Apple hooks Microsoft Xbox tactician Apple continues to add to its stable of hardware heavyweights with the addition of Richard Teversham of Microsoft's European Xbox division. The hiring of marketing tactician Teversham adds to speculation that Cupertino is building its own dream team of chip designers and strategists, with the goal of creating its own SoCs ( …
...could all this chip design/strategy activity be aimed at a proper Apple media centre/console?
It could be a perfect fit for Apple - a device that looks like an Apple TV/Mac Mini, with the power of a PS3. Media centre, Blu-Ray player, PVR, games console - but sold as a plug-and-play media device that sucks all your songs and video off your computer, stores them, and can download games if you want. As with the iPhone, Apple wouldn't initially want to market the games ability - just the ease of use for everything else. 3rd parties would get the games going later.
It's time for Steve's hobby to go mainstream.
(I don't really believe they're doing this. But I'm running a Mac Mini as a media centre, and discovering new uses for it every day. With a non-desktop front end and a bit more grunt, it would be a perfect device.)
"with the power of a PS3"
Apple doesn't do power. Just look at their current lineup and the specs. For little over the price of a MacMini (£750), I got an 8GB RAM, 512 MB ATI 4850, 1TB RAID0, Core i7 PC from Dell. OK, it sounds like a Jet Engine and consumes 350W of power but it's really fast.
Media Centre machine or games machine sure is a possibility... but not with the power of a PS3... unless it's released in a couple of year's time when the power of a PS3 will be old-hat.
He was only the marketing guy in Europe, and frankly whilst I love the XBox, the European marketing has been utter crap.
There hasn't been any of the promotions that the US gets that let you win MS points, none of the competitions to win stuff etc. Compared to US marketing the EU marketing of the 360 really has been utterly awful.
Quite why Apple or anyone is making news of this I don't know, effectively they seem to be gloating about taking on someone who is pretty worthless as an employee as they've done a crap job in their old position at MS. It's not like when EA managed to take Peter Moore from MS.
What next, Apple saying "Hey we're awesome we stole Microsoft's Kazakhstan Zune office janitor lololol!"?
If this is Apple's beginning of a push into the games business then it's already failed. Apple already have the best marketing machine on the planet, that's how they sell their overhyped crap. Quite why they think someone this dire is going to help them in the games business who knows - maybe Apple really are helpless without Jobs?
If Apple can teach you anything its that performance only matters if you don't have enough. Adequate is indeed enough.
When it comes to games consoles, a quad nehelem and 10 tb of storage requiring 15 fans for cooling just isn't appropriate, even if it isn't that much more expensive than a core2 duo. Remember, output is likely to be to an hd tv with relatively low resolution. The Wii has done quite nicely with rather ordinary hardware. While you can turn on a quiet fan while actually playing, the hardware needs to be absolutely silent when on but not doing much, to make it into the living room.
Ah yes and before you talk about proprietary DRM'd Apple stuff, ask yourself why MS with its long history in the x86 arena decided that a non-x86 platform would be good for Windows Home, Gaming Edition?
Having said that, if I were Apple I'd be talking to the good people at Valve rather than MS. Steam is iTunes for Games and using Wine underneath would allow Valve to clean up on Linux too, with minimal effort in porting from Windows to both platforms.
Wine-based games consoles... mmmm, the next step in world domination.
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