Apple CEO says TV is ‘intense focus’

DHAKA: Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said that television is an area of ‘intense focus’ for the company as it seeks to add products that can build on the success of Macs, iPhones and iPads.

‘This is an area of intense focus for us’, Cook said of TV in an on-stage interview at the D10 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

‘We’re going to keep pulling this string and see where it takes us’.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, before he died last year, told his biographer that he had ‘finally cracked’ how to build a TV with a simple user interface that would wirelessly synchronize content with Apple’s other devices.

The company is working on a television that may be unveiled this year and released in 2013, according to Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos, reports Bloomberg.

Apple turned to Jeff Robin, the software engineer who built the iTunes media store and helped create the iPod, to lead its development of a TV set, people with knowledge of the product said last year.

The company sells a set-top box called Apple TV that lets customers stream video from Apple products or the Internet to their TVs.

Still, that device has yet to gain wide acceptance, and Apple executives have called it a ‘hobby’.

During the conference, put on by the AllThingsD technology blog, Cook said that Apple has ‘great appreciation’ for Facebook Inc., the largest social-networking service.

‘The relationship is very solid’, he said.

‘We have great respect for them. I think we can do more with them. Stay tuned on this one.’

BDST: 1445 HRS, MAY 30, 2012

Edited by Robab Rosan, Cultural Affairs Editor