Wade Meredith:
Like smart phones and point and shoots, iPads can compete or best the consoles on hardware specs while absolutely whipping them on platform flexibility and portability. I don’t know the console equivalent of on-device photo editing — but between app, accessory and peripheral support for iPad, the consoles have their work cut out for them (Kinect was a good start, Playstation Move was not).
I don’t know if it will ever happen, but this was a good read.
Yes.
Note: you should add a ? after the word camera
Here’s to an Apple TV which supports a bluetooth/wireless game controller. This could gradually compete with consoles if the Apple TV had the native ability to run applications.
I think the writer of the linked article really doesn’t understand the hardware specs of consoles: RAM and resolution aren’t really that important. The GPU in the iPad 2 could perform a theoretical maximum of 16 GFLOPS. The GPU in the iPad 3 should theoretically double that, to 32 GFLOPS. The Xenos processor in the Xbox does 240 GFLOPS. (The PS 3 does about 255 GFLOPS; a modern computer graphics card will do 2700 GFLOPS).
So, no, the hardware specs aren’t really close to consoles…and when the current console generation is replaced – probably in a year or so – the performance will likely increase by a factor of 10.
The danger to consoles doesn’t come from being out-specc’ed by tablets. It come from people being happy to play tablet games and forgoing console games.
@d7f6f528b99fb535cb253d8f8eeb7bc5:disqus “It comes from people being happy to play tablet games and forgoing console games”
That’s typical Apple strategy – bypass the market by finding a new demographic. By the way, that’s what I think the rumours of a smaller retina-display form-factor iPad are about – going after the massive casual gaming market. And after seeing the visual magnificence of Sky Gamblers Air Supremacy in the new iPad demo, all bets are off….
iPod and Camera are iPhone apps now.
PC and game console are iPad apps now.
GFLOPS is irrelevant. The iPad has a much, much, better screen than any game console setup anywhere in the world. And it’s right up close, and you can touch it with 11 points at a time, interact with it very deeply. Way, way more graphics are getting into the user’s eyes with iPad than any console game or even 99.9% of the world’s PC’s. In 50 years, iPad (3) will be looked at as the first real PC screen. The first one where you couldn’t see the pixels.
The iPad also has cheap, downloadable games instead of expensive physical media games; 10 hour battery and everywhere mobility; PC apps; Mac apps; iTunes+iPod. It destroys game consoles.When iPod came out, people talked endlessly about how much crappier MP3 was than the lossless PCM audio stream from a CD. But that was only academic. In practice, iPod had better sound. It didn’t skip, which all by itself is a dramatic improvement in sound quality. That is iPod continuing to make sound while a CD makes silence. And iPod was with you instead of being back at home, which means — again — you had iPod sound versus CD silence. And iPod doesn’t run out of music after one album, which again, is iPod sound versus CD silence.So the spectrographs that were made with an iPod and a CD player in a lab and showed some missing frequencies in the MP3 track and denounced the iPod as CD replacement were a fantasy. Same as comparing iPad and game console GFLOPS. If you have to go to a lab to show me it is better, you already lost. I don’t need a lab to tell me I can game all day on an iPad I keep in my book bag, while a console game would sit at home. I don’t need a lab to tell me that the iPad screen is the best digital image I’ve ever seen. Period.
And there are only like 100 million console game users. iPad will pass that this year. iOS will be 4x that this year. The scale is totally different.
Apple already has the massive casual gaming market on iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad.
The rumors of a smaller iPad are the makers of 7 inch tablets trying to add legitimacy to the 7 inch tablets nobody wants. It’s the makers of 7 inch screens trying to get the makers of 7 inch tablets to buy up supply now because if Apple comes in, they will take all of the supply for many years with their large volumes.
The problem with a 7 inch screen is there are no apps for it. 99.9% of the world’s apps were designed to run either on a 3-4 inch device or in a 3-4 inch “widget” window on a larger screen; or on a 9-10 inch device or in a 9-10 inch “full-size” window on a larger screen. That’s the apps we have.
In publishing, it is already really, really hard to fit a “page” onto a 10-inch iPad screen. That is already the smallest possible book or magazine screen we can have. And that is also the smallest screen you can surf the full-size Web on without having to zoom. 7 inch screens are 46% of the area of a 10 inch screen. It’s not enough to run full-size apps, Web apps, books, magazines, movies, TV.
Another way to look at this issue is to remember that a touchscreen is a keyboard. A PC keyboard has 80-100 buttons, but iPad has like 3 million buttons. Well, how many different sizes of keyboard do you need? There is a 100% scale PC keyboard that almost everyone uses. That is equivalent to a 10 inch touchscreen tablet. It’s a 2 hand, full-size device. There are also 89% scale keyboards on netbooks, which everybody hates, because they look like a real keyboard, but turns out they are not. Those are 7 inch tablets. Looks like a new kind of keyboard/tablet but turns out it is just made too small to be useful.
So as long as we have 2 hands that are roughly the same size as they are now, we’re going to want 3-4 inch 1-hand devices and 9-10 inch 2-hand devices. Those 2 devices also fit into pockets and anything that is made to carry paper, like a briefcase or book bag.
Or, what does a 7 inch tablet do better than any other device in the world? There would need to be about 100 things to even conceive that it will be a popular general purpose computing device.
Perhaps I’m just bored with Playstation and Xbox, or maybe I’m just an unrepentant Apple fanboy, but I often wish Apple had a home console to play such games as Mass Effect or Assassin’s Creed.
I’d love a 7″ iPad.