Slashdot Mirror
Apple's 2014 WWDC Keynote Will Be Streamed Live; Hopes For a Microconsole?
SlappingOysters (1344355) writes "Grab It is reporting that Apple will stream its 2014 WWDC keynote live at 10am PST on June 2. The site speculates that a recent update to showcase title and previous keynote star Real Racing 3 could confirm a rumoured microconsole announcement. The App Store has seen a dramatic rise in the quality and frequency of AAA spin-off titles over the last year, giving Apple a good platform to make a move into this emerging space."
The site speculates that a recent update to showcase title and previous keynote star Real Racing 3 could confirm a rumoured microconsole announcement.
Could confirm? Seriously... if it's still questionable then it is still unconfirmed.
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Apple is known for limiting the number of different products. IMHO Apple is unlikely to ship a "microconsole" and continue to ship the Apple TV.
Much more likely: the "4th generation" Apple TV, which will not only do everything an Apple TV does, but will also play games if you buy a controller.
According to Wikipedia, the current Apple TV uses a single-core ARM chip. For gaming, Apple should put in a more powerful chip, which may imply a price hike. Perhaps Apple will continue to sell the current generation as a less-expensive model, for those who don't care about games.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I am curious why Apple is having their WWDC convention in the early summer (before the Google I/O event even), when normally they are in the fall.
If they announce a console, they should merge AppleTV and it, so one product does all the set top love in a residence. Maybe even add a Blu-Ray drive, so one only needs it and the TV.
Other things that might be useful as Apple announcements:
1: A security standard for devices, and more than just SSL or "just trust us". Apple upping the bar in the security arena would mean good PR. Perhaps an app to device standard that helps secure communication via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Perhaps some way to share public keys so an IoT device only will speak to authorized devices, and no other, no CA, no third party.
2: A return back to schools with deep discounts and an active presence. Apple made themselves a foundation by having low priced machines in the educational setting. These days, a Mac discount is 10% last time I checked. It may not profit the next quarter... but it will have a lot more people who will buy them later on.
3: A rackable desktop/server. The only reason MS is existing is because of their presence in the enterprise. If Apple can get into this market, even a bit, it is a stable income base.
I normally don't like looking at Apple Rumor sites at all, or reading about them.
But a story like this seems REALLY pointless. What on earth is the point of publishing the story days before we know for sure what will happen? Just so people can swagger in with last minute "guesses" that hardly count because of last minute leaks?
Much better to discuss the meaning or use of what actually is to come, rather than some possibility which will be potentially dissipated in mere days.
In other words, let the cat at least settle down in the box before you open it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you can play it on iPad and iPhone. If you feel strongly about it you can mirror your iPad screen to the apple TV. If you feel super strongly you can buy a bluetooth gamepad controller. https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
That game is on the Google Play store as well, so the anon GP could just as well get any Android device. However, tons of reviews say this game is utter shit: even though it is paid, it still takes a ton of microtransactions to get any good. Of course, you could run the original on an emulator... oh wait, Apple does not allow emulators on their store. Google does.
Circumcision is child abuse.
of Apple's cultural bankruptcy. Jobs died and they haven't come up with ANYTHING of importance. He's been gone for almost 3 years. He wasn't that active the last year or so, so technically he's been out of the picture for almost 5. Apple needs to do something big and smart. I don't see that happening with Cook at the helm. They could do something small and smart, like PUT COVER FLOW BACK INTO ITUNES. But I don't think that will happen. I think they'r just going to minimax themselves into triviality.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
If you want to watch something multiple times you can just rip it to disk. I gave all my DVDs away. One hard drive holds an entire drawer full of DVDs with room to spare.
Yeah and how big is your NAS?
The nice thing about iTunes + Apple TV is the cloud. Stream whatever you want to watch and delete it when you're done. So long as you have a halfway decent internet connection, literally anything you want to watch is available with a touch of a button.
I've tried the DVD route. DVDs tend to get scratched, lost, or otherwise become a pain to organize.
I've also tried ripping them. It required way too much storage space. And I'm always faced with the distinct possibility that if I don't make backups of all that data I may find it disappear one day.
Apple takes care of all of that for me. And I am more than happy to pay them for it.
Of course, you could run the original on an emulator... oh wait, Apple does not allow emulators on their store. Google does.
Yes, yes they do, and in fact I have both the emulator and the oregon trail dsk images from the Asimov collection on my Nexus 4 right now.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can buy content from itunes for similar price, not have to leave my home, and play it as many times as I want. I will never scratch the non-existent media, never lose it, and it will play on all of my devices. Sure if Apple goes broke i lose access to my media, but the chances of that happening are probably smaller than WW3 starting and us all being nuked back into the stone age.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yup. Guaranteed quality digital content (no crapshoot with downloading torrents), its relatively cheap ($2-$4 = not worth my time screwing around with dodgy rips), and if your internet connection is say 6-8 megabit or faster streaming is no problem at all.
I really believe that decent broadband will have a signifnicant impact on consumer storage. I would bet that most people with multiple tb of storage at home (note, not all - i'm sure there are exceptions, so don't both saying "i have a heap of legitimate content") are using it purely to store ripped or illegally downloaded media. Convenient, cheap streaming = bottom will drop out of the storage market.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The rumour is confirmed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Looks awsome! The new Apple Bandai Pippin console features a 66 MHz processor and a 14.4 kb/s modem...
iPhone or iPod touch may be the controller...
I sure as hell didn't need them to go to Apple.com to see the banner at the bottom of the home page, which leads to this page which clearly tells us about the live streaming tomorrow.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Not true. You could get a Chromebox or any number of little computers running normal Linux (including on that Chromebox instead of ChromeOS).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Apple going bankrupt almost happened in 1996 (18 years ago). WW3 almost happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 (52 years ago). This puts an upper bound on the probability of WW3 at 1/52 = ~1.9% and on Apple going bnakrupt at 1/18 = ~5.5%. Therefore, Apple going bankrupt is more likely than WW3.
(Cue the statistics pedants!)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Hackintosh.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Last year Apple opened up a framework for made-for-iphone bluetooth gamepads. they specified two layouts, the xbox 360 layout and the SNES layout. it's kind of silly to use these with an iPhone
I don't see how the layouts are so silly. There are iPhone cases with buttons, and holding it horizontally makes the combination of phone and case look like an original GBA, PSP, or the bottom half of a Nintendo DS. The DS and PSP copy the Super NES's layout closely, and the GBA is the same thing minus two buttons. Other gamepads come as something to clamp onto the phone with the buttons at the bottom, which looks more like a GBA SP or NVIDIA SHIELD.
there are millions of iOS developers who would love to break into the home console market.
Then why doesn't a small business that's been successful on Apple's App Store sign up as a PlayStation game developer? Sony Computer Entertainment has lately been courting indies in a way that would have been nigh unthinkable last generation.
Can you fit that all on a Nexus? What with the no SD slot and all...
Until you end up living in a place whose best available home ISP promises (and delivers) 6 to 8 Mbps bursts but cuts you off after 10 GB per month. This lets you blow through your cap in three hours.
Apple's iTunes division could work around studio bureaucracy the same way Netflix did: vertical integration. Invest in a TV studio to produce original programming. Or what am I missing?
You'd be surprised at how small these Apple II games are. Each disk side is no bigger than 140 KiB, meaning you can probably fit well over a thousand disk images in 100 MB of zipfiles. They're small like NES games.
I think the article screwed up here.
From the article:
"Party Play allows four friends to connect via BlueTooth controllers to an iPad, enabling local splitscreen multiplayer. Take your iPad out to your flatscreen TV with a HDMI adaptor and bingo, the Apple microconsole has arrived."
So the iPad is the microconsole, and you can ALREADY DO THIS.
The iPad can mirror anything to a TV using HDMI, and the iPad can already do MFi controllers, so there is NOTHING NEW HERE.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
My NAS is 5.5 GB, co-located at mine and my in-laws house. Total cost $600, less than a blu-ray carousel.
Good-bye
5.5 GB?
What quality do you rip those movies at? ;)
Its my test setup. I started with my low def rips and DVDs and plan on working up from there. I only have about 15 full size Blu-rays on there (just started ripping them in the last 6 months). Eventually ill add another, pro-grade NAS, maybe even a ZFS setup with larger storage. Keep in mind that im co-located, so costs double for any changes. Its more important to me to have quality over quantity.
Good-bye
A decent NAS isn't too expensive. Get a decent enclosure that has a number of 5.25" bays, power supply, a small SSD for the OS, trays for the 5.25" bays that allow hot plugging/unplugging of 2.5" drives, and your OS of choice, and you can have a good capacity with +2 redundancy for under a grand. (You want RAID1 or RAID-Z2 at a minimum these days because RAID-Z can detect bit rot, but can't fix it. RAID-Z2 and higher can not just find bit rot, but can fix it without the use of ditto blocks.)
Another product I've heard very good things about is something called un-RAID. You can add onto the RAID array dynamically, having the largest drive (if they are not all the same size) be dedicated to parity, another drive for write caches, and so on... so when you need more storage, tossing more drives in and hot-adding appears to be easy. Downside is that it is commercial, and I am leery of "magic voodoo" when it comes to RAID.
Apple itself as a company does not like leaks. To the extent they are hiring the Chinese military to clamp down on them...
The leaks/rumors industry is not Apple at all, but a whole range of third parties seeking to discern anything they can about Apple before an announcement.
The reason is of course money... for whatever reason a lot of people seem drawn to these rumor sites, and that creates a lot of advertising revenue.
I was just hoping Slashdot was above doing the same thing...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Okay sure. Just let me buy Photoshop for Linux and... oh wait, your solution doesn't work at all, you fucking moron.
Looks like it works to me.
http://appdb.winehq.org/object...
That said, photoshop was not listed as a requirement. Few people need/want it anway. GGP's post didn't mention it at all.
Seems like it's just a lot of bitching with absolutely no effort to avoid the root cause. Like someone bitching about who gets elected but never bothing to even register to vote.
Want an alternative? Put your money and effort into alternatives.
Want to continue to be treated like a sheep? Just keep bleating and follow along.
I think the most likely update candidates are the Mac Mini and their display line. I'm guessing they'll finally pull their non-retina macbook pros as well.
I'm really hoping for a beastly mac mini. Something fitting as the smaller sibling to the Mac Pro.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I'd be happy with a "Mac Pro mini" that has a quad-core i5 and an nVidia GTX 750 TI 2GB.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Is "emerging space" a synonym for "didn't go anywhere?" As it stands, there is the Ouya, which is dying, a bunch of android consoles dying on the vine, and a Playstation Vita TV, which hasn't caught on enough in Japan to bother shipping elsewhere. As it stands, the only microconsole-like object that is doing OK is Chromecast, and that has nothing to do with games.
The ______ Agenda
ssd + ram really helps make it a better/faster machine, if you haven't already done that.
Or, you can torrent it for free! :-)
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
It's all about what kind of person you want to be.
We will get apologies from the people that reported on bullshit unfounded rumors that turn out to have no relation to anything Apple was actually going to release.
No, I've never been right before. Why do you ask?
Apple could stage a hostile takeover of the largest media company in the world
If that happens, national competition regulators could probably stage a hostile takeover of Apple.
If they announce a console, they should merge AppleTV and it, so one product does all the set top love in a residence. Maybe even add a Blu-Ray drive, so one only needs it and the TV.
Screw that. I want an iPad, the size of a coffee table book, with an iOS 5 or 6 style GUI.
Of course, there is that snowball's chance in hell, but I seriously expect that Ive will continue to destroy the Mac and iOS GUI.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Literally the only thing I care about from this WWDC is the role Andre Young will be playing as an Apple employee. As long as he's drawing an Apple paycheck, they won't get another penny from me for anything. As far as I'm concerned, the guy is a misogynist and a homophobe. His presence is an insult to every female, gay and lesbian employee there.
"War makes me sad." - Me
Ah, what is actually the difference between a microconsole and a smarthphone? Ah, yeah, the name... so that Apple fanboys buy two devices that do exactly the same and spent double as much money. Well thought! And by next year the Giga-iphone: A giant 4K screen that you can also use to watch TV!!! AWESOME
-- 29A the number of the Beast
The 4% adoption rate is an Android issue because users can't apparently choose to upgrade, if the suppliers are preventing that, and/or updating isn't as easy on Android as iOS. Not to mention all of the junk Android devices that can barely function.
Blu-ray is better quality than streaming, sure. Most people don't actually care. Just look at the blu-ray adoption rate. I can stream 1080p youtube or 720 Apple TV content and do other stuff at the same time on a 16 megabit ADSL with zero hiccups. I was streaming AppleTV content (720p) with zero hiccups on a 6 meg sync back in 2010. And codecs are only going to get better.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
This is someone asking a company to update one of their model.
Nope, it isn't. See way up there where an AC said, "I don't want to get a Windows PC. I really don't. BUT YOU LEAVE ME NO CHOICE! I will be forced to flee the obsolence of the Apple realm if there is not a modern Mac Mini released sometime in the nearest of futures", which is where the linux (chromebox, to be exact) suggestions started.
The fact is, he has loads of choices, but is just going to complain that none of them are viable, all while yelling that his current product is too outdated.