The increasingly popular iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad become more and more powerful when it comes to supporting your entertainment needs, whether we’re talking about music, movies or actual gaming. It’s more than obvious that Apple’s growing iOS environment will be a bigger and better entertainment oasis year after year; the question is, what will Apple do to increase its presence in your living room?
Apple has never declared its intention to enter the console business, but the more iOS grows, and with it, Apple’s iDevices, the clearer it is that Apple will be able to pose a serious threat to Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft, not necessarily in this order, when it comes to console gaming, The future PlayStation 4, Wii U and Xbox 720 may find themselves fighting a tough battle with an unexpected enemy, an iPad/iPhone (as controller) + an Apple TV (actual Apple-made HDTV running iOS) bundle that would offer some serious gaming. In fact they may become obsolete even before being launched since the smartphone business is evolving at a much faster rate.
When will Apple decide to try to overtake the console gaming business? It may be sooner than we anticipate, although certain game developers expect such a thing to happen only in a few years from now. Epic Games’ President Mike Capps thinks the future iDevices may pose a serious threat to the Big Three console makers. But according to him it’s not the iPhone 4S/5 spearheading this gaming revolution, not that we expected it to be even if the new iPhone, packing a dual-core processor like the iPad 2, will be capable of offering an even better gaming experience, but a much later iPhone version, the iPhone 8:
So I think that’s the real challenge for us now, rather than worrying about the difference between a couple consoles and some order of magnitude, whether 3X or 4X. It’s about how do we deal with iPhone 8… if you watch where the gamers are going that’s where they are. Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound. So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles? It’s a very interesting situation to be looking at. That’s what we’re starting to think about more… not how do we scale from some Nintendo platform to some other future console.Now if game creators are having such fantasies, then I’m sure Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft may be pondering over similar questions. Oh, and the same line of thinking could very well be applied to Google’s Android OS, although it’s more likely Apple the company that’s going to turn a mobile device into a future console by combining it with the future Apple TV.
