguishable product from LG and Samsung, and prices keep getting driven down every year.

The only way they'd do it is to make some sort of integrated TV/AppleTV thing. But I'm not sure that's really to their advantage versus just selling an AppleTV and letting folks plug it into their existing TVs.