Carmack says Apple is not proud of the iPhone being a game machine

Imagine all the satellite engineers, dismayed that people use GPS to geocache junk in tupperware around the world.<p>Imagine all the thousands of man-millenia of research in CCDs and computer networking and systems engineering and UI design just so that some people can upload cat videos from their phone onto Youtube.<p>There's no reason not to celebrate when something gives others joy, even when it's not Serious Business.

It's too bad he didn't supply a bit of context with his opinion. Apple has spent a considerable amount of time in public events over the last 2 years promoting the iPhone as a gaming platform. The run run ads on TV spotlighting iPhone games. They buy ads on gaming sites. The iPhone as a gaming device doesn't limit it's functionality in other ways so there would be no rationale reason to blame gaming as holding back the platform's potential as this article suggests.

This reminds me of the Vimeo move to disallow gaming videos. They wanted Vimeo to be for "creative expression", and straight said they didn't think game-related videos met that test. Original 2008 blog post here: <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140" rel="nofollow">http://www.vimeo.com/blog:140</a><p>I think some of the iPhone's gaming success is the market--players demanding more games--but some of it is also the lure of game development itself. If the whole point of the App Store was to let developers make whatever they wanted, and they want to make games...isn't that kind of the point?<p>(And yes, it is pretty naive to assume all iPhone games were made for the love of it instead of trying to cash in on a gold rush).

so what do they want it to be, if not a gaming machine?<p>from their ads and the dev conferences, it seems like they actually do want it to be a gaming platform.

To be honest most non-casual games on the iPhone suck. And I rarely spend any time playing games on the iPhone. It just wasn't <i>designed</i> to be a gaming device. As great as the touch screen is, controls usually end up sucking. There's no way most people would ever see it as a gaming device. It may play games better than other phones, but it's other features still outweigh it in its definition.

"""when the device is truly capable of so much more"""<p>Like what?<p>(some) Games are some of the most demanding things computers <i>do</i>.<p>Besides, I'd be more inclined to go with that if they hadn't hobbled the dock connector, bluetooth and SDK to severely limit what it can do for the first two years or more.

I'm amazed at how far technology has advanced..even since I was a kid (I'm 28). I just got an HTC snap and I loaded it up with a bunch of old game system emulators. I can now play NES, SNES, Neo Geo, and any other game system that I played as a kid...right from my phone.

I don't like this kind of journalism. He cites something like "Apple is not proud..." in two lines and we have three paragraphs from other person interpretation, telling whatever he wants. Just give me the entire conversation and don't get out of context.<p>Classic trick for manipulating information.<p>When Carmack says Apple is not proud on the iPhone I believe is about Steve Jobs when he thinks that computers are powerful machines and you can use it for doing amazing creative and scientific work but you can use it for wasting all your time too.<p>I'm trying to remember the exact real interview he said that, I think it was in the famous Playboy magazine interview, long long time ago.<p>They get a ton of money from that, but feel more proud of other things.

They're marketing the iPod touch primarily as a game machine, I don't think Carmack is right — maybe they're just not as <i>extraordinarily</i> enthused about <i>gaming</i> as Carmack is.

But they do nothing but market the iPod Touch, which is nothing more than a crippled iPhone, as a hand-held gaming device. Big ol' Whiskey Tango Foxtrot on that one.

Just like Facebook doesn't like the platform ben used for games. That's the beauty of a market economy though - the consumer always wins.

Jobs has never understood the value of the gaming market w/r to building a computing platform. Something that pretty much <i>everybody</i> does one a computing platform as soon as they have a spot of free time. Hell, people were figuring out gaming on cathode ray tubes in the late 40's.<p>To be fair, I think he's desperately trying to not turn Apple into Commodore.

Well, the entire App Store release model seems to be designed explicitly for games and media content, and actually seems to be fairly decent in that regard (certainly better than any predecessors). As for <i>Applications</i>, especially those that interface with the Internet, it's fucking abysmal.

"It could be so much more"<p>Really? It's a 3" screen without a keyboard. It's good for web browsing and pinball. I am not sure what anyone else would want it for; netbooks are much better for anything that involves more than 10 minutes of concentration.

That goes for the Mac too. I've got several friends who'd have switched to the Mac long ago, if it wasn't for the fact that they were enthousiastic PC gamers.<p>These people are power users. Convert them, and their friends and family will follow.