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Since Steve Jobs’ biography was released, there’s been a lot of talk about an Apple television. Apparently Jobs figured out the perfect interface for a TV, and he thought it would make a big impact on the industry. Well, I hope Apple does this as soon as possible, because my GoogleTV is a piece of shit. Leave it to Google to put out another scrappy beta product.

GoogleTV is a great concept. Instead of buying a desktop computer with a big screen, why not just buy a TV with a web browser built in? There are lots of people who don’t do anything on their computers besides browse the web anyway. A 23″ desktop computer costs $1,000; a 40″ GoogleTV costs $800. GoogleTV seems like a great deal.

I tried it out at a Sony Style store, and my first impression was positive. The first time I read a text document on the 40″ TV, I thought it was a great experience. I didn’t need to strain my eyes. This made it easy to forgive the many shortcomings. The included mini-keyboard was not easy to use, but I figured that the full size Logitech keyboard would be a fix. GoogleTV’s browser cannot open PDF files, but I figured that an update would come.

Only after buying this piece of junk did I realize my bad judgment. GoogleTV is so unnatural to use as a web browser that I hardly try any more. It’s so much more efficient to just use a laptop. The Google Chrome app crashes frequently when loading pages (this is nothing like the computer version of Chrome, which is awesome). It is a chore to switch between tabs. First you need to hold down the Home button for a second. Then you need to push on the directional pad. Then you need to push Select. This was truly designed by an idiot. On a computer all I need to do is use a trackpad and click. Most asinine of all: when you type in a search term in Chrome and press the Enter button, you are not brought to the Google search results page. Google directs you instead to TV shows and movies relevant to your search terms. For example, if you search for “margin call”, GoogleTV will bring you to the TV show “Margin Call” rather than what you are more likely interested in… an explanation of what the financial term means. For the love of God, fire the dumb fuck engineer who designed this. Fire him immediately!

And as for the Logitech full-size keyboard? It is terrible, too. The trackpad isn’t even half the size of a Macbook’s. You can’t just tap the pad to click. You need to click a separate button. This was also designed by an idiot. What about controlling the TV using the Logitech keyboard? It is also cumbersome. I don’t even know how to change the channel. There are buttons in strange places. It really seems like Logitech engineers took a regular keyboard, added a few buttons here and there, and left it at that.

Apple wouldn’t dare to put out the crap that Google does. When Apple makes a TV it is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen. I can imagine it now. You won’t need three remotes to turn on your A/V equipment. You won’t need to study the manual that shows you what each button does on your remote. You will just tell Siri if you want to switch from watching a movie to browsing the web. You won’t need to remember the numbers to every channel. If you tell Siri to switch to Food Network, it will change the channel automatically. Even better, if you tell Siri you want to watch, say, “Boardwalk Empire” it will switch automatically to HBO if the show is on. This will free us from having to remember the numbers of hundreds of channels and from having to remember what programs are on what channel. Good riddance to the endless list in TV guide.

Sounds far fetched, but that is my vision. The last time I dreamt up a device it was 2003 and I had drawn a sketch of what would later become the iPhone incarnate. The sketch was uncannily similar to something that would not be released until a year later. I sent the sketch to Sony’s New York headquarters. They sent it back to me with a polite letter of dismissal.

None of these ideas are coming from an engineer. They are coming from an average consumer of technology who just has some common sense. We know what experiences are good and which aren’t. Everything Apple makes is intuitive to use. Apple’s competitors generally don’t know how to make anything intuitive unless they copy. Sometimes I wonder if Samsung, Sony, Dell, etc. engineers actually use the products they make. OK, I am not actually cynical enough to think that they do not use them. They certainly have their priorities wrong. And Steve Jobs called them out on it. He said that by focusing on the technology first that Apple’s competitors had it backward. I don’t care if you put more megapixels in a camera. Or if you add 3D to a television. Or if you put in a faster frame rate. After twenty years I still have to remember the numbers for every channel. There’s absolutely no reason for this! For too long, technology manufacturers have been obsessed with the technical specifications of their products. Apple starts from the opposite end. They think about the user experience first and then they work on the technicals.

I’ve made the analogy before that consumer tech companies are like the Big Three American automakers in the 1970s. They keep putting out iteration after iteration of products that people don’t care for. The car companies took thirty years to recognize their mistake. I think the big consumer tech companies have gone a whole decade making the same mistake. A lot of this comes from the old Wintel model of stuffing identical hardware and software into generic beige boxes. (And of course Google is making the same dumb mistake of putting their software into generic black televisions.)

Successful people need stupid people to be on the other side of their trades, so to speak. We’ve seen Apple’s competitors absolutely devastated. Just look at their share prices. I think it’s just going to get worse. This is a good thing, because anything Darwinian is a good thing. I just feel bad for the companies that are in danger but don’t realize it yet. Specifically I am concerned that the current stock prices of many consumer technology companies appear cheap on the basis of current earnings. The problem is that current earnings for a consumer tech company are much more misleading than the current earnings of a soft drink company. iPod destroyed Sony’s profitable Walkman division in two years. iPhone destroyed digital camera sales and dumb phone sales in two years as well. Now value investors are getting involved a lot in technology names and most will get their asses handed to them. The ironic thing is that most of them avoid owning Apple (and even worse, the contrarians will short it). So they will have losses on their longs and losses on their short.

Sony and Panasonic are great long term shorts. They have OEM businesses that will be obsolete in a decade. They are being outwitted by the South Koreans. More on all this later.