The Oracle: iTV

The iPod has been a tremendous success and from looking at my habits I think it will be an even bigger success in the near future. People haven’t yet explored the full versatility of this litte thingie and by machines like iTV it will be even more valuable.

So here is the first question for The Oracle: What exactly is iTV?

I think iTV could be one of three things.

1. It could be a Mac
2. It could be an iPod
3. It could be something else

Is iTV a Mac?

If iTV is a Mac, it would have everything that is needed to do what is promised: play back videos, provide a Front Row interface, do wireless networking and connect to the Internet to retrieve trailers and maybe even buy things online. While I doubt a buying feature will be in iTV from day one (although the Wii shows this can be done in such a box) I see even more problems with the rest if it is based on Mac-technology. Let me explain.

First of all iTunes is the gateway for all things Store-based. But iTunes totally sucks. It is unstable (it does crash from time to time), it is super-slow (try scrolling through a long list of podcasts, try playing back video while doing other things) and it is a pain in many more ways not only because it is based on Carbon but also because it is Apples tryout field Nr. 1 as it also runs on Windows. That’s why there seems to be no advantage taken from the strong Cocoa and Mac OS X frameworks at all. iTunes is probably the single program in most need of a complete rewrite to please its users (Finder comes close on second place). Even Front Row is not as stable as iTV needs to be as it relies on huge applications in the background.

Then there is QuickTime. While it can be hailed as being visionary stuff with features and being a more or less open frameworks for all kinds of codecs and good ideas, it also totally sucks. QuickTime - like iTunes - is still stuck in its Mac OS history and is inherently unstable and unbearable slow. Being at least in some kind of transition towards Cocoa, it also suffers from its dual existence on Mac OS X and Windows and I have stopped waiting for salvation. QuickTime is one of the big millstones around Apples neck.

The third reason I doubt iTV is a Mac is Mac OS X. It is big. It needs lots of disk space. It needs lots of resource and again there is the performance factor. While being quick in many things and probably even stunning in another it is still far away from being “fast”. I am still impressed by the responsiveness of the BeBox machine (2 x 603 PPC processors with 133 Mhz each) running BeOS. This baby could play back multiple movies without the hint of a slight jolt. Even on the latest and greatest Dual-Core-Whatever-Machine you can’t be sure there are no hickups when playing back a SINGLE movie on Mac OS X. It is disgusting. Also, for $299 I doubt Apple can build a machine running an unchanged Mac OS X. So to sum up: iTV is not a Mac.

Is iTV an iPod?

There is another machine that fulfills some of the needs of iTV: the iPod. Its hardware based video decoder makes sure there are no hickups. iTV might have some hardware built-in to decode videos, but the question here is: what if the videos waiting on an iTunes share are not iPod-compatible? What about other codecs? I guess Apple will stick to iPod-compatibility anyway on iTV with no option to install DIVX or other codecs.

But there are other things an iPod does not have. There is no TCP/IP. There is no compelling user interface. But using my iPod on a big screen I must say that having a Front Row/iTV interface on my iPod would totally make sense. I can already control some functions using the Apple Remote when the iPod is plugged into my Universal Dockm but the Front Row user experience is missing. I think Apple could and should do this and it could be that the iTV is the introduction to a new generation of iPods in a way. The iPod has already proved it has the necessary graphics power. Look at the recently released Games.

Putting a TCP/IP stack in an iPod does not seem totally unlikely although I then start to be concerned about its security now that it is possible to intrude the box from the outside. Will it be open source? Who is taking care of this? Is it one of the well-established realtime OSes out there that is being deployed? I doubt Apple wants to do too much work twice. So either they are working together with a company licensing a well-tested and reliable OS or Apple has something else up the sleeve.

If there will be an iPhone it must have TCP/IP as well. And I think it is totally clear that iPhone is based on the iPod. In that sense, iTV, iPod and iPhone would share the same platform. I tend to give this option the highest probability.

Is iTV something else?

If it is not an iPod and if it is not a Mac, iTV could be something new. Feature-wise it would be between these two system and that would open up the path for small Macs or PDAs. It might be closer to a Newton although it would not be a tablet. But which operating system would it run?

I think this OS could only be a shrinked Mac OS X. It would be basically Darwin without the UNIX userland and without most parts of Carbon. It would provide a simplified user interface that could be considered a subset of Aqua, but would probably only offer 40% of its functionality. It would be “Mac OS X light” but it would have a cooler name.

Linux has shown that a UNIX based OS can be successful on embedded devices and there is no reason Darwin could not scale the same way. Darwin is pretty modular on the driver level and could be significantly reduced in terms of size and memory footprint when major subsystems are removed.

The Oracle speaks

I give the “iTV is a Mac” option a 5% probability. “iTV is an iPod” ranks 80%. “iTV is something else” gets a 15% chance.