After so many attempts to innovate and bring new ideas to the console space, Microsoft must be relieved (and kicking themselves a bit) to finally realize that a

After so many attempts to innovate and bring new ideas to the console space, Microsoft must be relieved (and kicking themselves a bit) to finally realize that all that their most vocal consumers ever wanted was bigger iron. I sense that the console market has picked up a lot of "performance enthusiasm" from the PC community. The tried-and-true tech/car analogy works here - a lot of people love building, or even just buying and owning, really powerful cars. Do a search on Youtube for "[game] framerate [test|comparison]" and you'll find a zillion hits, many of them with details down to patch versions, driver versions, and detailed settings. The number one complaint I saw of the new greatest-game-of-all-time Zelda game was "framerate," and the web was flooded with framerate tests as soon as a patch was released. A common meme in Reddit's PC-building community is dropping $X000 building a monster rig in order to install a big new game just so they can jack it up to max settings and watch it run at 100FPS, then shutting it off and returning to browsing and Minecraft. That said, it's a little surprising to me to read all the positive feedback on this, especially around the price. Game-related Reddit threads are usually full of hate on any topic that involves paying for something, but all I see for this is "I will drop $500 for this, day 1, I'd even consider it at $600; guess I better get that $1500-$2000 4K TV I've been looking at too; let me know when the VR's ready and I'll put $600 on that as well." Just a couple years ago, speculation about a move like this was widely poo-pooed by industry analysts, who said that bringing the PC's complexities of hardware upgrades to developers and consumers would kill the only thing consoles had going for them - simplicity - and leave consumers wondering why they're expected to shell out $X00 just a few years after buying the last new box. Now the overwhelming consensus appears to be "4K at 60FPS or don't bother". With hardware standardization increasing, compatibility becoming the norm, and the focus on power, I think there's going to be a really interesting convergence between the PC and console market in the next few years.