geez. i thought ps4 standby mode already consumes too much :(

I hear MSFT is coming out with a fire extinguisher bundle by New Years

A lightbulb that is on all the time in millions of houses.  It is significant and a huge waste of energy ww.  

not really when you consider the average household uses about 30,000 watts a day, about 1250 an hour

7 watts this or that way won't make a difference

a lot of these stats don't have too much context, and the differences are so miniscule they're basically irrelevant. come on, seven degrees hotter?

only problem i could see is the minute power up, but people don't normally cold boot

If they sell the same amount of X1s as 360s, 80m, then thats 1.2 billion w.  I'd say that's significant.  

america uses 414000000000000 watts an hour on average, consoles would be like .00002% of total electrical energy consumption

If it is hotter but quieter, it just means they are running the fan at a lower RPM.  They can always boost the fan speed to drop the temperature if they think heat will be an issue (at the expense of making it louder).

Conversely, Sony obviously decided that 51 dB is quiet enough and gives them the cooling they need.  They could also drop down their fan RPM to make the unit quieter (and hotter).

I am happy that neither runs like my old AMD Athlon XP 1700+ :)

In fact, Kinect consumes more power in standby as all six lights in my living room consume combined and turned on.

Actual lightbulbs may no longer even be sold my country, because of their unnecessary power consumption. Applying that logic, maybe my government will forbid selling the Xbox One as well. ;)

IMO both consoles are fine, it's just that OP picks out the bad things of the One and compares it to the "best" values of the PS4. Telling half-truths.

Mostly irrelevant in terms of sales, but I do think this demonstrates that Sony have been able to use their greater hardware expertise to good effect, plus I suspect that the rumours of Xbone having a somewhat rushed development process are true - It just seems that sony have spent the time refining and improving PS4 in all areas until it beats the Xbone comprehensively. Usually its a compromise between power, price and emissions (heat and sound) and most of the time you do well in 2 at the expense of the third, but PS4 seems to do everything. It's seriously impressive