Two years ago, almost an exact two years now, two “next-generation” consoles were released to the masses. They had been revealed a few months prior to release at an event called E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, in 2013. Fans were wild for the new device because with the new hardware and said-to-be elite tier performance, the hype train was chugging down the tracks.

When I first got my Xbox One, it was in March of 2014. My thirteenth birthday was soon to arrive, and I had no clue what gifts I was getting. One day, my parents asked me to take their laundry downstairs so it could be washed. As I was picking up clothes to put in a basket, my eye caught a large green box in the corner. Of course, I succumbed to the curiosity, for I was a thirteen-year-old after all. The box had a black handle with Xbox engraved across it. It was exciting. I remember being shocked and immediately going over to Skype to tell my friends about the find. I was glad to have gotten the console, and that’s my purpose in writing this. You should know what you’re getting into before you buy.

Now, Microsoft was smart about this console. Rather, they thought they were. At the E3 conference, if you want to call it a conference—it being a giant mess—the introduction of the console got the cynics and skeptics pondering upon why this console was the way it was. Everyone thought it would be the Xbox 720, for its predecessor was the Xbox 360. However, the naming made a lot of sense when you got the deeper meaning. The Xbox One was meant to be the all in one experience—a console for television, Netflix, gaming, browsing the Internet—everything, and it had a lot of promise.

Delving into the deep abyss that is performance, hardware etc. you have to know somethings. Picture quality isn’t native to the console. It is judged from game to game. For example, the resolution of the game Destiny is 1080p (1,080 vertical pixels). With that, there is also framerate. Again, with the example of Destiny, it has a locked thirty frames per second, which is smooth; however, sixty is better, which a lot of games nowadays run.

Furthermore, there is the Xbox One’s home screen, place for all your games, apps, store, and music needs. This is completely customizable, where you can change to color of the tiles and the background picture. Not only that, it works smooth like butter, going from app to app, page to page cleanly and quickly, where this is a plus for the user interface, for it is clean and efficient.

Naturally, there are competitors. Microsoft had a lot of competition with Sony’s Playstation 4, which came out shortly after the Xbox One. There was also Nintendo’s Wii U, but that didn’t really catch the sales it was projected to receive, and therefore was deemed a failure. Consequently, the Playstation was highly successful, selling twenty-five million units as of October 28th, 2015. Technically, the Playstation is superior; however, it is very slight. In fact, the only difference is in graphics, where some games run 1080p for Playstation and 900p for Xbox. So if you’re a graphics buff, go for Playstation.

Again, with these consoles came a price. When first introduced, the Xbox One was sold for a high price of $499.99 in North America, and the Playstation was sold for the lesser $399.99. I’m sure this $100 drop off was highly influential in the sales of both consoles, for the Playstation is still ahead by a very large sum of fifteen-million units.

So the final verdict is: do what you want. At the end of the day, console preference is up to you. If your friends have an Xbox, get an Xbox. If you like the exclusives for the Playstation, get a Playstation. And if you have the money for all three, and don’t care what you have, buy all three. The choice is entirely yours.