There’s been a lot of desperate handwaving going on about Apple’s apparent failure to release a giant television set with an integrated AppleTV at 2012’s WWDC. I’m very much not surprised, as Apple will release something when they feel they have gotten it right, not when market pressures force their hand. I figure there’s not even a very high likelihood that Apple is even working on an television set – lots of people more internet famous than me have talked about why this is a bad idea for Apple. In short, televisions tend to last a lot longer than computers do, and selling a $99 add-on to the television infrastructure is much easier than selling a wide range of $300-$3000 devices, based on screen size, ports available, etc.

That aside, I think the bigger picture on this has been totally missed. In the WWDC keynote Apple gave some very strong hints about where the platforms are going and what we can expect in the future. AirPlay mirroring is big – any Apple device can output to the TV in your living room over WiFi, and can be controlled from the device sending the video stream. This gets around all the handwaving about “we need an SDK to write apps for the AppleTV” – you have one, it’s called AirPlay. And the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad do the heavy lifting when it comes to CPU cycles, leaving the AppleTV as a display device. It also means that Apple doesn’t have to get into the business of selling various versions of the AppleTV (different storage sizes), and AppleTV’s don’t cycle out as fast as CPU upgrades come along.

And don’t get me started on web browsing on the AppleTV. Televisions are shared screens used by multiple people at once, and hell is watching someone else control a GUI. Sure, Apple could ship Safari on the AppleTV, and do weird things like making it require an iPad or iPhone to control it, but it would just be simpler and more Apple-like to enable AirPlay in Safari.