Late Tuesday afternoon, an unnamed former executive plopped in the lap of Daily Tech with a scoop about what the secretive tech company may be planning for a monumental product launch later this year. "You'll go into an Apple retail store and be able to walk out with a TV," the tipster said. "It's perfect."

Rumors about an Apple television are neither novel nor unreasonable. The Cupertino company has been in the fancy computer display business for a dozen years now -- their Cinema Display was among the first flatscreen monitors available to consumers. However, the debate over whether or not Apple will up the ante and compete in the wall-mounted television market hinges on a simple question: what can Apple do that's new? According to Daily Tech's source, the company can skirt around the competition by including them in the production of a television display. And according to a handful of patents filed by Apple in the past three years, the company can break new ground by completely redefining the purpose of the television in the home. Like they did with the iPhone in 2007, Apple might not try to build a better TV; they might build a different TV, lightyears ahead of anything else on the market. Let's bounce around a few ideas about what that might look like based on Daily Tech's report and recent patent applications.

Read the full story at The Atlantic Wire.