ezralahm:

1)  Nintendo is still very much an Eastern-style company whereas Apple is a very Western company.  A merger or a takeover would be extremely complicated and licensing would be tough given the way Nintendo games are played.  I would also add – Apple may or may not have hit their peak seeing as how their stock has continued to slide downwards since September.

2)  If anything, I see Nintendo falling back on portable gaming which is still fairly profitable and can compete – for the time being at least – with android games.  It’s going to be some time before mobile gaming dominates entirely and in the meantime Monster Hunter and Pokemon remain moneymakers.

3)  Nintendo can take years of losses.  They have tons of cash on hand.

4)  As someone else said – if anyone is going down this cycle, and I do actually think that at least one console is DOA – it’s going to be Sony, who have been hurting for far longer and bleeding money for years.

tl;dr why is it that whenever a console cycle starts the first thing is “IT’S DOOMED!”  Gaming is an interesting thing given how many people analyze the business and yet still come to the wrong conclusions.

There are important points here. I am an Apple/iOS customer who after playing a bunch of iPad games, decided that I’m not content with Western games/gaming. Japanese games (especially RPG) is different, and I think Apple and Nintendo aren’t exactly catering to exactly the same market.

I’m not saying none of it is possible, but I do see Nintendo, if ever, falling back to just gaming software if they lose the hardware market (since they’re already doing badly at it). Owning a crappy 3DS never stopped me from looking forward to the Nintendo games and investing money in it. It’s not really just the hardware for me: I’m looking for gaming experience that isn’t in iOS. Some Eastern games are just really different from Western ones. Downside is that I’m a minority.