When both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were revealed to the public, many gamers quickly went and discovered how the specs between the two next-gen consoles match up with each other.
One person who was not interested in these comparisons is Xbox product planning boss Albert Penello, who revealed his apathy about the debate to OXM:
"For me, I'd rather not even have the conversation, because it's not going to matter...the box is going to be awesome," Penello said. "The games are going to be awesome. I heard this exact same argument last generation and it's a pointless argument, because people are debating things which they don't know about. They're not [head silicon engineer] Nick Baker or [corporate vice president of IEB hardware Todd Holmdahl], and I'm not [lead PS4 architect] Mark Cerny, so why are we having this discussion?"
Though he claims to not care about the specs of the next-gen consoles, Penello still had some barbs to throw in Sony's direction regarding what technology is under the PlayStation 4's hood.
"The problem is that Sony decided to go out and publish a bunch of numbers, which are in some ways meaningless, Because this isn't like 1990, when it was 16-bit versus 32-bit. As a matter of fact...they actually go out and they talk about how proud they are about their off-the-shelf parts. Our guys'll say, we touched every single component in the box and everything there is tweaked for optimum performance," Penello said.
While Penello may not care about the specs comparisons between the two consoles, many gamers do care about what kind of hardware powers there games, and make their choice based on that. While it is the games that ultimately make a console, Penello should realize the huge amounts of work that went into designing the interiors of both consoles and how that will affect how well games for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 ultimately can become.