Apple TV box with 1tb / 2tb harddrive capable of receiving Freeview HD and up scaling the crap SD image -probably sold
With Bluray drive - defo sold!
I doubt they'll go down this path.
you'll probably find the machine will ship with a bit more flash (to keep the price down) and stream games from the internet like it does with HD content right now.
Maybe caching content between levels.
Waiting for content to download has become part of console gaming life already anyway, every ********* time I want to play GT5 on the PS3 (which is only once every few months) i've got a PS3 software update and GT5 updates to download. Yeah sure you can skip them but only if you unplug the console from the net and don't want to use online features....
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It's all about GPU these days and the iOS device GPUs are "good enough".
People moaned and rolled their eyes at nintendo with the Wii specs too, and yet who sold the most hardware? Even teh PS2 market is still doing pretty well and that hardware is about 13 years old and outperformed significantly by a modern cell phone.
The AppleTV hardware is way underpowered compared to a PS4 or future Xbox, sure. However the next generation may not be so far from PS3 or Xbox 360, and that is "good enough" by a long shot as proven by the success Nintendo had with the Wii. The iOS devices already have more RAM than a PS3, the storage is quicker, and the GPU is likely on-par. There's also a massive developer pool who already have games out for iOS that would easily be able to port or use existing skills to write new ATV games. The developer pool for new Xbox and PS4 will be starting from zero due to the totally new hardware and lack of well-known and well-tested development platform.
A developer for future Xbox / PS4 will need to spend time and money to learn the platform, the SDK, etc, whereas for an iOS developer ATV will be very similar to what they already support.
Other than the "hard core" market, console hardware has been good enough for most people for many years - since the PS2 days. It's a case of whether or not decent games are still being released and price. And apple are strong on both of those points.
There's a huge market of mobile gamers out there who are happy to pay $5/game or less (like they do on mobile with iOS or android), but will NOT stump the cash for AAA "big budget" titles.
Google/android are equally positioned with the potential to eat the home console market also - but apple has the advantage here from teh standpoint of less fragmentation and ease of support for a developer - even if they were to support all iOS based Apple TVs, that will only be 3 platforms once the new version comes out. Rather than a heap of different Android hardware and a myriad of different Android versions due to lack of OEM upgrade support on many android devices.
Gabe from Valve is also concerned that apple are positioned to dominate the console market.
