Microsoft considered disc-less Xbox One
Some times I do wonder. What do people think these companies do all day? I'll wager Sony considered a disc-less PS4 as well. I'm guessing they probably threw that idea out much quicker, but it seems abundantly unlikely that they hadn't considered it at some point.
Most of these products are in the works for YEARS. Final designs and specs often only start rolling in as short as a few months before launch. Prior to that, designs and specs are constantly changing. The people responsible for such large projects are trying to anticipate everything from future hardware costs to trends to the capabilities of the infrastructure that they will rely on.
In this particular instance, infrastructure was probably one of the driving choices. Unlimited bandwidth is still a scarcity, and so downloading multiple 40+GB games a month kind of blew that out of the water.
But, if wide spread availability and acceptance of unlimited bandwidth was a reality or just around the corner, then this would likely have been a no brainer. The industry as a whole is moving that way. Steam is disc-less. Virtually every tablet and phone app is disc-less. Everything is moving towards the cloud.
Combine that with the fact that optical drives are generally big, loud and power hungry. You can generally work around the big and loud aspects, but that usually costs more money to get a better quality unit. If you could eliminate the optical drive from these machines you would reduce the cost, reduce the noise, reduce the energy, lower the thermal footprint and increase the airflow and cooling capabilities of the system without changing a single additional item.
Removing the optical drive would probably make the single biggest, viable change in current generation console gaming.
In fact, the optical drive is likely also physically the single largest atomic component in either the Xbox One or PS4. They are larger than the hard drives, they are larger than the CPU, they are probably larger than the GPU(S). Motherboards can be redesigned into multiple pieces or shapes, fans and heat sinks can also be tweaked into a number of configurations. An optical drive is big rectangular, archaic piece of electronics on the other hand.
In the case of the Xbox One, removing that optical drive may make enough of a difference that they could maintain the same thermal properties of the unit while reducing the size a bit. In the case of the PS4, the could leave the size the same and simply use the extra space to improve airflow and allow them to make even more use of their superior hardware. In both cases it would improve on their razor thin margins if they left the prices alone. It is one less part with moving pieces to deal with warranty claims on.
If internet speeds and reliability were anywhere near where they needed to be, you would undoubtedly learn that they also toyed with the idea of a drive-less console. Load the whole OS onto a small and fast flash drive and just stream the parts of the game needed into RAM or some other form of fast temporary storage and you eliminate yet another of the more volatile components.
Heck, if you can remove both the optical and disk drives, you're really only left with fans and PSU as your main fault points. Production costs would drop either making the companies more money or allowing them to be more competitive. Failure rates would drop. It would be commonplace to see these things last a decade or more.
Somewhere down the road we may even see consoles as just dumb terminals where all of the true CPU/GPU power comes from the cloud and active cooling and massive power supplies aren't even needed. Manufacturing would cost a fraction of todays consoles and failure rates would be laughable. Such a device could theoretically last multiple decades. And, with the guts being external to the device, could remain viable that long as well.
In fact, I'd wager that everything I said above was considered, if only in passing by either one company or the other if not both at some point during R&D. Every point above reduces both manufacturing costs and number of moving/fault prone parts. Which means each of those points both directly and indirectly gives them more strategic lee-way in terms of pricing. Each idea could also be seen as revolutionary within this industry which is never bad for image. And each one also provides a means of locking the user into some service which can unlock additional ways of monetizing that market.
You can also be guaranteed that a mind boggling array of ideas that no one has yet mentioned were also tossed back and forth by each company.
Most of these products are in the works for YEARS. Final designs and specs often only start rolling in as short as a few months before launch. Prior to that, designs and specs are constantly changing. The people responsible for such large projects are trying to anticipate everything from future hardware costs to trends to the capabilities of the infrastructure that they will rely on.
In this particular instance, infrastructure was probably one of the driving choices. Unlimited bandwidth is still a scarcity, and so downloading multiple 40+GB games a month kind of blew that out of the water.
But, if wide spread availability and acceptance of unlimited bandwidth was a reality or just around the corner, then this would likely have been a no brainer. The industry as a whole is moving that way. Steam is disc-less. Virtually every tablet and phone app is disc-less. Everything is moving towards the cloud.
Combine that with the fact that optical drives are generally big, loud and power hungry. You can generally work around the big and loud aspects, but that usually costs more money to get a better quality unit. If you could eliminate the optical drive from these machines you would reduce the cost, reduce the noise, reduce the energy, lower the thermal footprint and increase the airflow and cooling capabilities of the system without changing a single additional item.
Removing the optical drive would probably make the single biggest, viable change in current generation console gaming.
In fact, the optical drive is likely also physically the single largest atomic component in either the Xbox One or PS4. They are larger than the hard drives, they are larger than the CPU, they are probably larger than the GPU(S). Motherboards can be redesigned into multiple pieces or shapes, fans and heat sinks can also be tweaked into a number of configurations. An optical drive is big rectangular, archaic piece of electronics on the other hand.
In the case of the Xbox One, removing that optical drive may make enough of a difference that they could maintain the same thermal properties of the unit while reducing the size a bit. In the case of the PS4, the could leave the size the same and simply use the extra space to improve airflow and allow them to make even more use of their superior hardware. In both cases it would improve on their razor thin margins if they left the prices alone. It is one less part with moving pieces to deal with warranty claims on.
If internet speeds and reliability were anywhere near where they needed to be, you would undoubtedly learn that they also toyed with the idea of a drive-less console. Load the whole OS onto a small and fast flash drive and just stream the parts of the game needed into RAM or some other form of fast temporary storage and you eliminate yet another of the more volatile components.
Heck, if you can remove both the optical and disk drives, you're really only left with fans and PSU as your main fault points. Production costs would drop either making the companies more money or allowing them to be more competitive. Failure rates would drop. It would be commonplace to see these things last a decade or more.
Somewhere down the road we may even see consoles as just dumb terminals where all of the true CPU/GPU power comes from the cloud and active cooling and massive power supplies aren't even needed. Manufacturing would cost a fraction of todays consoles and failure rates would be laughable. Such a device could theoretically last multiple decades. And, with the guts being external to the device, could remain viable that long as well.
In fact, I'd wager that everything I said above was considered, if only in passing by either one company or the other if not both at some point during R&D. Every point above reduces both manufacturing costs and number of moving/fault prone parts. Which means each of those points both directly and indirectly gives them more strategic lee-way in terms of pricing. Each idea could also be seen as revolutionary within this industry which is never bad for image. And each one also provides a means of locking the user into some service which can unlock additional ways of monetizing that market.
You can also be guaranteed that a mind boggling array of ideas that no one has yet mentioned were also tossed back and forth by each company.
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