“Online conspiracy theorists suggest that Apple is about to frag the gaming community with a revelation that could shake Microsoft to its core: Apple will buy Nintendo. What could be more quintessentially left-field Apple behaviour than buying out the US’s number three games console manufacturer? Between howling at the moon, these looneys point to the similar corporate philosophies of Apple and Nintendo (bull-headed determination in the face of defeat); the similar consumer perception of the companies (both have followings whose brand dedication verges on the religiously devout); the similar design styles (the Nintendo DS Lite practically looks like Jonathan Ive built it); and the complementary market spaces (Apple wants games, Nintendo wants style),” Crave at CNET writes. “But somewhere in the looney’s mind, is there a scintilla of logic? A tiny fragment of truth spluttering for breath in the soup of madness? Could Apple actually buy Nintendo, and more importantly, why would it want to?”
Crave writes, “Consider this: the Mac Mini currently retails for not much more than the forthcoming Sony PlayStation 3 will. The Mac Mini can play high-definition video, edit music and photographs, surf the Web, word process and edit video — things no console can currently do well, if at all. The Mini also runs Apple’s extremely robust OS X operating system. What if the Mini could also play Nintendo games? And not just play Nintendo games, but play Nintendo games specifically tailored to the strengths of the Mac Mini’s hardware? Would Apple have a viable console on its hands? And if so, could it penetrate the mainstream consumer market with Macintosh computers in a way that has constantly eluded it in the past?”
Full article with much more here.
MacDailyNews Take: You read 100+ Apple-related articles daily and you develop a strange subconscious sixth sense. Maybe that’s why we’re so interested in Nintendo’s Wii? Is Nintendo lately tingling our warped Apple geek sense for a bigger reason than your basic “Wii lust” or is it just something we ate?
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Nintendo does not need Apple to produce stylish hardware and Apple does not need Nintendo to bring games to Macs; they have Boot Camp for that. It would be cool to see the two companies working together for something like Front Row on Wii but I do not think they need to merge for that to happen. As for the idea of a Mac Mini with Nintendo games, the price of such a console would make it as expensive as the PS3 and comparable to the Pippin.
When was the last time Apple bought ANY company?
“When was the last time Apple bought ANY company?”
Ask EDGAR.
Odyssey67,
Apple sells well over 1 million Macs per quarter. So it’s more like 5 million Macs per year, not 1 million.
There’s no business reason for Apple to buy Nintendo. The gamer market is stagnant, and there is no technology that Apple would add by buying Nintendo.
If Apple just wanted great Nintendo games, it’s much cheaper and easier to enter into a deal with Nintendo to have Nintendo develop games for the Mac.
Also, Apple has historically shown very little interest in the games market. Many people would call that short-sightedness by Steve Jobs back in the 1980s, that he insisted on keeping the Mac a “real computer” and did not pay attention to games.
Factchecker:
Right you are – I not only didn’t take the time to look up the numbers (going from rough memory for both), but I was also thinking in terms of desktop sales only for Macs, even though I wrote like I meant all of them. My bad on both counts.
Conceptually, I still think of ‘IBM’ & ‘desktop Macs’ together. Obviously, for a project like I outlined to have maximum impact, the CPU would have to be usable throughout Apple’s product line. The best (revised) combined estimate I came up with was 4.6 million units, based on a doubling of Q1 & Q4 ’05 results – the only ones I found in a quick serach – reported here:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/jan/18results.html
(click on “Data Summary”)
My guestimate of Nintendo’s GameCube numbers were also low on average too, b/c my recollection came from their last years reported results (’05), which was 4 million units. See here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/26/nintendo_results_q3_05/
This was a weaker sales year than previously for the GC, so average yearly sales over the lifetime of the console is higher. According to the ‘People’s Source’, 20.61 million GCs were sold over it’s four year (thus far) history, so that would be a little over 5.1 units/year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_(sixth_generation)
Assuming no downturn for either company, that would be a minimum of 9 to 10 million CPUs per year combined – pretty hard to ignore. If the CPU had been a real homerun … well, PS2 was a 100 million seller, and PPC Mac sales were rising faster before the switch anyway, so who knows?
All of the above is just a nice thought experiment though. With Apple and Nintendo now using entirely different CPU architectures, there would be no point in a team up, or having one buy the other. Increasing their CPU market power and R&D efforts really would’ve been the only rational, business-level reason to do it.
Though the idea of Apple in the gaming market is interesting and welcome to many; this plan is not too feasible to me.
In Japan the polls recently showed 68% asked were most excited about the Wii over the other nexgen systems. So, who could say they are weak going into its release? I haven’t liked Nintendo since the first console, yet now I even want a Wii!
I can’t see any reason they would do anything more than a partnership for exclusive rights to the Apple store and sales base.