"It's a Trojan horse!" they said. When Microsoft released the original Xbox in 2001, the company dominated the computing world, and common wisdom held that its console was going to use games as a gateway to conquering your living room. In the end, the Xbox was just a games machine. The Xbox 360 was also called a Trojan horse, and although it eventually proved to be a popular way to watch Netflix, it too was primarily just another games machine.
With the Xbox One, Microsoft isn't even bothering with the wooden-horse trick. The new console is a Trojan army, blatantly marching on your living room, carrying a banner that reads, "We are here for your TV!"
Made for a new era
When the Xbox 360 hit the market in 2005, we lived in a different world. Twitter didn't exist. Facebook was solely for college students. The iPhone was two years away. App stores? Xbox Live Arcade was one of the first, but the idea that you would download every app for your device from a unified online store is a relatively new thing, made commonplace by hundreds of millions of smartphone sales.
The Xbox One is, to its core, made to live in our new consumer-electronics era. It's an era in which we don't just watch TV, we tweet about it. We don't just play games, we share videos of our best moments. Nearly everything has an online component, and computers don't even have disc drives anymore. We live in an age in which talking to your phone's built-in assistant is so two years ago.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon