Bill Gates on the 360

Engadget had a sit-down with Bill Gates at CES, and they talk for a good while about the Xbox 360's launch and subsequent issues. From the article: "We played quite a variety. Actually, the Xbox Arcade was a big thing, a lot of the adults wanted to sit down and play for five or ten minutes. It was Hexic or Zuma that were easy for them to learn the rules, get used to the controller. We had some younger kids who were just beating the heck out of me at Project Gotham Racing, Kameo, basketball, Perfect Dark Zero. We have, I think, a dozen titles in total."

Comments

Re:He Lies through his teeth!

[LoRdTAW]

Apple invented fire wire not USB. It was proposed back in the 80's as an SCSI replacement. It was fully developed in the 90's and made it debut at nearly the same time USB did. I think USB was either first developed by Intel or adopted by Intel, can't say for sure. Fire wire never gained popularity over USB because Apple had a hefty per port license fee along with naming problems (Supposedly no one but Apple could call it Fire Wire). Apple used the name Fire Wire, Sony called it I-link and most others called it 1394. Imagine joe six pack presented with three names for the same thing. The only thin that really saved it was its wide adoption in the video world as the interface for most every DV cam.

Take a look in your Mac

[snuf23]

And you will find mostly commodity PC components now. Let's see:

PCI bus = check
ATA or SATA hard drive = check
ATA CD/DVD/ROM/R drive = check
Standard PC style graphics card or chip = check
USB = check (while Apple was one company in the standards body, so were Microsoft and Intel among many others)
DVI connector for monitor = check
Standard Ethernet using TCP/IP = check

And coming soon... Intel x86 CPU

Interestingly, it seems that Apple is phasing out Firewire (which it did create) in favor of USB (see iPod Shuffle, Nano and Video).
Long gone are Localtalk, ADB, NuBus etc.

One of the big trends in Apple since Steve Jobs came aboard was transitioning the Macintosh to use lower cost commodity components. This approach in addition to reducing the number of different Macintosh models and configurations, allowed for cost cutting and increased margins on Mac sales.
I'm not saying Apple hasn't innovated in the hardware space over the years, obviously it has. Today's Apple however leverages commodity hardware and innovates in overall system design, operating system and software.