> 4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
IMO their lack of support has less to do with hate and more that they just didn't find value in that demographic. No one is making money off gaming hardware. On the other hand Apple has put in a LOT of effort into iOS gaming. Steve Jobs himself had multiple games showcased in his keynotes.
Huh? I mean, surely nobody is making Apple-money from gaming hardware. But plenty of companies of various sizes are decently profitable and making money in this space.
It wasn't that long ago that gaming consoles were being sold at an astonishing loss, to be made up on services subscription revenue. They're mostly not loss leaders anymore, but the hardware sales are definitely not responsible for significant profits. Video game console hardware has lower margins than gaming PC components, which are already a very low-margin market segment (except where companies can get away with a 30% surcharge by adding RGB LEDs). If Apple tried to compete in that space, they'd face an instant shareholder lawsuit.
>Video game console hardware has lower margins than gaming PC components, which are already a very low-margin market segment
The high end has quite generous margins and the volumes are absolutely insane, which is why we're now doing HPC and ML on what is basically gaming hardware. Nvidia have a broad spectrum of markets, from the high margin and low volume Quadro to the low margin and high volume GTX - in a business that's dominated by NRE costs, that's a good place to be.
Apple providing support for gaming wouldn't necessarily be profitable in itself, but it'd potentially provide the volumes to improve their offerings for professional rendering applications. Apple refuse to do business with Nvidia and they've been hamstrung by AMD's weak offerings, but a gaming-focused Apple could acquire some IP and tape out their own GPUs.
That's obviously not in the same league. The gaming capabilities of Apple TV are still pretty much an afterthought. The games available are more likely to be ports from smartphones, not Xbox/PS platforms. The processing power is a small fraction of what a video game console or gaming PC requires, which is why Apple can use leftover old smartphone SoCs instead of having to invest in actual high-end chips for the device.
There's the potential for the Apple TV to become a serious gaming platform in the future, but it would require a major shift in product strategy from Apple. That shift would have to include putting much more expensive hardware inside the Apple TV, increasing the BOM by more than the current retail price.
Regarding the hardware, are you deliberately ignoring Nintendo? They have low cost, cheap hardware, good margins, and are able to get a huge part of the market.
I agree on the need of a shift in product development, but the hardware isn’t what is lacking here.
Where does this nonesense come from? There's a whole market segment just catering to PC non-console games with companies manufacturing RGB lighted RAM, specialized motherboards and plenty of gaming periphelias. Even gaming laptop market is booming.
And that's even ignoring "tiny" companies like nVidia.
Jobs’ view always seemed short sighted to me. Yes, they were a hardware company back when he made these decisions, but software sells the hardware in the market he was in.
Halo was originally intended as a Mac release, and Steve was livid[1] when Microsoft bought Bungie and made it an Xbox exclusive. I think his apathy toward the games business probably grew from experiences like that, if not that one specifically.
This is the type of bullshit comment that makes me login and bother replying. Anyone in the industry that has needed to work with Apple knows their stance on games is inane. This is in spite of the fact that games make the lion’s share of revenue on their app store and they know it. This in spite of the fact that the majority of games on their iOS platform suck. Games is really not in their dna and boy does it show.
> 4. Culture. Steve Jobs disliked games, it shows in Apple's support.
IMO their lack of support has less to do with hate and more that they just didn't find value in that demographic. No one is making money off gaming hardware. On the other hand Apple has put in a LOT of effort into iOS gaming. Steve Jobs himself had multiple games showcased in his keynotes.