User interface designer Adrian Maciburko has designed a great UI for a better (and unfortunately non-existent) Apple TV.
From what I can see, it seems like in his concept, Apple would manifacture the television set with built-in storage, and the “iTV” would basically filter the cable signal into its own UI, like PVR boxes do (only this UI wouldn’t suck). The new Apple television set would also allow connectivity with iOS devices such as the iPad, which could serve as the remote.
I explored the possibility of changing the well established TV guide paradigm that moves all the channels at the same time as you swipe to the left … I think there is a benefit to moving to a distributed time scale as this results in easier scanability due to all the shows having the same bar length. For example a movie’s bar needing to be stretched to show its 3 hour length takes up a large amount of space and causes the whole TV guide to become misaligned and disjointed as you get an array of large and small shows scattered around the screen, this can now be avoided.
I think this would be awesome. I don’t know about you guys, but I despise the UI that cable providers tend to use with their set-top boxes. They’re getting better as time goes on, but many providers are still stuck in the early PVR days.
As for whether or not this is feasible, I think this would mean Apple taking a very formulaic approach and attempting to really take over the living room market. Also, a 42″ retina display would be both unnecessary, and incredibly expensive – not to mention you’d have nothing to display on it.
Would you buy this? Do you think it’s something Apple is interested in? Check out the full series of images below!
