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Apple CEO Tim Cook: TV is TERRIBLE and stuck in the 1970s

The iKing thinks telly is far too fiddly and ugly – basically, iTunes

Some may fondly remember the era that bought us The Clangers, Fawlty Towers and The Sweeney. But not Apple boss Tim Cook, who reckons the goggle box is stuck in a time warp so intense that watching it is like being sucked back back into the 1970s.

In an interview with American talk show host Charlie Rose, Cook dropped a clanging clue to his company's future direction while slagging off the state of the telly industry.

“TV is one that we continue to have great interest in – I choose my words carefully there – TV is one of those things that, if we’re really honest, it’s stuck back in the seventies,” said Cook.

“Think about how much your life has changed, and all the things around you that have changed. And yet TV, when you go in your living room to watch the TV, or wherever it might be, it almost feels like you’re rewinding the clock and you’ve entered a time capsule and you’re going backwards. The interface is terrible. I mean, it’s awful!”

The Cupertino supremo has whipped the Apple faithful into a feverish state of nervous anticipation in the past few days, after nicking Steve Jobs' famous "and one more thing" gambit to finally introduce a new product line in the shape of the Apple Watch.

But if longstanding rumours that Apple has been working on an iDiot Box since the Jobsian golden era are to believed, Cupertino has its heart set on developing a screen much bigger than the timepiece's sapphire glass face.

Tim was typically tight-lipped about his firm's plans to take on the television industry like his predecessor did with the music biz.

“I don’t want to get into what we’re doing in the future. We’ve taken stabs with Apple TV, and Apple TV now has over 20m users, so it has far exceeded the hobby label that we placed on it,” Cook continued.

“We’ve added more and more content to it this year, so there’s increasingly more things that you can do on there. but this is an area that we continue to look at.”

Video of Tim Cook talking to Charlie Rose, where he makes the comments we report below.

Following the launch of the Apple Watch, Cook has repeatedly invoked the memory of Steve Jobs. In the first part of the interview with Rose, he even confessed that the Apple godhead's office has been left untouched since his death, in the style of Dickens' Miss Havisham and her home. The rest of this unusually open interview will screen tonight in the US, so we might expect even more necromancy from the king of Cupertino.

If Apple really does have plans to release a TV, it will most likely receive a response which could only be surpassed if Steve Jobs rose again from the underworld to lead a crusade which will finish off his enemies (to wit: IBM, easily accessible buttons, any jumper that isn't a black turtleneck) for good.

At least one of those two game-changing events now looks more than likely. ®

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