Imagine: Your ultra-chic future iPhone isn’t just a sometime mobile game machine, it’s also a wireless vehicle for hardcore gaming on your big screen television. Maybe it works with a wireless gamepad, maybe it uses ultra-low electrical current that lets your fingertips “feel” the edges of control surfaces along your iPad or iPhone’s perfectly flat glass screen. Either way, imagine that it’s the future of serious and casual gaming, a future in which dedicated set-top boxes, cables and marathon life cycles shuffle grudgingly into that good night. For years I’ve made the argument that Apple‘s iOS platform is just a wireless gamepad and HDTV-hookup away from squaring off against Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo in the living room. Take the iPhone 5 with its 1.3 GHz A6 processor and triple-core PowerVR SGX 543MP3 GPU, outputting console-quality visuals to a virtually 720p screen. No one’s run meaningful comparison benchmarks between the iPhone 5 and, say, the Xbox 360, but we’ve seen actual game developers suggest that the iPhone 5 is on par, performance-wise, with Microsoft’s seven-year-old console (to say nothing of the tricked-out A6X processor in the fourth-generation iPad, which probably surpasses it). (WATCH: 10 Things You Should Know About the New BlackBerry Phones) But wait, didn’t I just type “seven-year-old console”? Isn’t Microsoft coming out with some gobsmacking new Xbox this year? Perhaps, but a few points: One, Apple has a platform in iOS that it’s able to update once, sometimes twice a year. That’s an incalculable advantage in an increasingly fickle consumer landscape. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 were fresh back when George W. Bush was working through his second term (and even then, they lagged well behind contemporaneous high-end PCs). Are Microsoft or Sony going to start selling upgraded versions of their consoles every year for $400 to $500 a pop? Unless these rumored new game systems aren’t set-top consoles at all (hey, anything’s possible) don’t bet on it. iOS (and Android) devices, by comparison, have been doubling or tripling their raw crunch power annually. Does anyone think it’ll take another seven or eight years![]()
