News Nintendo 'Could Rival Apple'

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/10/04/nintendo_could_rival_apple_/1

As Nintendo stocks continue to surge upwards, analysts say that the makers of Mario could soon rival Apple in terms of profit valuation and marketability.

 

Apple and Nintendo are very different companies and so I don't think a comparison is fair.

Nintendo makes its money from basically two places (1) games (hardware & software) (2) toys.

Apple is involved in far more diversified and thus will always be a larger company. I can't see Nintendo branching out into anything else any time soon - it doesn't fit in with the company's mantra of putting games first.

Additionally the companies fans are different. Nintendo has a lot of sales in its home region simply because it's a company from that part of the world. Apple has fanboys, but they're there for far more solid reasons. Apple could screw up, release an unfashionable product and give it bad customer service and all their fans would disappear. If Nintendo did the same - well they've already done it a couple of times and sales in home markets continued to be strong.

People have to ask what's next for Nintendo. The Wii is starting to see some strong games on the horizon - though the DS seems to be stagnating slightly (I love mine, but there haven't been any really 'wow' games for a while now). Whatever happens the wii will now be a huge success - the sheer amount of systems owned means that any developer not developing for it is mad. Looking 4 years down the line, time for a wii 2, that'll decide whether Nintendo go back to their previous position. I personally have faith in them as they're the one company in the area that do genuinely innovate.

 

Sony really needs to do something to kick start PS3 sales before they fall even further behind. Let's face facts - a lot more people would buy into PS3 if it weren't so massively expensive as compared to the other consoles in the market. Historically, early consoles have always been heavily subsidised by the manufacturer in the hope of building a user base so they can (a) make a load of money from software royalties, and (b) make money on future consoles when the unit cost drops. Sony is making a loss on PS3 at present, a lot of which is to do with their stubborn insistence on building in Blu-Ray (this also caused a lot of their supply side issues early on), but they really need to suck up a bigger hit on each console, get the worldwide prices more in line so Europeans don't resist buying on principle because they don't want to get ripped off, and get consoles into homes. Simple. If Sony sliced £100 off the UK price and $100 of the US price, then we'd see which console started shifting most units.

 

Its a shame you only care about real lameness... Nintendo and Apple are nice companies. Nintendo came all the way from trading card games over 100 years ago (or something ridiculous like that) and well... Apple has ALWAYS been innovating, all the way from the first mac to vectorial GUIs.

I can't wait to see what will come from both companies in the future.

 

the $399 USD smaller/cheaper less media hub-ish model should help if rumors are true. And the 80GB US model is going to drop $100

 

$610/share!?!? whoa O_O I had no idea it was that high

 

So, two companies that make completely unrelated products are getting a lot bigger, against most people's expectations. That hardly makes them rivals, though they may certainly both be wise investment opportunity.

 

Should help tackle the problem in the US, but may never surface in the EU. We never got the 20 GB model, so wouldn't surprise me if this didn't come here either. Also, the previous US price drop didn't translate to the UK. Retail price is still £400 here for the only model available (the 60 GB). Make it £300 and I'm there.

 

/\ just wait until Christmas and you should see a drop considering the PS3 has only been out in the EU for how many months less than the US? like 3-4 months....? so you should see a drop just like us.....I would hope.....

 

It's nice to see the underdog(as suggested by the article and last gen consoles)(no offence to Nintendo or it's followers) is getting up in the market, this third variable in the market will make it even more competitive, which means good things for us the consumer

 

Yep, competition is always a good thing, but I am not sure if nintendo can really beat out apple.

 

Where exactly are they competing?

 

IR remotes, of course. Nintendo's Wii competes directly with Apple's Airport Express.

 

I always thought that the Apple TV was way too over spec to *just* be a media centre device. It has a better graphics chip than the Wii does (Nvidia 7300 vs ATI 9700M iirc), more ram (256mb vs 88+32mb) and a smaller form factor. Although the Apple TV doesn't have a media drive, it does have a hard drive which games could be downloaded to. It also has a USB port on the back, which is "for future use" and also another internal USB port which people have said looks like an internal bluetooth radio would fit onto.

It can run WOW at 60+fps, so maybe Apple are thinking about getting into the console market, who knows. Sure would be interesting if they did thats for sure.

 

that is impressive for a media center