I realised "next gen" consoles were well behind on the tech...

Probably a lot, because Microsoft got up on the big stage and told people that it was required. Twice. People heard this being said at the Xbox One reveal and E3 and made a decision on which console they wanted. Do not go up on the big stage and tell your potential consumers what they don't want to hear. Even though they reversed their awful policies, a lot of gamers were obviously still angry. Many seem to have gone from the 360 to PS4.

Microsoft hugely messed up by wasting resources on improving the Kinect. The hardware will now always be inferior to the PS4's and people will continue to bring it up. The price of the consoles is now the same, if you compare the PS4 to the Kinectless Xbone. You're still paying the same price for inferior hardware.

That statement there is slightly poorly worded.

It isn't. Microsoft know how badly the Kinect has been received and for that reason, produced a Kinectless bundle. They told us that would never happen. It has. They will very quietly discontinue the Kinect and will have to write it off as a poor investment.

I fully expect the Kinect to slowly disappear and for them to produce a cheaper camera. Something that's good enough to use for Skype and the basic voice commands. Microsoft had a good thing going with the 360 and destroyed a lot of their hard work within a short space of time. I believe that many people will not be quick to forget. Things could still change, though. Sony could mess up.

If they didn't spend the R&D investment and time on the Kinect, they could have used the extra investment and time into improving the hardware. If they matched Sony's hardware, the problems wouldn't be as bad as they are.

Did you even bother reading the rest of the post, because it doesn't look like you did.

Enter: cloud computing

Which is becoming more marginal by the day, the difference is £5 on amazon, and 35 if you get the kinect with it. I would rather spend that extra £35 to get a platform with poor performance and plenty of extra stuff on the side over something with poor performance and nothing of note on the side.

Yes, but it is irrelevant. The Xbox One is supposed to be a gaming console. A lot of gamers don't seem to be interested in the extras. The sales numbers show this. Microsoft's decision to practically ditch the Kinect shows this. All that matters to them are sales numbers. I'm unsure how that suggests it was anything but a poor investment.

You do raise a good point with cloud computing, I completely forgot about that.

I wouldn't use the Kinect for anything but voice commands, so I wouldn't buy the Xbox One with Kinect. Although the Xbox One has got some good exclusives that I would love (Halo ), I just prefer most aspects of the PS4.

I'll just stick to PC gaming.

So, because M$ sell consoles, if they develop something which they release with a console any other use is irrelevant? I'm sure when your life is effected by developments made in the wider world because of the developments made to Kinect 2.0 you might change your mind. Try looking at all uses of something before declaring it a waste of time.

X

By that logic, when was the last time anybody made a gaming console?

What are people's thoughts on onboard graphics such as the intel iris pro and whatever AMD comes up to compete with intel.
With these graphics they can handle most games at medium-high settings even things like bf4 or witcher2.
That means your average i7 laptop at 600 can run almost all new releases at decent settings.
And who knows with their future iterations they may make medium level gpus obsolete.

The statement was referring to next-gen consoles, Captain Context.

Posted from TSR Mobile

If a lot their consumers don't want it and it sells poorly, yes. Microsoft don't care if a small minority like the Kinect and it is useful to them. They're looking to sell Xbox's and be the market leader. There has been almost double the amount of PS4's sold to Xbone's to date. Irrelevant is probably not the correct word. I stand by my choice of words that it was a poor investment decision.

And Wii U is dominating both of them, does that mean that Wii U is the best?

But the same argument can be applied to all consoles of at least the last few generations. The argument can be used to say that PS4 isn't a gaming console, nor was Ps3 or xbox 360, nor Xbox or Ps2.

I know that they can't do bf4 med-high given that current Desktop APUs can't manage it and they will be higher power than laptop alternatives. But that is basically what the consoles are using, super powered APUs. Depending on how low is being counted as "medium level", they're a marketing ploy anyway. Looking up Kaveri, the compute performance is still behind medium level, with a 750Ti having over 50% more Flops, which doesn't directly compare to perfoemce, but for the Kaveri that includes the CPU element, in terms of just the stream cores, 750Ti is almost twice as powerful. The GPU element of the A10-7850K is comparable to a GT730/740. It will always be better to have a CPU and Decent GPU over an APU, or at least for the foreseeable future.

First of all it's not next-gen anymore it is current-gen. Secondly, most people don't have the time, expertise or money to buy a gaming PC. Thirdly not many people are that fussed about how powerful it is, as long it can play game at a reasonable resolution and frame rate what is the issue?

Goddamn PC fanboys.

Yes, current gen being from 2013. And the GPU is worse than what was around in 2010.
If you aren't fussed about how powerful it is, why even have a new gen of consoles?