Slashdot Mirror
Apple Snags Former Xbox Exec
nandemoari sends along word that Apple has picked up Richard Teversham, a senior Executive from Microsoft's European Xbox operations, ending his 15 years of service to Redmond. Some press accounts assume that Teversham's role may lie in beefing up the games scene on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Forbes goes farther, opining that Apple "appears to be preparing an all-out assault on the handheld gaming market." Other reporting associates the hire with Apple's recent buildout of chip-design expertise.
Steal brains behind the only thing microsoft has ever made from scratch
the atari lynx was somewhere between an atari 800xl and an amiga. stereo sound, 4096 colors. you could flip the atari lynx's display around 180 degrees to accommodate lefties. it had networking built in so you could link up with your pals. the downside was that none of your pals HAD an atari lynx. while you were playing chips challenge or california games in full color with great sound they were playing tetris on a monochrome gameboy. was there a company more incompetent than tramiel's atari corporation?
I can see some potential here. The iPhone as a gaming platform has been proven in the market already. There are a number of small developers selling games for the iPhone. Probably not because the iPhone is a great platform, but because people are willing to pay small amounts to amuse themselves while they're on the subway or waiting somewhere, and they happen to have their iPhone on them. It's like a Nintendo DS that's smaller and you always have with you - it's a convenience thing. Game developers realized this, and the apple store made it easy to distribute products. A small bit of attention to make the device more game-friendly could make it even more attractive for developers to target this platform.
They needed someone to make the quality of their rev. A stuff even more memorable...
Hurricane Ballmer hits conference room. Scores of chairs injured and missing.
Maybe Apple will launch an attack on the console market next?! I wouldn't pout it past them, they move so quietly you don't know till it's too late! Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store, eliminating the retail and the distribution networks.
With Jobs on the sidelines, we're back to the Sculley era at Apple, where senior executives and high-level techies are hired away from competitors to make a splash in the press and foster buzz around the stealth-mode projects. And incidentally rescue some careers that may have been in trouble.
Too bad that's not what creates great products. Usually what it does is create layers of non-accountability somewhere in the clouds above where the engineers and UI designers work.
Soon everyone will have an Apple Sphere 3000, hooked up to their TV! really, i dont think i could think i could aford to upgrade my computer, xbox, playstation and an apple gaming system. P.S. i better be able to play Halo 4 on my zune
I guess they've concluded they can't compete in the business/productivity market? What!?
Nintendo and Sony (PSP/OLED phone) better get their feet moving.
The future is parallelism. Unless Apple can come out with a hardware and software solution to the parallel programming crisis within the next few years, this is an investment that will come back to bite them in the ass. Hard.
Anybody who thinks that the conmputer industry should retain last century's multithreading CPU technology should lay off the dope, in my opinion. Heterogeneous processors, too, will lead to failure. What is needed is a new parallel processor, a homogeneous one designed to support a universal, deterministic and easy to program parallel computing model.
Can Apple deliver? Does it have the correct vision? Does it have the courage? I am not so sure. All those hardware experts come from the old conservative school of computer science. That's too bad because what is needed is a radical paradigm shift. Apple needs a true maverick, a rebel with humongous huevos. I wish them the best.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
I think that at this point in time, Apple releasing a gaming console would make as much brand sense as IBM releasing an IBM branded gaming console.
That's what people said about Microsoft in 2001, and the newcomer's product tied Nintendo GameCube in worldwide hardware sales.
PLEASE
They don't make a difference, for every 'HOT' exec there are 10's (100's) of other brilliant people capable of doing the same thing.
Articles like this confirm the current executive manager payment scheme (overpayment by SHIT loads) that is one of the factors of the economic crisis
A new Apple patent filing reveals plans to put a red/green LED around the Home button on the iPhone for diagnostic purposes.
Marketing was one thing Microsoft did very well in the Xbox debacle. If they'd picked up any of the people responsible for quality control, I'd have been worried.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All things aside the reality is when Microsoft created the first Xbox they (Microsoft) had already poured hundreds of millions into DirectX thus the Xbox was a no brainer. Apple on the other hand is miles behind when it comes to having a mature multi media/gaming toolset/API so I think he (Richard Taversham) will find things are not as simple over at Apple.
Any chance we could add some more post icons? they look kinda pretty
Apple may or may not be gay, but you sure are.
Now that Richard Teversham is cloaked in the RDF he no longer suffers the taint of Microsoft that many Slashdotters would otherwise sniff out.
The hilarious inept creator of the Pippin console, Apple, hires a no-name exec from Microsoft's 8+ billion dollar Xbox fiasco?
What could possibly go wrong?
The way you write betrays you:
He's too much of a control freak to let Tim Cook or anyone else sabotage the juggernaut he helped to create
Why would Cook be 'sabotaging'? We're talking incompetence here, not malice.
If you think Sculley's Apple will make a comeback then you're mistaken and don't know history.
Sorry - the downfall has already begun. RIM is again the biggest smartphone maker.
Expect things to get worse when this xbox exec 'sexes up' the iPhone. Probably with some lime green styling. And make it bigger. Yeah, chunkier. And the appstore will be renamed to iPhone live - where you can only rent apps.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
So, because Apple's previous management dipped a toe in the water, realized their mistake and then terminated the product line, that means that shareholders like myself shouldn't criticize a multi-billion dollar disaster?
You're funny.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Linux just isn't ready for the microwave oven yet. It may be ready for the toasters that you nerds use to distribute your toasted bread and bagels across the world wide web, but the average microwave user isn't going to spend months waiting for toast to toast and then hours compiling meals so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their food with, especially not when they already have a Windows microwave oven which does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed chefs living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is Gordon Ramsay (haha) providing me my OS.
"had already poured hundreds of millions into DirectX thus the Xbox was a no brainer."
My god. This is one of the, many, reasons console developers despise Microsoft and their unwelcome entry into the console market.
Now every dimwit like EEPROMS runs their mouths off about console development because they know a little about desktop PC graphics just because Microsoft was dumb enough to throw a bunch of PC parts into a box and call it a console.
Microsoft's OpenGL clone is exactly what you don't want to base your console development on. OpenGL(and likewise DirectX) are built to isolate you as much as possible from the underlying hardware. The exact opposite of what a console developer both wants and needs to do. Console dev tools are highly specialized for the specific hardware each gen and have nothing in common with tools and APIs written years before. Spending hundreds of millions or billions on DirectX and tools means absolutely nothing to current console dev tools, let alone the iPhone and like devices from Apple.
There are serious problems Apple has with supporting game devs, as anyone who had the misfortune to deal with them like I did for both the Pippin and Mac games over the past decade. DirectX sure as hell isn't one of them.
Hell, you don't even need to be an actual console engineer to see how little Microsoft's 'hundreds of millions into DirectX' has kept the Xbox 360 from getting humiliated by the PS3's graphics this gen.
My initial reaction was "Eeeew."
Then I read it again and went "Oh, Apple Snags Former Xbox Exec."
When's the "iPhone3: Buttons" coming out?
--- Do you believe in the day?
Maybe he will show them how to design the iPhone such that it overheats and dies.
Seriously hardware wise the Xbox 360 is pretty unreliable and nothing special. Timing of the release and price was well done but not the hardware.
Hilarious!
What a fucking retard. You even sound like one of those pathetic Xbots who make the same type of idiotic rationalizations about the Xbox fiasco.
The Pippin fiasco
Apple Loonie: "dipped a toe in the water"
The Xbox marketplace flop
Xbox: "pretty good for their first console"
Apple would be dumb to take on Nintendo in the handheld market.
A. It's been tried.
Everyone up to and including Sony has tried and failed. No one has ever taken the crown from N in portable gaming. And Sony gave it everything they had.
B. It's not possible without dedicated hardware.
So the Iphone can play games. Gee great. It has a nice screen. So did the PSP. But it doesn't have dedicated gaming inputs like the PSP had, and the PSP still failed. I remember people saying the PSP would be the one to finally take the crown, how wrong they were. The DS blew everything out of the water once again.
C. Only one screen.
When Apple starts shipping Iphones with two screens it might have a chance of competing with the DS, until then I think not.
Are developers going to create games for Iphone with the same scope of the best and richest of DS games? No. Because the market for Iphone apps is muddled. People may be buying games for the Iphone, but they sure as hell aren't paying DS-game prices for those games. They're paying a few bucks. And those games reflect it, they are curiosities-- the portable equivalent of time wasters, generally. Will Square ever release an RPG for the Iphone, I seriously doubt it. Will parent buy an Ipohone for their kid to game with? Hell no. Lacking a clam-shell alone is a massive strike on that possibility.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
LOL! What a fucking moron.
The PSP is over 50 million sold worldwide dipshit. Hell, in Japan the PSP is outselling/neck and neck with the DS every week in the hardware charts.
Sounds like you need to keep your fucking fanboy mouth shut, k?
Joke? Right...? You mean people can have opinions which are contrary to my own? GASP, say it ain't so!
Xbox 360. Universally regarded as the worst console in history by whiney, butthurt Sony and Nintendo fanboys .
Judging by half of your complaints listed, I'm assuming you've never so much as been in the same room as a 360 and are basing your arguments on things you've read posted on gaming forums.
What's to rationalize? They put out a product, it didn't sell, they terminated it. They didn't continue down the rathole like MS did.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPHS8TjQrcc
Feel free to search Youtube for other iPhone game reviews.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Here's a clue dipshit.
When your company is responsible for one of the biggest turds in console history, the Nintendo Virtual Boy, you keep you fucking mouth shut.
The only thing Nintendo can brag about is they didn't blow over eight billion dollars on their console market failure like Microsoft has with the eight year long Xbox train wreck.
But lighten up sweetheart, there are going to be a whole bunch more of the Microsoft Xbox 'braintrust' looking for work this year...
Apple launched 1 model. Didn't sell well amongst a crowded market and poor marketing and high price tag. It was cancelled after 100,000 models.
MS launches 2 models of the Xbox. Both sell moderately well but at a loss. It takes MS 5 years to make a profit. Also during that time, their last model suffers major quality control issues that causes them $1.79 billion in extra repair charges on top of the $6 billion that they have already spent. Also the small profit disappears after two quarters. At the rate of profit, it will take MS somewhere between 12-15 years just to payback the original cost.
If you were a stockholder in either company which one would you get more concerned about?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Thanks. That was partially entertaining.
Requiem for the American Dream
Chadwarden? Is that you?
The Sega GameGear was way worse, that thing would suck 6 AA batteries dry in under 30 mins.
It used to annoy my friend no end when I would be playing my Gameboy every where while he had to be in the vicinity of a power outlet and have to carry the adapter around.
What Apple needed was somebody to bitch-slap the CPAs. Jobs was the Jobs for the job. And now that he's banished the beancounters to the kid's table the engineers are stepping up. And they're happy. God help you if you're competing against a happy engineer who's making good products because he thinks they're cool. Microsoft could learn a little here. Yeah, 90 hours a week is impressive brutality - but let your engineers get laid now and then and they'll make stuff that is good rather than stuff that meets spec.
Funny thing: now that the engineers are happy, the beancounters are orgasmic. Apple will pass Microsoft in Market Cap next year if current trends continue.
No doubt Apple's got some Moorestown goodness in store for next year. But except for this one quiet comment you won't see it coming, because that's how they roll in Cupertino.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What's to rationalize? They put out a product, it didn't sell, they terminated it. They didn't continue down the rathole like MS did.
You are so right! Apple would never persist in a market where their initial offering failed
You might want to look into Apple's work on OpenCL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
Right up until here...
a homogeneous one
And that was the precise moment when I realized... you're a script. You're a good bot, but no Turing Test win for you. You need to put some typos in there and the occasional grammar error, btw.
There is nothing virtuous about "homogeneous". Quite the opposite. A general purpose computer needs a variety of special purpose circuits. The heterogeneousness (heterogeneity?) of available platforms makes a ripe field in the market for the "suitable for any problem" problem. To get to the next level of adaptability we have to embrace the heterogeneous platform in our programming environment. That way our environment will be able to adapt to the heterogeneous environments they will live in in the future. Work on this is under way.
But I'm a script too, so it's ok.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Considering Apples past history with computer games, this doesn't seem like a stable relationship. From what I've read, most games on the Mac were done almost completely by the studio and publisher with little or no support at all from Apple.
Harold Ryan (Bungie Studio): "But the chance to work on Xbox, the chance to work with a company that took the games seriously. Before that we worried that we'd get bought by someone who just wanted Mac ports or didn't have a clue."
http://www.developmag.com/interviews/95/Single-Player
John Carmack (id Software): "The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games ... It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in"
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/id-softwares-john-carmack-interview
Gabe Newell (Valve Software): "we have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming.' And then we'll say, 'Okay, here are three things you could do to make that better,' and then they say 'Okay,' and then we never see them again"
http://games.kikizo.com/features/gabenewell_valve_iv_sep07_p1.asp
It is not common for a company to long survive the retirement or loss of its founders. Such a thing is so rare as to be a statistical anomaly. When the founders retire a company loses its purpose, its vision. The replacements chosen are almost never worthy of anything but riding the company down to its demise.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
> A stupid Nintendo Mii ripoff
Er... that's a bit of a reach. Not that it's not a ripoff of nintendo, but really does THAT affect the quality of the console?
To use a car analogy: "This is a terrible car... muffler missing, no battery, two broken headlights, there is a barbie doll in the glove box, and the front axle is broken."
On second thought, I did miss this
Stupid and gigantic external power brick
So maybe that car metaphor should include "has one of those stupid dreamcatchers on the rearview mirror."
While you play the role of the optimist, I'll play the pessimist. I've played Quake 1 on the iPhone. It's beautiful for a 13 year old game and plays well. But it has one big problem - you have to rub your thumbs all over the display to move around. Bad guys like to hang out under your thumbs. This just doesn't work well in practice. And the accelerometer has limited use for games. There's no tactile feedback from the display, so you have to watch the placement of your thumbs in order to keep things in control. The iPhone would only be game worthy if it had some sort of docking cradle with analog sticks and buttons.
Some games will work on the iPhone, but for the majority my Nintendo DS is still going to be the first thing that I reach for.
Yes, and the DS version sells for 2-3 times the Iphone version. Ever wonder why? And why the consumer is okay with this?
The guy in that video you linked says the Iphone version of the game is better because it is graphically superior and cheaper in cost. He clearly know little about the hand-held market and its history. Every competitor who's ever challenged Nintendo's decades long dominance of the hand-held sector has come at them with the same thing 'better looking' (though not always cheaper games, but usually more expensive hardware) and has been devastated. If the Iphone were only a gaming device it would likely suffer the same fate.
So, you may think $10 for Assassin's Creed on the Iphone is a great deal. Sure. But what if you're the publisher? You might port the game to Iphone after making it for the DS and selling it there for awhile. But what if the DS was gone and Iphone was your primary system, could you afford to sell games at $10 a pop? No. So, publishers are not going to be happy with a $10 price for a game like AC. The only reason the price is so low anyway is because Apple no doubt put pressure on them to lower the price as much as possible, and they did it to test the waters.
Lastly, the graphics are are only marginally better. The battery life is much worse. The control scheme is much worse (Iphone control scheme even takes up screen real-estate!). The durability of the Iphone is worse (no clamshell). And the cost of the Iphone itself it far, far, far higher. Children are not going to be buying it, nor teens, nor parents for children or teens. It costs more than a PS3!
I assert again, Apple has no chance of displacing Nintendo in the hand-held market with the Iphone. It will continue to be at best a secondary market, a throw-away market, while the market-share remains with Nintendo.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
You are forgetting about manufacturing and distribution costs. Yes, the DS version is 3 times the price of the iphone version, but EA is not cashing that money difference (at least, not most of it). And yes, I know apple is taking a cut from the price, but distribution costs are usually quite more expensive than that.
That's not to say that they don't make more money from Nintendo DS cartridges than from downloads in the iTunes store, just that the difference is not that big, and the risks are lower with itunes (if the game is a flop, you only paid for development).
I don't know if Apple will ever displace Nintendo from the first position in the hand-held market. But I certainly would take it as a serious contender. They won't displace Nintendo or Sony as the first option for gamers, but Apple could certainly dominate the "casual" market that has pushed Nintendo to the first spot.
Did the Xbox 360 kick your girlfriend and make out with your dog?
Sure is butthurt in here. "AAA" PC games are just xbox shovelware, Wii has kiddy games and PS3 is ching-chong shit.
That's highly unlikely. The iPod Touch/iPhone market* has a lot of downward pressure on pricing coming directly from the customer base. It's a very strange market from the many articles and sales figures I've read; it seems customers are willing to buy lots of apps but they are very price sensitive. When the store was in its first few months, companies priced products like they did for other cell phones and they simply didn't get sales.
Apple contributes to the pricing pressure, but I think it's from poor design rather than intention. The App Store is both the main retail venue and the main form of advertising most apps have, and getting on either the store's front page or a category's front page makes a tremendous difference in sales -- the difference between a total failure and a success. The main way to get on the front page is to rank in the top sales, and more expensive apps are going to tend to have fewer sales. Naturally this tend to favor lower prices. The reason why I believe this is unintentional is because Apple initially didn't even think to separate out free apps from paid apps in their list of top downloads. What's more, frankly the iTunes and App Stores are terrible at helping customers find products they want or might like.
As a point of comparison, I've read that people who organized friends and followers to get their book on the top of the sales charts for Amazon ultimately didn't get a noticeable boost from it. The difference being that Amazon's site is well-designed, with a pretty good search mechanism, good methods for browsing, a decent recommendation system, and various other goodies. On the App Store you can't even limit your search to the App Store, much less to a particular category. There's no attempt to help you find apps you might like with a recommendation system, the browsing has minimal options. It's really just crap by modern standards
*While the iPhone gets all the press, the iPod Touch unit sales are roughly two and a half times more than the iPhone's.
Most big Xbox titles are like "Gears of War", "Left 4 Dead", "Dead rising" etc.
i'd have thought that would be "Objectionable content" on the iPhone?
"however the tendency is for PS3 games to be graphically worse than 360 games"
Holy shit!
Let me guess! You used to be a Dreamcast fanboy too!
What a fucking loser! Here's a clue since you obviously are too fucking stupid to know any better, the 'smarter' Xbots have all moved on to the "we don't care about graphics, we only care about gameplay' rationalization to deal with the utter humiliation the 360 has gotten graphically this gen from the PS3.
Hell, even the directx hacks over at beyond3d.com who most certainly filled your little pea brain with bullshit about 'which console had a better graphics card' have thrown in the towel and have moved on with their sad little lives.
Now keep your fucking mouth shut you piece of shit. Don't ever fuck with someone who's entire life has been spent crafting low level console graphics code again.
Congratulations to Microsoft on tying with the Nintendo Gamecube for last place in that iteration of the console wars
Second != last. GameCube and Xbox each sold twice as many units as Dreamcast.
[...] but the average microwave user isn't going to spend months waiting for toast to toast [...]
You don't toast toast. You do that to bread. ;)
[...] The last thing I want is Gordon Ramsay (haha) providing me my OS. [...]
I'm sure there is a Rachael Ray version, just for users like you!
It's flawed to point out that the iPhone is very expensive when it's a phone. The iTouch does anything else and is much cheaper, that's a better comparison.
You just got troll'd!
Actualy Tramiel was owner number three. All went down when Nolan sold Atari to Warner Brother.
Martin
Assassin's Creed on the DS was a terrible game.
Microsoft needs about 20 Halo-sized hits to make the Xbox go profitable. I just don't see that happening, especially given that Bungie couldn't stand being part of the Empire.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All your bases are belong to us! - Richard Teversham to Steve Jobs.
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
I assert again, Apple has no chance of displacing Nintendo in the hand-held market with the Iphone.
What about the iPod touch? (cheaper, teens could buy it, children, etc.)
Ipod touch is rather nice. If Sony added a control scheme it would be roughly equal to the PSP is feature-set, yet have a touch screen for at least some DS functionality. That could turn into an excellent mature-market gaming machine. I can see that taking the upper-age part of the market, similar to how Nintendo focuses on kids with their console and MS/Sony shoot for the more mature gamers. If Apple shot for that market they might have something. That could be a winner. But I think adding a control scheme would be a requisite addition, and I doubt Apple is going to do that, but who knows, it's certainly possible. If they added a clamshell and second screen...
The price differential between the 360 and the PS3 was so great when the PS3 came out, the 360 was bound to gain traction. Parents and gamers chose the cheaper machine and developers found they could address a wider audience in less time by going 360 only - as it's easier to program for than the PS3. Better games catalogue = even more customers.
For the OP and me, the 360 is a dreadful product. I couldn't live with a 360 in the same way that I wouldn't tolerate the shortcomings of a typical budget laptop. I like my PS3 and I like my $3000 laptop. But I also recognise that I care way too much about these things and should probably get a life.
You don't toast toast. You do that to bread. ;)
Then I suppose one doesn't churn butter, one churns milk cream. To say "waiting for toast to toast" sounds stupid, but it is grammatically accurate.
The Bandai Pippin was not made or sold by Apple, which is why the Bandai brand is there.
Bandai (the Japanese company that licensed "Power Rangers") jumped on board when Apple offered to license Mac hardware designs to third parties, along with Panasonic and Motorola and a variety of companies that either did or did not actually bring a Mac clone to market.
Most of the Mac clones were just rebranded Mac models with more RAM or a faster CPU, but Bandai wrapped it up as a game console that was more of a web-centric device. That made it more powerful in some respects than a Playstation, but also more expensive. It was also not trying to be compatible with much Mac software, so it ended up being neither fish (a basic games console) nor fowl (a cheap desktop Mac), and instead joined the ranks of middling stuff that nobody saw a reason to buy.
Suggesting that Apple designed it 15 years ago, and that it has some bearing on what Apple would release today is fantastically ignorant.
The iPhone isn't coming to Verizon.
Apple isn't losing money on the Apple TV, and certainly hasn't pumped $8billion into it.
Second year sales have jumped 3X, and the company has only ever halfassedly marketed it as a hobby.
To draw a parallel between Apple TV, a slow selling device that supports the success of iTunes against other set top boxes and services (including Microsoft's feeble attempts to enter this market) and the Xbox, which has only sold devices at huge subsidies and rang up massive hardware bills for Microsoft while only doing little to maintain Microsoft's monopoly grip on games development, is fantastically ignorant.
The death of Microsoft's Xbox 360
Guys guys. I have nothing against Apple, when it is the right thing for some people. :)
And I would not know why to have anything against gays. I mean, how in the world would they hurt me? I don't get it...
But you totally and completely fell for it. Lol. Makes it even more funny. You guys are suuuch hypocrites, my children will not believe me when I tell them in 20 years. So funny! XD
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.