In an interview with, among others, Brazilian journalist Caio Tulio Costa on TV Cultura’s Roda Viva, Isaacson had some interesting things to say about the details of a possible Apple television.
About 57 minutes into the interview, Costa asks Isaacson “Walter, you already said you’d write an addition to Steve Jobs bio, so what’s missing in it?”
Isaacson replies by saying that his next book will really be about the history of the ‘entire digital revolution’. He then says that he left a few things out of the book, one of those being details of “what [Steve Jobs] thought the next Apple TV should be.”
He says that he left it out of the book “because Apple hadn’t yet done it and I thought that, maybe, that was unfair to Apple before they produce the TV…reporting what Steve thought it should be.”
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Earlier in the interview, Isaacson says that “Apple will continue to do really great things, it will have a great iPad 3, probably do television…”
“He could have retired any time. But until he died he was still there, working on what would a TV set look like, what would a great camera look like, what textbooks would be like,” said Isaacson about Jobs’ dedication to Apple. “He didn’t need to do that, but I think he was driven by the desire to create great products, not the desire to make money.”
In his biography, Steve Jobs alluded to the fact that he had figured out how to solve the problem of an ‘integrated’ television.“I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” Jobs told Isaacson, “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.”
Jobs went on to elaborate that “it will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
It’s not clear when Jobs said this, so it is hard to say if he saw Apple’s Siri voice assistant as a part of this solution, but it’s easy to imagine that he did. We’re betting that some of it has to do with a new remote for the Apple TV.
You can watch the whole interview below, in which Isaacson talks at length about Steve Jobs, Apple and the process of writing the biography.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ICMaiREFg0w#t=3428s
H/t Federico Viticci
This article features additional reporting by Anna Heim
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