Indeed. Making the experience as confusing and difficult for the end-user seems to be the goal. The contrast with iOS is startling. To paraphrase John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame: Apple takes an idea, reduces it to its most elemental level, and then polishes it relentlessly. Thus, the App Store: see app-buy app-use app. Overall, this ability to reduce, simplify, and perfect is arguably Apple's greatest strength. And it only looks easy.
Because as you said spec is only important to power hungry users so why do Apple increase the power of there products every year yes they might not put it in the box but they do it other ways constant advertising big marketing events etc . So in fact power of the hardware does matter and as it stands the new Tegra 2 duel core 1ghz processor tablets and phones blow away the iPad 2 in terms of what they can do as the makers of Riptide GP ,Vector Unit said they could only ever think about making the game for the tegras as they are the only ones that could handle it .
Hodapp, you hit the nail on the head in so many ways. The same situation you refer to is not too difficult to apply to the game industry as a whole in the coming years (no crystal ball is clear enough to tell if this means 2 or 10 years), and the implications of this realization affect everything from the shape of the next generation of consoles (corporations less willing to take a high risk with hardware) all the way to the business models which will become dominant in the next generation of the industry. The greatest regret with regards to the quality and depth of content is the fact that the people who understand gaming and have been growing into the culture in the past 20 years or so and who are aware of what's possible with this medium of entertainment (and art!) are mathematically no longer the best target for the safe bet economics of game development, at least in the context of mobile games. To large extent this is due to the fact that investing heavily into development with an expectation that higher quality content without an existing brand would justify a higher price point is pretty much be suicidal as a business case in the current mobile games market. A tough pill for many to accept is also that there is a large overlap between power users and pirates. (Which should be pretty obvious since casual users don't have the knowledge of how to pirate!) This is a complex topic since the enthusiasts who are avid gamers tend to be also in the power user category. So do you make content for users who have a less demanding set of standards and who have no knowledge of how to pirate games, or do you aim higher and increase your risks of both development and piracy? Ultimately, not many studios can afford to do so. Yes, it can be profitable, as proven by Infinity Blade, but very few studios are in the position to take risk in that segment of the market.
