That's fine but who in their right mind would shell out for a next gen console in less than 7 years from purchasing this years? That's a slippery slope they are playing with if they go to a 5 year refresh.

Generally these days people play on consoles for a persistent experience across the board. doing what you suggest would fragment that experience,which would be akin to ...A PC! <shutter at the thought>

Mount it to the wall, make two box cuts framed out to look nice (one behind your tv mount and one down by the floor) and feed the wires through the drywall. Do that and you'll have no visible wires.

Just because you don't agree doesn't make it false. The XBox 360 has been out for ~9 years now.. with a guarantee of at least 2 more. So.. yeah, I think 10 years for the XB1 & PS4 is more than reasonable to expect - especially since both sides said it.

Umm, sorry to tell you but they spec'd out this generation of console to last 10 years

or forget the 2-4 more fps and increase the resolution. suddenly it becomes worth it.

but gaining 10% for devs.. which is a win/win

A developer would never let you do that since they want a consistent experience for every user. They would either shut it off or leave it on... but not give a user the option for their game.

What are you talking about? You can leave the XB1's Kinect plugged in now and it won't matter since you can programmatically shut Kinect off for a game. So it would be just as if you unplugged it. Do you not understand this concept?

It did take away - they reserved 10% of the GPU/CPU processing power for Kinect even if your game didn't use it. Now with this update developers can choose to shut Kinect features down entirely and get that 10% back to use in their game. Once they exit their game then the Kinect gets re-enabled automatically and uses…

there isn't that much going on in WipeOut HD. I mean, yes it looks great but the number of objects it has to render at one time - there just isn't much of that since the game is about speed.

maybe within the next 7, but not within the next 5 since we've had the 3 of ours for a minimum of 3 years now.

1080p, yes... but the amount of textures, objects, and shaders they could handle were nothing compared to this generation. Not that they haven't become really good at squeezing every ounce of performance out of last gen consoles.. but this one is just getting started.

Consoles have always been underpowered when compared to the current state of PCs.. but since it's a closed system with limited types of hardware they can bleed the most out that hardware. while keeping the OS slim.

They may need to update the art assets if they were counting on 720p but that's *maybe*

It doesnt cut back memory usage, it restores the 10% system resources the Kinect takes up back to the game that requests it. It has nothing to do with memory.

Because through code you can reserve CPU/GPU resources for specific things. You can do that in Windows too. Apparently they reserved 10% of the CPU/GPU power for Kinect all the time through the APIs until this update. Now developers can effectively recover that 10% by disabling Kinect through code (no need to unplug…

did you not read the article?