Most of you will hold on to your old devices for a long time. I still have a 1st gen touch lying around. I agree with commander data there, in that there needs to be an eventual cut off. If apple wants to take their place in handheld gaming. We are all on touch arcade here, but you must remember that most people are not, and many people use their devices for things other than games. You will always still be able to play your doodle jump, use your iPod/phone as just that, it's not like they said your device must now be destroyed. If you want to play the newest games, get the newest gear. Welcome to computers guys. And I'm no "fanboy" there a lots of dumb moves by jobs and co. But I am for the raising of the bar. AND... I don't care about achievements, trophies, leader boards, etc. I hate the achievement systems, not for what they are meant, but for how people now NEED these for a good game. Done ranting now. Go away. Grr.
Loved you achievement rant. I actually like them for increasing replayability . And yeah it is amazing how we need them now o.o, but that has happen with a lot of things over the.. well... existence of mankind, so nothing new there. 1 question. But the latest gen PC you can. How many years does it last you? Probably a lot more than an iTouch if they keep this up. (the only point im trying to make here)
I know you're exaggerating to try to prove a point, but Nintendo has made incremental design changes to the DS to prevent its stagnation in the market and fuel new purchases. Stage 1 was the chunky original DS. Once everyone who cared to buy that ugly and unpocketable version had one, they create the DS Lite. Once everyone had a standard DS Lite that wanted one, they introduced more different colors of DS Lite for those who were holding out. Every iteration had small tweaks to the design to make them more desirable (size, battery life, etc) and tweaks to the manufacturing process to reduce costs. That also let them lower the price of a new DS a number of times over the life of the DS as a platform. All these little design adjustments help them get more units into peoples hands. Note the Wii market getting saturated, so they bring out a black Wii (keep the gross comments out of this )... Microsoft and Sony do it too with their Xbox 360 "S" and Playstation 3 "slim" models. Even Apple is following this pattern, by making small incremental improvements to the iPhone and iPod Touch each year. The difference is, Apple *must* sell you a new model to keep shareholders happy. They can't fall back on software sales like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. This is about as close to official as I can get for you on short notice: Fortune - App Store: 1% of Apple's gross profit
I agree that apple is doing the same thing as nintendo, and all other gaming companies for that matter. BUT Apple is doing waaay to fast, if every lets say 2 or 3 years they came out with a new device to cut off the rest it would be fine, but the 3rd gen came out almost exactly a year after the 2nd gen did 2nd gen release: September 9, 2008 3rd gen release: September 15, 2009 to most people but 3rd gen was available exactly a year after the 2nd gen(September 9, 2009) in some places
This doesn't surprise me because iOS4 seems to already be pushing the limit of my 2nd gen iPod Touch. I just hope that we don't get stuck at 4.0 - if that's the case I might be reverting back to 3.1.3... One more reason for devs to stick to plain ol' OF (or any of the other onese except ScoreLoop which is still F'n creepy! )
But the beauty of the DS would also be that in no point Iwata said "ahem, this only plays on the XL, sry" either way you have a pretty valid point, I just don't like the change rate, I myself only plan on changing ipod next year (3+ years after having it) and consider having to change it before that absolutely awful, there should be other incentives to make us change ipods not the "oh this new glowy thingy we had prepared for months, MUAHA you aint getting it unless you buy a new ipod". That's the only thing that bothers me. Also, maybe not 6 versions that might be exaggerating (normal, lite, xl, dsi and 3ds only 5), but i'm probably being pretty accurate about the costs involved in them. Also thanks for the healthy discussion
I would love to know what % of the "iDevice" market they are immediately losing due to this. Anyone care to share an educated guess?
Sorry CommanderData, but this is simply incorrect. While it is true for Microsoft and SONY, Nintendo does not use a loss leader strategy for their consoles. This has been discussed in several forums and their conservatism in this matter is what pulled them through the last console-generation with their numbers in black, despite finishing third in the race when it came to sales-figures. Nintendo makes money of every console they sell, plain and simple. While all this is said, are we actually sure Apple will drop support for these older devices? The non-existence of support in the current beta strongly suggests this, but does not necessarily confirm it to be true.
Lame. I'd love to pick up a newer model, but I doubt 4G iPhones will even be available where I live for another year, so I'm always going to be buying something outdated. I got a new 2G iPod Touch just over a year ago.
Note I said "virtually at cost", not "at a loss". Sony and Microsoft were willing to lose $100-$300 per unit to get them into first place in the console wars. And of course Sony also had the war in HD formats to win with Blu-Ray, so they took the bigger loss for each sale. I know for a fact that Nintendo never sells its consoles for a *loss*, but I guarantee you when the Wii came out they were not making much more than 10 or 20 bucks per console sold. Today, with internal redesigns and lower manufacturing costs (just like they do for the DS line as I stated above) their profit per unit is probably significantly higher, even though they were also able to lower the price (due to those same internal redesigns and manufacturing tweaks). Nobody's talking about *Apple* dropping support for older devices. Or at least I am not. I'm talking about Apple making an attractive All-In-One handheld gaming platform on Gamecenter by excluding devices that don't meet the minimum hardware specs (as detailed a few pages back: 256-512Mb RAM, 600Mhz or greater CPU, GPU w/OpenGL ES 2.0 support). The upshot of this is it will encourage companies to create games that support this minimum hardware standard and Gamecenter. Which means it'll be the big developers that put the nail in the coffin of older devices! If Apple wants to get serious in gaming it needs a "system seller"... Nintendo has Mario and Link, Microsoft has Halo, Sony has (whoever they have). This very capable hardware spec will encourage the big developers to support iDevices. When something like the next GTA (or whatever is hot on consoles in the next 6-12 months) arrives in full 3D as seen on the PS3, Xbox360, and PSP it will cause an upgrade wave of epic proportions as gamers move to 3rd and 4th gen devices. Final notes: I suppose if you want to get technical, Apple is trying to phase out old hardware on two fronts. One is the path I described above. The other is a long term trick- They already cut off new iOS installs on most of those old devices. They are also disallowing new apps or updates that support OS below 3.0. Maybe by iOS 5 they will make 4.0 the minimum for new apps? Doubtful, but 2 years from now? I would bet on it. Anyone who's serious about playing games on their iDevice will upgrade as soon as they see what comes down the pipeline that they're missing out on. Wait and see My game plans: I'd like to be a part of Gamecenter, but I certainly can't ignore 25-35% of the market right now (my estimate of old devices still in use). I have between 2-4 games that will all arrive scattered over the next several months and into next year. I'll likely support OS 3.0 and all the way down to the first gen iPod Touch until Apple makes it difficult or impossible for me to do so. I think most indie developers will do the same. The big companies, with big name licensed properties, will go for Gamecenter and high-spec devices.
I don't think you're quite right there. The phenomenal profits reported by Nintendo since the launch of the Wii would indicate a higher margin than that. Remember, the Wii is basically a die-shrink of Gamecube with a different controller. So with a die-shrink, the manufacturing costs for the internals are already lower than with the Gamecube, and Nintendo was selling Gamecube for $99 during the previous gen. This would indicate that the launch price of $249 for the Wii was a pretty good deal for Nintendo. Apple also manages to charge a rather healthy margin on flash memory. It makes perfect sense for them not to provide an SD card slot, when people are willing to pay 100 USD extra per each 10 USD memory increase
A lot of valid points in this thread, and overall an interesting read. The one thing that resonates with me personally the most, is I definitely think Apple are pushing out new devices too soon. I can't help feeling like a case of "shooting oneself in the foot" is unfolding. The problem is this: if I have not bought a new Apple device within, ooh, say 3-4 months of release, I'm more than likely to just wait for the next gen. If it's been 6+ months since release, it becomes a certainty. It simply makes overwhelming sense. What this means is, new Apple devices have desirability window of around 3 months, after which point it begins to drop off rapidly. Now, true, not everybody will share this viewpoint. There's a percentage of new Apple users entering the market each year, who may not be as savvy about the speed at which Apple releases new devices. However, as the percentage of experienced users grows, Apple might find themselves with rapidly decreasing hardware sales after a mere handful of months into a device's life cycle.
I find this funny because I have a 3Gen Touch so it doesn't effect me. Though I feel sorry for the unlucky ones.
Well, I did a quick bit of research, and found out $10-$20 profit per unit (at launch date) was not quite right, but I was close. Analysts peg the profit at close to $40 per unit back at launch in 2006 (when the selling price was $249). I suspect it's around $100 per unit now even though the Wii sells for $199 now. Read the $40 per unit reference info here. Apple charges a healthy profit on *any* memory, not just flash. The RAM upgrade prices they've had for their computers have been historically crazy too. I know I'll never buy more than base RAM from them. Get your minimum, order the amount you want elsewhere and install it yourself Too bad we cannot do that with iPods and iPhones... Regarding an SD card slot- if Apple did build one into the iPhone or iPod Touch (or iPad for that matter) they would certainly lose a lot of leverage towards selling higher capacity and newer models. A lot of people would just keep buying larger SD cards as they came down in price. As I said, Apple's in the hardware business. It needs to sell new hardware to survive. They know what they're doing, and they are very good at it (even if some of us don't like it)
I guess about 25 to 30%, I've started a device listed poll here so we can maybe get a decent idea .. among gamers http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=63377
