Arguing Console Specs is Pointless, Says Xbox Exec, Who Does It Anyway

Debating which console’s guts are more powerful is “a pointless argument,” says one Xbox executive, “because people are debating things which they don’t know about.” By and large, he’s right. He then went on to tout his console’s innards.

They [Sony] actually go out and they talk about how proud they are about their off-the-shelf parts,” Albert Penello, the chief of product planning for Xbox, told Official Xbox Magazine. “Our guys’ll say, we touched every single component in the box and everything there is tweaked for optimum performance.”

If eSRAM and DDR and other e-peen acronyms are so far beyond the grasp of a civilian audience, then why would they give a shit if engineers used off-the-shelf parts rather than Microsoft lab coats tinkering with everything inside?

Before saying that, Penello was right. People argue specs, even without knowing what they’re talking about, because it pretends to introduce some objectivity to the world’s most pointless argument: My console is better than yours. Nuh uh. Yeah it is. No way. Prove it! OK, here’s a bunch of jargon backed by numbers, rather than arguing if Batman could kill Superman.

It’s not to say that hardware does not matter. The Xbox 360 was, and in some ways still is a poorly designed machine, beginning with all of the Red-Ring overheating issues, through the inferior disc drive and the constantly running chainsaw of a fan. Don’t forget its early models needed a special peripheral for Wi-Fi capabilities. Its backwards compatibility, in the time people still cared about it, had serious problems within a lot of popular titles. Today, the stupid, unnecessary trap door over the USB port on the Xbox 360 is more of a quality-of-life issue for me than however its GPU stacks up to the PS3’s.

I liked things better when we were actually talking about decisions and features that affected gamers—like the Xbox One’s DRM policies—not the hypothetical graphical boundaries of a console and how long it would take to “push them.” So, please, cut it out. Besides, the contents of both boxes could be literally identical. Everyone knows they’d still be inferior to a gaming PC.

Xbox One exec says Sony PS4 tech specs are “meaningless”, games more important [OXM]