When the authorized biography of Steve Jobs goes on sale tomorrow, it will throw more fuel on the rumor that Apple has a TV set in its product pipeline. A smart TV was a personal obsession of Apple's co-founder, according to those who have seen pre-release copies of the biography by Walter Isaacson. While Apple currently has a set-top box called Apple TV, which has been met with tepid market acceptance, what Jobs had in mind before his death was a much grander product. “He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant," Isaacson writes, according to the Washington Post. Isaacson went on to pen: “'I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,' he told me.'It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.' No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.'" The Apple TV set has been rumor fodder for years. And although Apple has filed for a number of patents in the TV domain, it has consistently referred to its interest in smart TVs as purely a "hobby." The new Jobs biography, though, suggests that a smart TV was more than that for the company. What's more, it indicates that Apple may have cleared the last obstacle to a final product. What that obstacle was is a mystery at the moment, but a key to its solution could lie in a patent filed by Apple in June. In it, Apple describes "an advanced widget paradigm." That paradigm could be the linchpin for a TV that seamlessly syncs with all your devices. "Apple states that they recognized a limitation of existing widget technology as applied to a TV environment -- in that conventional widgets, while often useful resources standing alone, are unaware of the media content that the TV is currently presenting," explains Apple patent watcher Jack Purcher.
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