Xbox One



The Xbox One is the upcoming watercooler successor to the Xbox 360.

499 US DOLLARS

MANDATORY KINECT

MANDATORY INTERNET TO BE ABLE TO USE IT AT ALL

INDIES? WHAT INDIES?

BEING BANNED MEANS LOSING EVERY BIT OF DLC YOU HAVE EVER BOUGHT, INCLUDING DOWNLOADED GAMES.

THE INFASTRUCTURE FOR ALL THE CRAP WE HATED STILL EXISTS AND CAN BE ADDED LATER!

RUNS TWO OPERATING SYSTEMS THAT EAT 3 OR MORE GIGS OF RAM.

SYSTEM COMES WITH 8 GIGS OF DDR3 RAM (read: Cheap as shit)

Updates
Update June 18 2013: [http://news.xbox.com/2013/06/update After the huge backlash, Microsoft has lightened the DRM restirctions; you can now play offline and share disc-based games. Games for the console will also be region free in responce to PS4 being Region-Free.]

Instead of locking discs to the system they removed the "family share" trick of allowing up to ten people to acces the same download as long as they all were on the downloader's friends list for at least 30 days.

Requiring the kinect to be attached at all times stays, as does the fact that the kinect does not power down. Facial recognition binding to discs and downloads is still going to be implemented. It also uses the Kinect to monitor your face and target ads at you based on gender and personal reaction to previous ads. More info on the Kinect: from Daily Mail and NBC News.

Instead of connecting "every 24 hours", now they want you to connect online in order to be able to use it for the first time. Yes, even on consoles that will only be used offline for single player games you need an internet connection to be able to boot your Xbox. No internet = No Xbox. Many are conserned that will Microsoft still be checking in at least once every 24 hours as long as XBOX ONE can connect to a network at all, especially considering how universal wifi is.

All in all, even if you're skeptical about the whole privacy issue, the partial lift of the DRM-enforcing features can either be seen as a "They heard us!" by the hopelessly optimistic, a more down-to-earth "Oops, almost fucked up our cashflow. We're all about the customers now, for real. Buy our thing." or a more Microsoft-appropriate "Oh crap- better try to match Sony. We'd better slip it in quietly (some now, some later)."

At least getting rid of regions is a good start...

System Specs

 * 8GB DDR3 RAM
 * 8 core "Jaguar" CPU
 * Blu-Ray
 * Wifi with ethernet port in back
 * HDMI in-out
 * USB 3.0

The core and amounts of RAM are the same as the PS4, but the RAM type and usage will be the major difference.

The system is being built on DDR 3 RAM, which is the slowest modern RAM and already starting to be out of date. It will be running Windows with a second program layer over top to make it so you can't customise anything. Windows by itself will use at least 3GB out of the 8 GB, not including windows Ballooning due to crap running in the background as well as the extra RAM that will be always in use by the second system later.

On a system that needs lots of ram to be able to "stream games from the cloud" maybe 5 GB of RAM will be availiable at best. Expect there to be a lot less availiable on a regular basis. This means crap framerate, crap speed, lag out the ass, and games that will not work. The streaming will also require at least a 3 GBPS high speed connection. God help you if anyone else in the house wants to use the internet while you're on Xbox ONE.

Oh, and the infastructure (programing, hardware, ect) for all that crap we hated still exists and won't be removed from the Xbox One just because we didn't like it. Expect it to be slowly implemented on future versions of the Xbox One as "improvements".