Tell me again. Why we think Apple will make a TV set?  

Fortune’s Philip-Elmer Dewitt on why the heck Apple needs to make a full-on TV at all.

One more thing. No one has championed the idea of an Apple-branded TV set longer or more enthusiastically than Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, who has been writing about it since 2009. But what set him going down this path?

The answer came in a Munster profile published last Friday in Bloomberg Businessweek:

“Somebody close to Apple said we needed to be doing more work on the television and that started it all,” Munster says. “You start with these crumb trails, then it turns into a dirt road, and now it’s a paved road.”
Indeed it is. But what if Munster’s tipster was trying to lead him to Apple TV, the set-top box, and not some still-mythical TV set?

Update: What I’ve heard—second hand—is that the tip Munster got about the Apple ‘television’ was actually about the 27" iMac and Munster just wouldn’t let the TV angle die.

Sounds about right.