Apple hooks Microsoft Xbox tactician
The funnest iPod ever
Apple continues to add to its stable of hardware heavyweights with the addition of Richard Teversham of Microsoft's European Xbox division.
The hiring of marketing tactician Teversham adds to speculation that Cupertino is building its own dream team of chip designers and strategists, with the goal of creating its own SoCs (systems-on-chip) for the iPhone and iPod touch - and any other media machines it's cooking up in its well-guarded labs.
Apple's senior HR folks have been busy lately, last week snagging both Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri from AMD's Graphics Products Group. The company also lured chipmeister Mark Papermaster away from IBM in a messy public tug-of-war last year.
These hires put muscle behind Steve Jobs's statement to The New York Times after Apple's acquisition last year of chipmaker PA Semi that "PA Semi is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods."
Well, not PA Semi per se, but PA Semi engineers along with Drebin, Koduri, and now - possibly - Teversham.
Or perhaps Teversham will instead be using his Xbox experience to beef up Apple's increasingly successful game support for its handhelds. After all, the iPod touch is "The funnest iPod ever."
In addition to these high-level hires, Apple is also hunting for average-Joe (or, more likely, average-Amit) engineers in a number of areas relating to its handheld efforts. If you're looking for work, check out the company's postings for a SoC-related "Mobile Silicon IP Program Manager" and a "High Perform/Low Level ARM Programmer." There are also openings for associated positions such as a "2D/3D Embedded Graphics Engineer" and an "OpenCL Drivers Engineer." ®
COMMENTS
Well, that's nice for Apple...
and their fanboys. But, whatever it is they are cooking up, they can keep it. I have no interest in the company's products nor becoming a member of "The Cult of Mac."
price vs performance
If Apple can teach you anything its that performance only matters if you don't have enough. Adequate is indeed enough.
When it comes to games consoles, a quad nehelem and 10 tb of storage requiring 15 fans for cooling just isn't appropriate, even if it isn't that much more expensive than a core2 duo. Remember, output is likely to be to an hd tv with relatively low resolution. The Wii has done quite nicely with rather ordinary hardware. While you can turn on a quiet fan while actually playing, the hardware needs to be absolutely silent when on but not doing much, to make it into the living room.
Ah yes and before you talk about proprietary DRM'd Apple stuff, ask yourself why MS with its long history in the x86 arena decided that a non-x86 platform would be good for Windows Home, Gaming Edition?
Having said that, if I were Apple I'd be talking to the good people at Valve rather than MS. Steam is iTunes for Games and using Wine underneath would allow Valve to clean up on Linux too, with minimal effort in porting from Windows to both platforms.
Wine-based games consoles... mmmm, the next step in world domination.
Not sure why this is news
He was only the marketing guy in Europe, and frankly whilst I love the XBox, the European marketing has been utter crap.
There hasn't been any of the promotions that the US gets that let you win MS points, none of the competitions to win stuff etc. Compared to US marketing the EU marketing of the 360 really has been utterly awful.
Quite why Apple or anyone is making news of this I don't know, effectively they seem to be gloating about taking on someone who is pretty worthless as an employee as they've done a crap job in their old position at MS. It's not like when EA managed to take Peter Moore from MS.
What next, Apple saying "Hey we're awesome we stole Microsoft's Kazakhstan Zune office janitor lololol!"?
If this is Apple's beginning of a push into the games business then it's already failed. Apple already have the best marketing machine on the planet, that's how they sell their overhyped crap. Quite why they think someone this dire is going to help them in the games business who knows - maybe Apple really are helpless without Jobs?
@Karl Smith
The problem is Apple would massively over charge, have controllers that can only be purchased from Apple, DRM as deep as the Ocean and content restriction to stop you seeing or hearing anything they don't want you to.
Apple - you know it's overrated!!
@Karl Smith
"with the power of a PS3"
Apple doesn't do power. Just look at their current lineup and the specs. For little over the price of a MacMini (£750), I got an 8GB RAM, 512 MB ATI 4850, 1TB RAID0, Core i7 PC from Dell. OK, it sounds like a Jet Engine and consumes 350W of power but it's really fast.
Media Centre machine or games machine sure is a possibility... but not with the power of a PS3... unless it's released in a couple of year's time when the power of a PS3 will be old-hat.
