Until recently, I was a proud owner of Nvidia’s Shield TV which I kept only for little less than 11 months. As someone who is not really a PC gamer, it started to make less of a sense as an expensive and good looking Netflix and YouTube streamer.

I have been a Playstation person since 1997 and this time around I was very keen to get back to console gaming and I was particularly inclined towards the XBOX One X, particularly following the “hype” in E3 2017. But soon XBOX didn’t made sense either particularly due to lack of appealing exclusive for a gamer not so fond of 1st person shooters. Surely, Forza 7 is appealing but not over and above Gran Turismo Sport.

Putting little bit more thought into this comparison, I have decided to go for the PS4 Pro for the following key reasons

1-Being considerably (£150) cheaper

2-Owning a 1080p TV set with not intention to upgrade in the foreseeable future

3- Games like Detroid: Become Human, Death Stranding and other very strong PS4 exclusives.

4- Lack of full Windows 10 support on XBOX One X.

The last point is what I want to iterate a little further. As a neuroscientist at Oxford, I am using a very elementary core i5, 8GM RAM computer everyday which has only 2 cores for running key data analysis programs like MATLAB which is widely adopted in academia. MATLAB benefits significantly from higher core counts and GPU processing and I keep wondering if and only if XBOX One X ran a full desktop Windows 10 OS and packed an additional 8GB of DDR4 RAM it would have been the perfect replacement for desktop PCs widely used in academia, and I do not think it would increase its cost over £500 dramatically.

It would have been a much better and cheaper option and if Microsoft and AMD worked together to establish a partnership with MatWorks it would increase productivity and free up resources which are otherwise wasted in middle tier desktop PCs widely used in universities.

I hope these companies will consider these suggestions and at least evaluate its feasibility.