John Siracusa, arguing that Apple should go all-in with a set-top box. Make it the only box you need in your media cabinet. Let it record TV, play DVDs, stream Netflix, and sell you iTunes stuff all in one interface.
Something you can watch for when Steve Jobs debuts products are cues that he personally doesn’t have a lot of passion for them. He knows lots of people play and care about games, but he doesn’t. Game Center is important to iPod owners and will help Apple sell to them, but Jobs clearly doesn’t have much enthusiasm for it in his talk. Compare the Game Center segment to any feature at all he talked about when he showed off the iPad for the first time.
Several years ago Apple released Keynote, which was later joined by Pages and Numbers as the iWork suite. Keynote was a program Apple designed specifically for Jobs because he so hated the existing presentation apps out there (that is, PowerPoint). When Jobs wants something, he has his team design the very best (in his eyes) version of it possible.
I really, really wonder what Steve Jobs’s home entertainment center looks like. Maybe he just has an Apple TV and watches pay-per-view movies on it. I’d think if it were the spaghetti mess of wires and boxes most of us have, it’d drive him crazy and he’d direct his engineers to solve the problem. Apple TV would truly be that one box to rule them all. How hard would it be to throw in a DVD slot and a DVR application? That Apple hasn’t is, just guessing here, because Jobs doesn’t watch much TV and isn’t a live sports fan.