While most of the major consoles for the 9th generation are basically just locked-down PCs, there are still interesting innovations going on.
One of the interesting tradeoffs with AR/VR systems is that there is less emphasis on just frames-per-second, and more emphasis on consistent latency and low lag between user input and photons coming out of the screen. This may continue to drive a divergence between dedicated AR/VR systems and "normal" game consoles & PCs. The input requirements for AR/VR are also much higher than a game pad sampled at high frequency.
The transition to consoles "just" being locked-down PCs makes me a little sad. From a software engineering perspective I really like the idea of squeezing out raw performance from custom bare metal architectures.
Many consoles had quite a learning curve for developers. And you see some drastic improvement in quality between early titles in the console lifetime and the last major exclusives for them. (There are more than a few examples of poor quality ports from one platform to another though.)
Each article has been posted to Hacker News a few times before, worth going back and looking at the discussion. But really I love this blog, fantastic set of articles. I'm quite looking forward to the Vita and 3DS articles.
One of the interesting tradeoffs with AR/VR systems is that there is less emphasis on just frames-per-second, and more emphasis on consistent latency and low lag between user input and photons coming out of the screen. This may continue to drive a divergence between dedicated AR/VR systems and "normal" game consoles & PCs. The input requirements for AR/VR are also much higher than a game pad sampled at high frequency.