William Bokunic’s Weblog

First off, sorry for no post yesterday. I decided to not make one in order to celebrate earth day. (I have a database crunching data for this site). Anyhow, a while back I was getting ready to watch the Sarah Connor Chronicles on Hulu when this interesting tidbit passed by my radar. To sum up the article, Apple apparently had a patent approved last year for a Wiimote-like device used for navigating interfaces, presumably Front Row and the Apple TV.

Now, of course the Wiimote sounds right up the ally for Apple in terms of gaming consoles. Wireless and unique while being slightly less functional (not a great device for playing FPSs and the like, though I’d imagine RTS’ would rock with it). So, I’ve come up with a theory. If Apple were to make a gaming console, this is how they’d probably do it. They wouldn’t make a completely new device. Why? Because they already have a great base to work off of; the Apple TV.

Let’s take a look at the base model:

$229
40 GB HD
Mac + PC
802.11n Wireless
64 MB of DDR2 SDRAM
1GHz Pentium M CPU
Nvidia 7300 (extremely low end, only 32MB, though it is DDR3)

(*Note - These specs may not be exact as Apple has no official documentation on the Apple TV. This information comes from this website*)

Right, this machine hasn’t been updated in about a year or so. Therefore it’s safe to say it only cost Apple around $125 to produce this machine. It doesn’t have much going for it after all. The most expensive bit is probably the HD, which being 40GB is extremely cheap. You could build a better PC for less. So, what do I think they can manage? Check this out:

$249
40 GB HD
Mac + PC
802.11n Wireless
1.66 GHz Core Duo
1 GB DDR3 SDRAM
Nvidia 9400M
+ 1x Apple “Wand” and infrared sensor

Alright, Apple may make no profit off this machine at that price (I haven’t price checked it), but almost no console maker profits off the device. They profit off the software (Nintendo for instance makes only around $20 for each device). But that’s okay because this console can run Crysis, and can sure as heck run Farcry 2 and Crysis Warhead (both of which use less system resources than the original Crysis). So it has power, definitely. But what’s this Apple “Wand?” Well, it’s that Wiimote-like device I mentioned. That will be Apple’s controller, connected via bluetooth. So theoretically you could have a lot of people playing on one Apple TV.

Now, no DVD/Blu-Ray drive. Why? Well, because we have the App Store. Oh yeah, I went there. The App Store is awesome for the iPhone/iTouch, why not make it just as useful for the Apple TV? Allow free games to be made and released or sold. The App Store already does an awesome job at managing Apps, and because both the iPhone and APple TV run a version of OS X, Apple could probably easily make the iPhone games run on an Apple TV (remember, the Apple Wand can replace the acceleromator in functionality).

This may sound like a farfetched idea, but I think it’s extremely plausible. Heck, it might even be possible for Apple to fit in an Nvidia 9600M into the device and make it more powerful than a 360. That’d be a sight to witness. And the funny thing is, Apple has the money to fund a project like this and pay for developers to make launch title games for it. It also doubles as an old-school Apple TV, very nice.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Apple, Suggestion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.