I mean obviously the price is going to be brought up for this discussion, but in 5-10 years it's probably going to normal. Eventually phones will be replaced, and the average person changes their phone after 5 generations. Like I said in the stories section, this could potentially become a threat or replace console gaming at least in terms of third party sales. However, this is only the potential we are talking about. We don't know if Apple will keep supporting it, developers to support it, consumer to buy AAA games on mobile, the effect on battery, the latency, cost efficiency, etc. It would take a long time to perfect these imo. I've always said this, but for consoles to stay, it really needs to focus on innovation that can only be tested through consoles. So far Nintendo is the only one, and although they fail time to time, it's always good to challenge the market.

The higher price for PC gaming is often defended by it being a multi purpose device. Mobile phones are that much more than PCs nowadays. There are 6.84 billion smart phones in the world. "The number of smartphone mobile network subscriptions worldwide reached almost 6.4 billion in 2022, and is forecast to exceed 7.7 billion by 2028" (quote from Statista so take the prediction with a grain of salt)

A lot of people get their phone through work or just trade in their phone every 2 years and sign up for another 2 year subsidized plan. You can get an iPhone Pro 15 for 0 dollars when trading every 2 years (Get the latest phone at the lowest monthly price with the Upfront Edge_TM program on financing and return your phone in 2 years) by paying $31 a month.

Sure not many people will buy these outright, yet there are many ways to get these for reasonable monthly fees tied to a subscription plan. Then after 2 years all those high end phones get resold for much less. It all goes a lot faster than 7-8 year long console generations.

In the end it's a device 6.84 billion people already have for work, social media, video and gaming. Not such a big stretch to reach enough people in that pool that are interested in bigger games that can be played on their phone or on tv (by cable or apple airplay)

Consoles won't go away, but there's always the possibility that games will be made more 'mobile friendly' if it catches on. But those are the same concerns I have with MS bringing xCloud to mobile. However games tailor made for the console experience, or for the desktop experience will still be made, just as Nintendo will keep optimizing games for the handheld experience.

It is impressive tech and mobile has come along way.  I just don't see mobile touching current home consoles.   The ps5 for RE8 is 4k, with RT and pushes 60 fps.  Huge jump from 720p at 30 fps at low settings.  Which is fine, many will be happy with the iPhone.  It is all about expectations.  And when mobile closes the gap there will likely be a ps5 pro.  

An add on that make a smartphone similar to a Switch or PlayStation Portal would also solve the problem with controls

Most people really don't need a S23 Ultra to do the basic taks they do with their smartphones though. Sure, doing it on a mid range phone will not be as smooth as using a high end device but who cares... It still does the job satisfactorily.

ok in 3 years thats around  current  consoles life cycle end. we would be looking forward to ps6 which will blow away mobile again lol.

M1, M2, and soon 3nm M3 are "mobile" chips that are already in iPads and will eventually become the standard for iPad (probably Apple TV at some point too) and M-series chips can run anything a PS5 can already. They're just going to get better and better every year. The iPhone chips (A-series) are just the kid brother of those M-series chips but the iPhone chips will get better and better every year too.

If we're talking M1 Max/M2 Max those are straight up PS5 performance already and those have been available in M1 Max's case for several years now. But a standard M-chip is still very powerful and even has DLSS-style upscaling thanks to machine learning cores (the A series has this too), so it can run at game at a much lower native res and scale it up like the new Nvidia GPUs can.

The games were just not there, but Apple is now starting to court developers and offering things like the Game Porting Tool and getting creators like Hideo Kojima and the Resident Evil team on board because these chips are way too powerful for just being used as a cell phone, they need a usage case to show what they can do and also Apple Arcade is apparently making Apple a boat load of money, so they probably want to expand that. 

Once you have ported the game it can work on any Apple Silicon device ... iPad, iPhone, Mac, etc. 

Perhaps this is the right time to mention that iOS got a bunch of ports of noteworthy console games 10 to 15 years ago. We've had plenty of discussion on VGC back then too, but more centered around how handhelds would be made obsolete. And while the 3DS and Vita did end up selling way less than their predecessors, it was ultimately for different reasons, because it could be recognized that mobile gamers at large don't want to play, let alone pay, for console games. Hence why this whole idea was dead for such a long time, only to be given another life with this recent news that suggests another push by Apple in this direction.

I am not surprised to hear that people on Apple forums aren't enthusiastic about this, because I am sure they've heard this narrative of Apple making serious strides in gaming countless times before. The latest technology may enable today's phones to play newer console games than a decade ago, but the underlying issues of mobile gaming remain the same. Higher investments for the same lame returns as back then will put a quick end to all this, at least for a few years.

Mobile chip tech back then was no where close to what it is now.

The game changer was 3-4 years ago when Apple ditched x86 for their Macs (dumping AMD and Nvidia too) and started making their own chips from the ground up which all are part of a unified family (so iPhone to iPad to Macbook etc. etc.).

That chip leap to the M-series has changed everything, they have low power consumption chips now that have a shit ton of power even in a passively cooled enclosure. 

Also the Game Porting Toolkit is pretty remarkable, developers can get a basic version of their game running on a Mac within a few clicks in some cases. Yes you have to optimize, but the speed at which you can do it now is much, much faster and streamlined and that version of your game can work on iPhone, iPad, Mac, etc. 

The toolkit is so good regular people are actually using it like an emulator just to play modern PC games on M1/M2 series Macs, even though it's not supposed to be used that way and is just brute forcing the game to run with zero optimization. 

The hardware can actually run modern games now is here and it's power efficient, that wasn't the case 4-5 years ago. A M-series, especially just the vanilla M2 will run basically any modern game (PS5, XSX, whatever). Sure the performance will be scaled depending on which M (or A) series chip we're talking about, but even the base M1/M2 and soon M3 chips are extremely powerful. These things can run in a iPad enclosure today and eventually that performance will scale down into iPhones (A-series) too. 

But who will buy the games?