Seems to me the same argument to be made on Windows laptops vs. MacBooks. Windows laptops are a commodity business, whereas MacBook owners pay a premium for Apple products. Why is this different?
It's a pretty good question. One, Apple entered the market for PCs a long, long time before it became a commodity business, so history plays a part -- they can play these games in a commodity business because they have been playing these games in a commodity business.
But people buy TVs not to run software, but to watch movies and TV shows, so value-added TV sets are basically dead in the water. The real business Apple has to attack is the cable industry, and they have zero leverage or competitive advantage in the sickly morass of rent-seeking and quid pro quo backscratching that is regulated telecoms monopoly world. By analogy, the TV makers are Dell, Lenovo, Acer &c, and the cable industry is Microsoft.
The only conceivable change is for Apple to forge direct business relationships with the production houses and rights holders, and the cable companies are buying them up as quickly as they can to prevent this sort of disintermediation.
"But people buy TVs not to run software" - at the moment. Maybe that's the secret. After all, people bought mobile phones for while but didn't buy a lot of content or apps because the interfaces were horrible.
I'm not suggesting this will necessarily happen - but I think Apple is likely to play to strengths - app infrastructure and interface design - as much as anything else.
But people buy TVs not to run software, but to watch movies and TV shows, so value-added TV sets are basically dead in the water. The real business Apple has to attack is the cable industry, and they have zero leverage or competitive advantage in the sickly morass of rent-seeking and quid pro quo backscratching that is regulated telecoms monopoly world. By analogy, the TV makers are Dell, Lenovo, Acer &c, and the cable industry is Microsoft.
The only conceivable change is for Apple to forge direct business relationships with the production houses and rights holders, and the cable companies are buying them up as quickly as they can to prevent this sort of disintermediation.