A MS employee (not in the Xbox division) recently said to me that Kinect had nothing to do with the way the Xb one was designed. Which indicates that had MS decided from the start that Kinect would be an optional extra we'd still have the specs we see today inside the box and the power gap with PS4 would be the same. Do you believe that? I don't believe that. The only thing I do believe is that the RAM situation would still be the same, because MS decided to go with 8GB DDR3 from the start of their design, whereas Sony decided to go for as much GDDR5 as it could afford, and ended up at 8 very late in the piece. But perhaps even that was influenced by Kinect; had Kinect been kept off to the side would MS perhaps have gone for GDDR5 rather than DDR3?

What do you think? With Kinect optional from the start would we still have the Xbox we see today or would we have seen an Xb one with more grunt?

I think it would, probably on par with PS4 maybe a bit more powerful

It would have been more powerful by default because of the portion of the GPU set aside for Kinect.

In terms of any massive hardware changes, no. Doesn't seem likely.

I think we would see an xbox one with the same specs. It might have even been less powerful since kinect takes system resources therefore microsoft would not have needed to add more power to the xbox one.

Wait what? Why would they design a console to be weaker just because of kinect? Kinect was already calculated within the price so its cost would've never affected the console specs.

If they would've used cheaper hardware X1 without Kinect would currently be below 399. What makes the inferior hardare so expensive is the ESRAM. That was the idiotic decision that broke X1's specs. Not the RAM or Kinect.

The problem with the XB1 is that is was designed to have 3 OS's, so it needed 8GB of RAM since the original inception. The only sure bet was 8GB of DDR3 at that moment.

That meant taking huge die space for the SRAM to compensate the slow RAM, which limited the space for the GPU. The XB1 is already huge as it is, so... I don't think not having Kinect would've made a difference in power.

If they used a better GPU and more Ram it would have been great or they should have gone for a much better Cpu

The XB1 wouldn't have been more powerful. M$ just aimed too low. If anything, they should have put more power into the design because of Kinect.

There was a time when Xbox team wanted to integrate kinect to the main system.

It could use more power it seems.

But I really couldn't imagine my One without the Kinect. Unless I'm playing a game, I rarely touch a controller. I love the voice control so very, very, very much.