Apple has peaked, decline inevitable - EA founder

EA founder Trip Hawkins, presently founder and boss of developer Digital Chocolate, has said Apple is peaking and will see decline within "a year or two". "It's an amazing thing what [Steve Jobs has] done with Apple," said Hawkins - who was the director of strategy and marketing at Apple in 1982 under Jobs before quitting to found that small company known as EA. "But if you want to be objective," he added, "it's very close to peaking right now. If you look at any institution in history - look at the Roman Empire - anything in history, and what it looks like when it's peaking. Look at Apple, and how can you say it's not peaking?"He went on: "The CEO is still alive, let's start there. They invented this tablet thing that's going to be really big. They've done really well by reinventing the phone. They breathed new life into the Mac. They've got this super-high marketing. All these things are about as good as they ever can be - how much better can it really get?"The thing is, it may take another year or two before it starts to decline, but it has to - everything does," he said.Not everyone would agree. Former PlayStation executive VP Phil Harrison recently made the sensational prediction that Apple won't just dominate the video games industry in ten years' time - it will own it."At this trajectory, if you extrapolate the market-share gains that they are making, forward for ten years - if they carry on unrestrained in their growth, then there's a pretty good chance that Apple will be the games industry," Harrison told Edge. Mike Jackson