There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Apple getting into the business of manufacturing actual television sets. Despite the latest cranking from the rumour mill, however, I still think this remains unlikely as ever for one very simple reason…

Apple is about providing full solutions, not individual products. I don’t see them entering a business where they can’t provide all of the pieces.

Does this mean that Apple will never get into the TV business? No, but it does mean that Apple will wait until the time is right, and I do not believe that time is now. The TV industry has room for improvement — some would even suggest that it needs a lot of help, but the average consumer is not yet ready for an all-in-one solution provided by any company, be that Apple, Sony or any other of the plethora of TV manufacturers or media companies.

Apple is actually very patient. While other companies spend their time trying to be there with the first product or solution, Apple waits until it can be there right solution.

For an example of this, let’s set the wayback machine to 2004 — a time just before Apple’s first foray into portable video. Apple was not the first company to produce a video-capable portable media player by a long shot. In fact, the release of the iPod photo had many users clamouring for video capabilities, comparing the iPod to other players that already did this, and declaring that it would fail miserably (or only succeed because of marketing) in the face of competition from players by companies like iRiver and Creative (anybody heard from them lately?).

The point is that the mass market wasn’t ready for portable video at that time. I haven’t made very many incisive predictions, but I am on the record as predicting that Apple would not release a video-capable iPod until such time as they could make portable video as simple as portable music had become. I speculated that Apple would create an “iMovie Store” at the time, but other than the name, I wasn’t far off… The following year, Apple debuted the fifth-generation iPod with video capabilities, alongside the sale of movies and TV shows on the iTunes Store.

An Apple-branded TV set is a similar animal. The time is not right for an end-to-end solution. As Marco Arment points out, “a modern TV is just one component in a mess of electronics and service providers, most of which suck.” People still seem to want options in the TV space, even if the average consumer is often befuddled by those options. The only way Apple is going to succeed is by building a solution that convinces people they no longer need that many options, and we’re a long way away from that point.

The Apple TV as it exists today is the right solution for those who want to take their first steps, but how many users have bought an Apple TV to replace a traditional DVD player or set-top “cable” box? I consider myself on the bleeding edge when it comes to this technology — I have a 3.5 terabyte iTunes library of movies and TV shows and a total of three Apple TVs in my house; I buy all of my Prime Time TV from the iTunes Store. However, I also still have a cable box and DVD player under my TV and two more in other rooms. There is still too much content that is only readily available via the traditional television networks.

The transition to a new order of living room media consumption has only just begun at this point, and we’re nowhere near even the first corner of this road, much less at the point where people will be ready to disconnect from the traditional providers and throw their hat into an entirely Internet-based world.

Hopefully, five or ten years from now the living room will be a different place. I have no doubt that Apple is planning for this eventuality, in much the same way the iPad was on the drawing board back in the days when Windows XP Tablets roamed the earth. However, Apple has shown that it is more likely to bide its time until the market is ripe than release some product that is merely a proof-of-concept for early adopters.