| AlfredoTurkey said: Guys, Apple entered the gaming industry with the advent of the app store. lol. They're the owners of the number one gaming device on the planet RIGHT NOW. |
I generally agree but I would state this another way: because of Apple's unique corporate structure (leaders own a functional area rather than a product), it tends to suffer from an attention deficit. Because the iPhone is doing so well and deserves a lot of resources, updates to Macs have fallen by the wayside (also because of a lack of competitive pressure from the stagnating PC market). So Apple needs to have a deep strategic reason to enter a new market, which acts as a distraction. They didn't get into the watch market per se, it is part of a wider foray into wearables, health research, and it has the side benefit of further increasing stickiness of iPhones (which already have phenomenal loyalty rates).
Getting into the console market could have some side benefits: there would be synergies in game development as the iPhone runs the same OS, so it could attract a higher class of game developers to the shared platform and thus be accretive to iPhone (and especially iPad which is a major focus for them right now). But I think Apple would only do it if they had some ulterior strategic reason (e.g. they have some brilliant idea that ties in with their work on AR and autonomous vehicles), because the business by itself is not that large, particularly in terms of user base. The number of iPhones sold is 1.2 billion, and even the modest Apple Watch sales are probably outpacing the Switch.
