Original post by Jammy Duel
gets a little rambly from here.
And neither represents great value for money, they were obsolete when launched, even for the price point and they still are. Let's consider speculation of a short dev cycle to be true and they are 5 year consoles, what does this leave us, let's take it from launch too. £400 to buy it, a further couple of hundred for the subscriptions, £10-£20 more expensive games vs PC, let's say 5 a year, I wouldn't say that's unreasonable, so £50-100 a year for that, all in all you have a budget in excess of £1k to build a computer to last 5 years and smash the consoles while doing it, not difficult, even without going second hand. And that assumes no hardware failures.
Briefly, on launch, the PS4 represented the best compute performance per dollar, within 5 months something three quarters the price per GFLOP took its place, and since then the price has halved again. Now that mobile and desktop chip architectures are aligned mobile devices will be able to compete with the consoles before the end of the dev cycle. Tablet I have running on a 3 year old architecture has a quarter of the power of an Xbone, the successor chip, running a newer architecture, about 40% of the power of an Xbone with just 10W, fanless, the chip next year, probably a new architecture again, if not it will be the next year, the 2017 chip will probably be roughly on par with the Xbone. This isn't really an issue if we continue this 5 year dev cycle assumption, it will be like last time, when mobile chips are comparable the 9th gen comes along, but if we go back to the standard 7 or 8 year cycle, well...