I'm going to weigh in. Some of these posts have been amusing, many of them have been cringe worthy.
Let's examine the facts.
Apple is a company that designs and provides solutions.
Once upon a time, computers were big and clunky and couldn't do much. Enter Macintosh. It was not only affordable, but it was one of the first home computers to use a mouse and a GUI. No more doing everything on command line.
Fast forward. Everyone loves music, but cd players and cassette players just weren't really really great experiences for listening to music. Who carries a bunch of CDs or tapes around. Besides, in the age of the INTERNET, everything was going digital, baby. Enter iPod. This thing could hold ONE THOUSAND (1000) songs, and had a built in battery that lasted 10 hours on a charge.
We jump again to 2007. Steve Jobs takes the stage and introduces a device that can make calls, take photos, send messages, do email, browse the web, and it was ALSO a wide screen iPod. Enter iPhone. The device that changed everything. I had a smart phone at the time. It was a HTC TyTn 2. It ran a mobile version of Windows. If I wanted to write myself a note, I just took out my cool stylus and clicked on START > Programs > Accessories > Notepad. Then I could slide the screen up and hammer away on my full qwerty keyboard like a bad ass.
But ... When I went to the Apple Store in 2007 and held an iPhone in my hands... "NOTES" was just sitting there on the home screen. It was just one tap, and a keyboard popped up and I could type whatever I wanted. Not... stylus, click click click click slide type.
That-- that was revolutionary. It showed us that things could be simple. Technology could be made in a way that made our lives easier, more convenient- and by extension- more enjoyable, if even only in a small way.
So we jump again to 2023, we look at the gaming landscape and ... what problem does Apple need to solve here? Gaming is clearly a multibillion dollar industry, but I believe that the core gaming market and mobile markets are inherently separate beasts. While I do think as mobile technology continues to RAPIDLY improve, we will see more mobile games that share some DNA with their big brothers. Games like Fortnite or Apex Legends prove that games can scale to small screens pretty well. The thing that will prevent the
iPhone from becoming a major console competitor is quite simply, lack of tactile control and a dedicated thermal solution.
Let me tell you why Apple would never make a controller for iPhone, or some kind of ... cooling fan add on. The reason is really quite simple. For Apple to create a first party product to attach to or in some way integrate with the iPhone to play games, it means quite explicitly that the iPhone is not a good way to play games. For Apple to say, make a controller accessory that has a cooling fan built into it, that is Apple admitting "We designed a product that doesn't do this well so here is another product to fix our first mistake."
They would never, ever, ever, ever do that. If Apple was, for some reason, going to make a gaming-centric device, you can bet your ass it would be designed from the ground up with gaming in mind, not as an afterthought. Being that you can play so many games on Apple TV with a controller, I don't see them creating any more of a dedicated gaming system than that for a very long time, if ever. Frankly, they don't need to. They already make money hand over fist in the gaming department. There is no need to invest more resources to what could be considered a niche device.
iPhones are for everyone. iPads are for everyone. AirPods are for everyone. Macs are for everyone. Whether you are 8 or 80, you can get use out of these devices. But that is
NOT true of a dedicated gaming device.
TL;DR: There is no TL;DR.