Report: Apple to become hub of the digital home by 2013
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 22, 2008 at 12:17pm
Apple will become the hub of the digital home by 2013, according to a new Forrester Research report. In other words, Apple will become an “elegant, high-end digital home provider” within the next five years.
Here’s Forrester’s executive summary of their findings: “Consumer product strategists frequently ask Forrester how Apple’s product strategy will evolve: What will Apple’s product portfolio look like five years from now, and how is Apple preparing for that future today? Forrester notes that Apple has completely remade itself from a PC maker to a consumer devices and digital music leader over the past eight years — thus setting the precedent for additional radical change over the next five. While there are a number of speculative industry hypotheses for the future of Apple — including scenarios like Apple as a media pure play or Apple as the ‘American Sony’ — Forrester sees a future that ties together many of these hypotheses into a coherent consumer product strategy: Apple will aim to become the hub of the digital home, offering eight key products and services to connect PCs and digital content to the HDTV-stereo audio-visual infrastructure in consumers’ homes. To fulfill this strategy, we predict that Apple will launch new products, re-engineer the Apple Store, and expand into in-home installation services.
To make this happen, Forrester thinks Apple will not only launch new products, but also re-engineer the Apple Store and expand into in-home installation services to deliver a fully integrated digital experience. According to the report, in order to create an integrated digital experience Apple will build its strategy on eight pillars with four existing products—the Mac; the Apple TV, the Apple Store, iTunes (and its successors)—and four new product concepts: Apple home server product; AppleSound universal music controller; network-enabled gadgets (i.e. music, digital photo frame, and alarm clock devices); and in-home installation services.
A home server product would act as a digital hub-and-spoke ecosystem for pushing video streams, music, and photos throughout the home. An AppleSound universal music controller could serve as a standalone iPod, and as a music and video controller, via dedicated home stereo amplifiers. It would sport a touch screen and Internet connection, with access to Apple’s home server. Basically it would be a combo remote control, mobile Internet device, and a gateway to a unified digital home AV/IT system.
Network-enabled “clock radio” and digital-photo frames would, according to Forrester, be spread throughout the house, offering high-quality speakers and HD-quality, nine-inch screens. These little devices would pump out music, video, and, as one would expect, digital photos throughout the house.
Forrester also thinks there will be an Apple TV media extender that will allow the device to integrate a Blu-ray player, an integrated DVR and more.
“Macsimum News” is a proud supporter of Planet Gumbo, which feeds the hungry. We urge you to help them in their efforts.Macsimum News has a presence on Facebook. Why not sign up? Log in to Facebook, go to Groups and type in Macsimum News to get there from here.
Article Information
Comment on this Article Print this Article Email this Article Digg This
Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
unscriptable Says:
There is no way that Apple will sell low-margin devices like digital photo frames or alarm clocks. Apple will let it’s third-party hardware partners do that. But the rest sounds plausible. Go Apple!
Posted on May 23, 2008