> "if Apple wants it to be." Therein lies the rub. Apple's had essentially nothing but false-starts toward serious support of traditional gaming. That iOS be

> "if Apple wants it to be." Therein lies the rub. Apple's had essentially nothing but false-starts toward serious support of traditional gaming. That iOS became and remains a gaming powerhouse is a happy accident that happened more because gaming companies adapted to Apple, rather than Apple making any concessions to the 'needs' of traditional gaming. Nothing about Apple's potential ability to leverage the AppleTV into a living-room juggernaut is new. You could've (and many have) made the same observation every single year since Apple announced they were going to allow native app development on the iPhone. Yet Apple continues to ignore this opportunity, I believe, for the same reason they've largely ignored traditional gaming on desktop macs for so long: they don't get gaming. Not as something that's worthwhile in and of itself. And they don't seem to care to. They certainly aren't willing to commit serious effort into addressing gaming-specific concerns. Popular history has it that Jobs didn't want to do the iPad unless it was good for something other than surfing the internet on the toilet. I'm wondering if Apple's minimum bar for apps on the AppleTV isn't "it has to be good for something other than playing games". Because they've been capable of putting out a hell of a gaming device for five years. But a good input method for controlling more-general software, on a large screen, several feet away, remains largely unexplored and unclear. So what if Apple's lack of movement on this front has more to do with their focus being on that unexplored territory, rather than having been too-distracted to release a Wii-knockoff controller and AppleTV SDK? Given Apple's history, they'd build everything about such a general platform around that input method. [1] And maybe some new dedicated-style of gaming tags along, with devs making brand new games that lend themselves to this input method. [2] And it would be very unlike Apple to present it the other way around: releasing a traditional games-centric controller, thus requiring non-game apps and users to deal with D-pads and analog sticks. I think that when Jobs' biographer quoted him as saying he 'finally cracked it', Jobs wasn't talking about their having cracked the video-content problem for AppleTV [3]. He was talking about the input problem for more-general couch computing. And that's why I think apps and games are almost certainly coming, but a gamepad isn't. [1] Touch for mobile wasn't just about using taps in place of mouse-clicks; everything about the UI revolved around tactile response. UI panes were dragged out and swiped away. Views were zoomed with (un)pinches and rotated with twists. [2] Not unlike the way native-touch gaming was forced to spring up, to deliver great experiences on iOS, rather than Apple adding traditional controls to enable the straightforward creation of traditional games. [3] How to get all the content providers to agree to an iTunes-style, user-friendly, integrated interface; rather than insisting on their silos and cable TV subscriptions.