Kinect is the Xbox 360's Great Wavy Hope in the battle for the home entertainment market. Did you know, however, that the device could have easily gone to Apple instead?


Inon Beracha, CEO of PrimeSense - the firm providing much of the magic behind Kinect - has revealed that back in 2008, when he was first shipping his company's technology to the consumer electronics market, his first stop was not Microsoft, but Apple.

"It was the most natural place for the technology," he tells Cult of Mac. Indeed, PrimeSense had already help several meetings with Apple executives, and Apple went so far as to bring some contracts and deals to the table.


That, however, is when it all went wrong.

"Apple is a pain in the ass," Beracha says.

Apple's notoriously controlling team was asking Beracha to "sign a stack of crippling legal agreements and NDAs", which almost instantly had PrimeSense walking away. Why deal with Apple and all those restrictions when they could sell it to someone who could pay just as much, but be easier to work with?

Which is exactly what PrimeSense did, Kinect is now in Microsoft's hands on the Xbox 360, and the rest is history.

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How Apple Almost Got Microsoft's Kinect Game Controller [Cult of Mac, via Gizmodo]