Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair this morning asserted in a research note that that the next version of the iMac, likely in the 2012 first half, will include some new TV functionality - basically, turning the desktop Mac into a bridge to a full-fledged television business.
There has lately been widespread speculation about Apple jumping into the TV market, due among other things to passages on the subject in the new Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The book says that Jobs wanted to “create an integrated television set…that would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud," Blair points out.
Blair envisions the company pushing the largest screen sizes of the iMac toward the TV market by integrating Apple TV and iCloud features into a slimmer all-in-one PC with TV capabilities.
"We think this makes sense because while we typically think about the newest TV’s hanging on the wall in large form factors, Apple could effectively start with what they already have on the manufacturing line and slowly push their offering from 27 inches and scale up from there to 32 inches and then move on to the 42, 50 and 55 inch market," he writes. "In short, we believe the initial Apple TV is their iMac computer that can function as a TV, over the iCloud platform."
I would just add - as some who has three iMacs of various generations in my house - that I watch video on the largest of them all the time. (Been working my way through Battlestar Galactica Season 4 lately on Netflix.) It would hardly be a big stretch to imagine bumping my old Panasonic plasma out of its niche in the living room in favor of a new living-room focused Apple television. Just sayin'.
