Apple had plans for a large-screen TV, but dropped them over a year ago

Sorry, Apple fans: It looks like you won’t be getting an Apple-branded flat-screen television anytime soon.

Activist investor Carl Icahn said in an open letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook today that he believed Apple would begin selling 55-inch and 65-inch television sets in 2016, generating $15 billion in revenue that year and $37.5 billion in 2017.

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There’s just one problem: Apple insiders say the television project is dead. That’s according to anonymous sources cited by the Wall Street Journal today, which reports that Apple killed the TV project over a year ago, after failing to find breakthrough features that would give it enough of an edge in the super-competitive market for TVs.

This is interesting news on a couple of levels. One, it confirms that Apple was working on a television. Year after year, tech pundits and journalists (including VentureBeat) have expected Apple to come out with a TV, and year after year we’ve been disappointed. Instead, Apple continues to offer nothing in the TV line except for the Apple TV, which isn’t a TV at all, but rather a box that plugs into your TV. (At least the Apple Remote is really a remote, and a pretty elegant one too, even if it doesn’t do anything you actually need it to do.)

Two, the WSJ includes some pretty crazy details about what kinds of TVs Apple was looking into. For instance, in the mid-2000s there was an experimental display that was transparent when it was turned off, but used lasers (lasers!) to generate the image when it was turned on. Unfortunately it used enormous amounts of power, and didn’t create very good images. Apple patented the technology in 2010 anyway, the WSJ writes. (This could be the patent.)

Apple was also reportedly looking at embedding cameras for making video calls. Unfortunately, Skype got there first, and is now embedded into many — if not most — smart TVs on the market.

The late Steve Jobs tantalized Apple television believers with a mysterious comment to biographer Walter Isaacson about how he’d “finally cracked” the problem of how to make a TV that people would actually want. Maybe not so much, as it turns out.

Icahn didn’t stop with TVs. He also believes Apple is about to — or should — get into the automotive market and the lithium-ion battery market. He believes a 13-inch iPad is coming soon, and that Apple Pay will be generating $3.3 billion in revenue for the company by 2017. It’s all pretty much hot air — albeit fantastic, amazing hot air — in service of Icahn’s argument that Apple should be buying back a lot more of its stock.

Unfortunately, if there’s not going to be an Apple TV next year, there might not be cars or a 13-inch iPad either. We might just have to wait for Apple’s next press event to see the company’s future, rather than reading about it in Icahn’s letter.