[BillTheCat]

The article seems to ignore why many people buy a console over a pc (aside from price). When you buy an xbox or playstation you know that it should play all of the games released for the next 5 years or so.

Coming out with an xbox 1.5 or xbox 10 that obsoletes current gen consoles midway through a generation would be the biggest change ever to the game console business. Probably the worst thing they could do would be to make a new "low-cost" xbox that can't run games that are already out.

I can see Microsoft experimenting with doing small hardware improvements in a mid-cycle revision but I doubt they will make drastic changes.

[seanp2k2]

My recent experience with reloading my gaming PC from Win7 to Win10 reminds me of the other reason even my technically-inclined friends have consoles: all the messing around with drivers and software and uPlay and Steam (Steam is probably the least troublesome but still has problems sometimes, like requiring me to run Rocket League with admin privs...probably not Steam's fault) and the Windows Store giving 0xError codes trying to download the Xbox Accessories app to use the wireless adapter for the Xbox One controller I wanted to use with my PC.

With a console, the idea is supposed to be that you put the game in, power it on, and enjoy the game. But these days, consoles aren't quite living up to that either. IMO, the first Xbox and PS2-generation of consoles were the best, since they had online play sometimes (anyone remember playing Halo with that Windows app that tricked it into thinking other users were on your LAN? A neighbor and I had tons of fun with that) and JUST WORKED (except in cases of overheating / PS2 disc read errors).

I'm currently enjoying my WiiU quite a bit, since most of the time when it doesn't need to update, I can just start it and have fun instead of spending 5-60 minutes each session messing with making things work like I need to do with Windows 10.

[cptskippy]

I think what the author poorly articulated was that with UWP, Microsoft has the opportunity to create new hardware tiers developers can target. If, instead of creating a tier above the Xbox, Microsoft created one below it then I see tremendous opportunity.

Imagine if Microsoft had devices at the Amazon Dash, Android TV, and Xbox One tiers that all supported UWP and Cortana. That would be a boon for developers.

Microsoft could also introduce a beefed up Xbox One with more powerful CPU/GPU if it did so without creating a new tier. It could do something along the lines of the High-def packs that we see in PC games where everything functionally remains the same but the newer model receives higher resolution texture, models with more triangles, and can render out in 1080p:60fps or 4k.