Xbox One Review

The 2013 reveal spent more time on Kinect, live television pass-through and NFL partnerships than on games, and attached always-online check-ins and restrictions on used discs that Microsoft reversed within weeks under public pressure. The technical hand was worse. The GPU delivered 1.31 teraflops against the PS4's 1.84, and pairing slow DDR3 with 32 MB of ESRAM meant developers spent the generation fighting a scratchpad, which is why so many multiplatform games ran at 900p here and 1080p there.

Bundling Kinect pushed the price to $499, a hundred over the PS4, for a sensor most owners eventually unplugged. The chassis was a matte black slab with an external power brick, in 2013. Credit where it is owed: the controller was excellent, the dashboard eventually got fast, and both Game Pass and genuine backward compatibility started here and became the foundation of everything Xbox does now. But as a machine to buy inside its own generation it was second best on price, power and library, and the grade follows.