If we're going to talk about GPUs, my ancient Radeon 5770 does 520 GFLOPS all by its lonesome. The PS3 does ~400GFLOPS; the XBox 360 somewhere around 300. Getting all the way up to 250 puts you at somewhere between the Wii and the XBox 360, right when the XBox One and PS4 are due to start shipping. Modern discrete gaming GPUs do 2-3 TFLOPS. ARM is notable for its power usage, not its performance profile, and in wall-connected gaming, performance is king.
Any "console killer" is going to have to compete with...well, current consoles (and now, Steamboxen). Apple could certainly ship an underpowered "do your mobile gaming on your TV" device (and to be clear, I think there's room in the market to siphon off some casual gamers), but actually going head-to-head with the console market just isn't going to happen without putting some more raw power into the box and shipping an architecture that won't make ports a pain in the ass. The Xbox One, PS4, and Steambox are all going to be X86-64 architectures. Throwing an ARM platform into the mix and expecting it to kill existing consoles is silly.
" The PS3 does ~400GFLOPS; the XBox 360 somewhere around 300."
I'm showing the PS3 at 230 (various Google) and the X360 at 240 (wikipedia Xenos). Regardless the Ouya at 12 is not in the same ballpark. To say the hypothetical Apple system is Ouya quality and not PS3/360 console quality is simply wrong.
"console killer" is going to have to compete with...well, current consoles (and now, Steamboxen) ... actually going head-to-head with the console market just isn't going to happen without putting some more raw power"
It doesn't have to compete directly though, it just has to be good enough at gaming at the price it's selling for in addition to whatever else they're selling to undermine the console business model. Mobiles won the point and shoot and handheld gaming markets without competing directly on specs in those markets.
My point with the Ouya remark is that the Ouya is an ARM machine, which runs ARM software. Nobody makes ARM games except mobile developers. The Wii, PS3 and 360 were PPC architectures; the PS4 and Xbone are x86-64 architectures (the Wii U, interestingly, is still PPC, but there seems to be far less of an emphasis for the Wii on capturing third-party AAA titles than there are for other platforms.). The raw power is a secondary concern to the fact that the utter lack of developers making non-mobile ARM games. An A7 system would probably easily capitalize on iOS games, and could have some PS3/360 games ported to it, but the library runs a little thin past that. Apple would have to get developers to port their titles to an underpowered system using a different instruction set that doesn't have a proven sales model for their class of product and which would involve entering into contracts with a company that is famously hostile to developers.
Regarding undermining the console business model, consoles live and die on their triple-A titles. Your GTAs, Halos, Marios, and Call of Duties are what sell consoles, not cheap hardware.
I think the main difference between our views is that you're assuming our hypothetical idevice wins or loses based on whether it gets game developers while I'm assuming it won't even be marketed as a game machine but the developers will move there because that's where the most customers will be. A dedicated $400-$500 gaming machines can die from a lack of third party games. A $130 converged set top box that people buy for netflix doesn't.
People love to watch netflix on their PS3 but at the end of the day nobody drops $300 on a PS3 to watch netflix. Plenty of people buy Apple boxes just so they can watch netflix. That's the difference the price point makes. When there were 30 million 3DS's and 100 million ipod touches people stopped making games for the 3DS.
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"Nobody makes ARM games except mobile developers."
What developer isn't in mobile today? This is like saying no one knows how to code for ARM except for everyone.
"consoles live and die on their triple-A titles. Your GTAs, Halos, Marios, and Call of Duties are what sell consoles, not cheap hardware."
I would say that is misreading the biggest lesson of the current generation which saw the Wii dominate it's first 3-4 years based on (1) the cheap hardware and (2) Wii Sports, a new title. To some extent AAA titles will go where the users are.
Just curious, but what's more compelling about Apple's ecosystem than Sony's, Microsoft's, or Steam's?
The PS4 is strongly targeting indies, Microsoft already has, and Steam is more than anyone. Steam already has a ton of traction, and now they're making it possible to roll your own console, in addition to future hardware.
Why would I, as either a developer or a player, bet on Apple, when they have a reputation for being even more closed and oppressive than the others, take a bigger cut of my (developer) revenue, and charge me more for hardware (as a player)?
While mobile may be taking alot of sales from the casual gamer, I reckon there's still alot more money to be made from console/PC sales (how much is GTA 5 up to? over a billion last I checked).
"what's more compelling about Apple's ecosystem than Sony's, Microsoft's, or Steam's?"
You might say the same thing about mobile games and the 3DS and PSP/Vita. What was more compelling about Apple's ecosystem than Sony's or Nintendo's?
(1) there were a lot more devices shipped.
(2) they have a lot of credit card numbers on file
(3) relatively fewer restrictions.
"more closed and oppressive than the others"
Right because it's super easy to get your games on XBL, Steam, PSN. These companies are all changing their policies because Apple took all the mindshare of the industry 5 years ago with the extremely dev friendly app store (you know, the one that you're calling 'oppressive').
"take a bigger cut of my (developer) revenue"
Uninformed. Steam takes the same 30% as Apple, Google it. MS charged devs tens of thousands of dollars to patch a game on XBL. Neither MS nor Sony has released the cut they're planning to take with PS4/Xbone.
"and charge me more for hardware (as a player)?"
That doesn't even make sense. The whole premise here is that the hardware would be less powerful and much cheaper than the new consoles being released.
"there's still alot more money to be made from console/PC sales"
That's not really under debate, what's at issue is which platform(s) will we see the money being made on. Just like in the home console market, there is lots of money still being made in mobile gaming; in fact more than ever. But that money simply isn't going to Nintendo and Sony the way it did 10 years ago.
Right now, I'm working on a pet project. I hope to target PC, Linux and Steam. I've seen all the statistics concerning the various platforms. iOS isn't compelling, as the average selling price (among paid apps) is quite low, and median revenue for iOS developers is abysmal (http://maniacdev.com/2011/10/survey-says-median-ios-game-rev...). Android is worse.
Take a company like Mojang, obviously an outlier, but they sell a popular app on PC, Xbox, and mobile. Their financials are somewhat public, and their all-time mobile sales are around 1 quarter of their yearly salves... And of course, they became a hit on PC. They also do twice the yearly revenue as Rovio.
When I was thinking closed and oppressive, I was thinking vs. PC/Linux (you can distribute your app through many channels), so you're right that Steam, XBL and PSN aren't very open, but they're becoming more open.
As a player, a decent iOS gaming device (iPad retina) costs more than a PS4 will cost at launch. Apple's not going to put out an Ouya competitor, the internals they put in the iPhone 5S would put them in the same price range as the PS4 for vastly inferior hardware.
Any "console killer" is going to have to compete with...well, current consoles (and now, Steamboxen). Apple could certainly ship an underpowered "do your mobile gaming on your TV" device (and to be clear, I think there's room in the market to siphon off some casual gamers), but actually going head-to-head with the console market just isn't going to happen without putting some more raw power into the box and shipping an architecture that won't make ports a pain in the ass. The Xbox One, PS4, and Steambox are all going to be X86-64 architectures. Throwing an ARM platform into the mix and expecting it to kill existing consoles is silly.