I used to hate Apple because I had been a PC guy my whole life. Then I got an iPhone and I love that thing, and I think maybe Apple isn't so bad. I would be interested to see what they can put together.

If apple took over EA, there's an odd thought, but if it were to happen I guess we will see a lot more I phone games, they don't have their own console so I'd imagine they would stay multiplat.

This wouldn't affect sony and nintendo that much, but considering MS relationship with apple, that might be a sh*t storm waiting to happen(they aren't exactly the best of freinds,and considering how much madden and the other sports games sold on the 360 I don't imagine the xbox crowd responding well to the "we really don't need EA Now speech").

Or they'll get along great who knows, at any rate this would be interesting, and somewhat scary.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft would try to counter-bid any takeover attempt by Apple. It would be in their long-term interest to own EA rather than let Apple have it.

what would concern me the most is apple gaining exclusive rights to EA, i personally enjoy quite a few of their games, and would want to play them on my PC, PS3, 360, DS or PSP, sadly i dont own any apple product (would like an iphone though).

I hope not, I hate apple. Three years ago I made the "switch" (laptop only, I will never give up a PC desktop for gaming) and my hard drive failed TWICE in a year and a half. Infuriating. I wish they didn't make the iPod.

@ BGFUSAB: Apple doesn't make the hard drives, so don't blame them. Do you blame Microsoft when your PC hard drive fails?

Maybe if Apple takes over EA we will get *real* Mac versions of games instead of half assed Cider ports.

The nightmares this possible merger gives me are so bad, I dare not speak of them. @.@ That being said, I don't see Apple trying to swallow up the biggest third-party developer out there.

God I hate Apple... please don't enter gaming!

@ Jaxyl, Brilliant.

I mostly agree with you, but I don't get this whole hating of macs. If you look at it most PCs are designed for gaming with, which is cool, I like gaming...And then you look over at the mac and the only group who actually make good games that function on them is Blizzard. But that's just it, so far the mac hasn't been a gaming computer. Its main function has been for work, not play. Which is the exact same as MS, they didn't start as a gaming company, they made their computers for people to do their jobs on and look how well its worked for them.

ughh that'd be weird.
would that mean dead space would become first party apple?
bizarre

Definitely the Terrifying Merger one.

...Isn't that a pomegranate?

@Jaxyl: Yes, it is fanboyism, but please make sure you apply it to both sides of the debate. When those "I'm a PC ads" came out, even PC people like myself laughed it off. They were creative and funny, and the characters entertainingly awkward. Now with all these new Windows ads, all the Mac-ies are so mad you'd think someone raped their families. If anything Mac fanboys have gotten a lore more rabid than usual. They remind me of PS3 fanboys with all their Killzone 2 stuff a few months ago. I forget his name, but the "Apple 2.0" writer at Fortune.com even outed the frist girl's full name, address, background, everything. What gives him the right to give people tools to harass her.

Yes, Apple does come up with a lot of "innovaitve" marketable products. They helped make the touchscreen popular, i'll give credit where its due, but they were definetely not the first. They're also the trendiest company out there for devices and that helps people associate certain prodcuts with them (Ipods instead of MP3 players for instance).

As for the OS stuff, Pretty much since Windows 95 computer have used the taskbar/start menu interface to access programs. Apple may call it the dashboard ro dock or wahtever fancy name they choose but at the end of the day its the same thing. Its the place wehre porgrams are launched from and minimized/hidden to. So each windows iteration may not be leaps and bounds ahead of previous ones, but enither is each OSX iteration; 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 look the same to me. There's only so much you can cahnge with each new OS, and that applies to both PCs and Macs. PCs may adopt some MAc features, but Mac originalyl adopted the PC Start menu idea; lets not forget that.

And one final argument I encounter from Mac-ies: "Well my Mac comes with iLife and Time Capsule/Machine, so there!". I'm sorry, but am I too stupid to hook up an external drive and copy files over? Is it so hard to move pictures from one folder to another? To burn files? To play DVDs? Jsut because they think iLife is great and wonder how they could have lived without, doesn't mean the rest of us don't see it as the "bloatware" they claim they don't get on their Macs.

Please note: I was trying to be curteous and did not mean to insult anyone, if I did. I merely enjoy healthy logical debates.

I love EA but highly dislike apple with their overpriced products...

If they buy themselves into the gamingmarket can't they just buy Nintendo...I mean the Wii looks like apple could have designed and both launch products for the mainstream!

Sure I bet Its a little pricy but at least then at this point I wouldn't have to care!

Those apples in the header image have genital warts.

@seltzermx: Of course the argument against PC fanboys goes the same to what you call Mac-ies...what would a PC be called? PC-ies? So while I don't present the other side of the coin, I figured it'd be obvious that I'm not heralding Macs and their users as saints. Just as there are crazy PC fanboys, there are crazy Mac-ies...but that doesn't make my case any less valid, it just shows that there are idiocy is fair to both sides of the coin. Also, the new Windows commercials with the kids are hilarious because I have a hard time believing that a 5 year old girl could take photos with a state-of-the-art camera, upload them, then print them with no help whatsoever. I say that not as a Mac user, but as someone who's watched kids stare at a mouse in confusion.

I think you may have misunderstood me in what I was saying, Apple wasn't the first company to use touch screens or a taskbar. It's their constant innovation that I was heralding and continue to. They've constantly upgraded their OS and products and each iteration, no matter how small the change, is always a step forward. You really can't argue that about Windows OS due to the fact that while Vista is visually nicer then XP, it isn't better. Windows 7 looks to be a step in the right direction, but they've taken a leaf out of Apple's book and steam lined their archaic OS to that of Leopard. So yes, I thank Microsoft for creating Windows so we could have Leopard, but that doesn't change the fact that Apple continues to innovate every product they release. Because of this, I find it hard to believe that an Apple-EA merger would be bad.

On a side note - what would they be called? EA - Electronic Apple? I have no idea.

As far as your last argument against bloatware - I agree it is. Just like how PCs come with bloat ware, so do Macs. Anyone who uses it will swear it's essential, anyone who doesn't will claim it's a waste of HD space. Anyone who claims that it isn't bloatware regardless is just another fanboy who doesn't want to think that their decision could have been the wrong one.

Also don't worry about upsetting anyone - if you do, you do. So long as you upset them with valid arguments, then it doesn't matter because you did nothing wrong. Also I'm just glad someone actually responded to me without being hateful; it's hard being a Mac user in a PC world.

@Benson - many of EA's new titles run great on macs.

@seltzermx - iLife doesn't launch at startup and consume all of your resources right off the bat. Removing it is as easy as dragging it to the trash and emptying the trash. If MS made deleting software that easy, instead of taking a half an hour to remove a coupon notifier that runs in the background at startup through "add/remove software wizard cuz you're too dumb to do it yourself panel," people would complain about bloatware less.

You're also painfully oblivious to the talent of the new generation of users. I'd go so far as to say MOST children could take pictures, transfer them to iPhoto and post them on a website, given a mac and MobileMe. I've also personally seen 8 year olds run final cut pro like they had it in the cradle.

I don't think you've ever really owned a mac.

@Jaxyl: Oh yeah, there are raving fanboys on both sides. I guess my argument was that recentyl with the ads, the Mac ones got more rabid than the PC ones ever did. They might tout the simplicity of PCs more than its deserved, however, thats simply marketing embellishment. Like the recent Mac ad where PC goes into the future to see if PCs will ever improve and turns out they don't. It might be funny, but up to that point, Mac ads had always focused on what I guess they considered "known flaws" of PCs to make fun of. The whole future prediction thing is actually a direct attack at Windows 7 even before its released, and any concrete flaws are known. That at least implies that Apple is somewhat perturbed.

And I guess I did misunderstand your point about the touchscreen thing, but then again, maybe you also misunderstood mine. Yes apple continues to innovate and expand on it, but say for example that Apple had launched a touchscreen phone before it was known for its iPods and other similar gadgets; back when the company was struggling to reinvent itself and didn't as much marketing appeal. Back then I feel it would have made a smaller splash and people would not associate touchscreens with Apple so pervasively. I think it was Palm (or someone else) who first launched portable touchscreen devices but made no impact.

And I actually prefer Vista over XP by now. I've had a Vista laptop since 2007 and i must say it runs flawlessly, and better than XP. My only restarts are with major upgrades or software installs, and I don't mind doing them since I rarely have to. And yes, I won't deny that Mac contineues to make improvements to the OS continuously, but now we enter the problem of timeframes. A new Mac OS is released every 1-1.5 years which I agree does give them a better implementation time for changes. But whose to say Microsoft hadn't been working on some of the Aero features that were "copied" off Mac, but since Mac releases every year you see more of them. Granted that might be a strange business model from MS, but att he same time, I'd rather not pay $130 (or whatever the price of the upgrade is) for a new OS on my same computer every 1.5 years as opposed to the nice spread between XP and Vista where I kept my same laptop for no additional fees for over 6 years.

And at least we agree on the bloatware argument, as it applies to both sides of the fight. :)

@TheStripe: Yes the uninstall process is more complicated than what you do for Macs, but it does not take 30 mins for a 2 MB ad program. I actually rather like the Add/Remove program feature as it nicely groups everyting I have into one lsit and I can quickly see what I do and do not want.

Also, trust me, I am not painfully oblivious to the talent of young kids when it comes to computers. I am 24 now and even I grew up knowing a lot about computers. One of my best friends in college wrote his first computer virus when he was 7 years old. Another wrote the Official Microsoft Guide to Frontpage back when he was about 16. Trust me I'm surrounded by competent users.

Which is another one of my arguments against Macs. They amke things too easy and sugar-coated. Its like, Here, its a Mac, its amiley face, it all works. But what if i want to go behind the face, and change it into a frown, or a scowl or something else. I feel PCs are better equiped for that sort of tweaking and modification. I want to change port setting, and IPs, and setup DMZs for my files. I want to setup FTP servers and stream everyhting across my apartment to my Xbox and Popcorn Hour. With my PC, I literaly did all that in under 5 minutes in easy to find menus and settings. I don't need a sugar-coated OS.

I would be hating life if Apple bought EA. They don't belong in a serious market that utilizes current technology. I'll gladly give Microsoft every penny to my name to help them buy EA instead.

If EA was acquired by Apple all their games would cost $90 and come in the fanciest cases ever.
EA games wouldn't be limited to Macs. Safari isn't limited to Macs. Apple loves money, and PCs and consoles make far more money software-wise that Apple'd love to touch. If anything, I'd actually expect EA games to get MORE PC ports than anything, since Apple's primarily a computer company, and porting a mac game to windows is far easier than porting a windows game to mac (since OpenGL runs natively in Windows but DirectX needs to be emulated in OSX).

@Doomsday Forte

Good point, and well put. A worth rebuttal, sir. The App Store is probably a bad example of Apple being responsible with their software output.

Basically, what I'm driving home is that they pay attention to the people using their products more than EA has in recent years. I'm not going to argue price points or market share simply that they do pretty well in user experience. If any of that user-focused design philosophy trickled down from above, I think we'd see improvement in EA software.