Xbox One Vs. PS4: Should You Even Bother?

1. Reliability

My day job is as an engineer, so maybe I find myself more annoyed by certain things, but I can€™t be alone when it bugged the hell out of me to find more than one reviewer who has expressed a sentiment that it seems unfair to judge the consoles on reliability, before they have worked out the hardware kinks and patched the software up a bit. Now let me qualify this and say if it is a pre-release console, then that's fair enough. But the second the product hits the shelves it should have a high degree of integrity. It is not unreasonable for someone who buys a product to, well, you know... expect it to work. If it is considered acceptable for the release of a console to be a harbinger of frustration and gremlin riddled equipment then something has gone seriously, seriously wrong. Development is the point at which a console should be tested. If it€™s riddled with flaws, then it has been released prematurely. I€™m not saying in my line of work everything is delivered to an acceptable standard all the time. Sadly, it isn€™t, but you won€™t find me trying to claim that it is okay when it clearly isn't. At the time of writing, the PS4 has been released and the NDAs have been lifted for Xbox One. The PS4 has a case of the gremlins, with some suffering a blue line of death-like syndrome and some port problems. Not necessarily as bad as I expected, but still not acceptable. We won€™t be able to make an informed judgement call until the Xbox One is in the hands of the masses, but going on prior experience and a healthy dose of cynicism, I suspect it will have problems. Possibly some fairly severe ones, too.. If it doesn€™t, I promise I will go to my mate who worked on it, buy him a pint, and tell him what a fine job everyone involved has clearly done. So yet another reason why maybe you should hang fire and be assured of getting something fit for purpose, perhaps? Click "next" for the conclusion...