If you’ve been following tech for a while, you know that rumors about Apple building a TV ran rampant for years — mostly driven by former analyst Gene Munster, who asked about it so many times on quarterly financial calls that it basically became a bingo square. Steve Jobs fueled the fire by telling his biographer that he’d “cracked it” right before he died, and Tim Cook spent 18 months saying TV was an area of “intense interest” in 2011 and 2012.

But after all that, the only TV products Apple’s ever produced are a series of Apple TV boxes and a couple of extremely middling reality shows. The HD flat panel business just never made any sense for Apple at the time: it’s a cutthroat, low-margin business, it’s impossible to fully own the…

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