Mile
Zero

Belle and I were planning on getting a Roku to replace our five-year-old XBox this Christmas, since the games are drying up and it doesn't make any sense to pay for a Live subscription just to watch Netflix and HBO. I still kind of bear a grudge against Sony for the CD rootkit they passed around years ago, but then my employers at ArenaNet bought everyone a PS4 as a holiday bonus. I am, it turns out, not above being a hypocrite when it comes to free stuff.

You can explain a lot about the last three generations of consoles by remembering that, at heart, Microsoft is a software company and Sony is a hardware company. Why did the XBox 360 suffer regular heat failures? Why does the PS Vita interface look like an After Dark screensaver? Our 360 was clearly on the edge of another DVD failure, so I bear them no particular good will. But you have to admit: up to the point that a given XBox malfunctions in one way or another, Microsoft knows how to build a usable operating system. Sony... well, it's not so much a core skill of theirs.

For example, after you turn on the PS4, and after the hundreds of megabytes of updates are done downloading and installing themselves a few times, you're greeted with a row of boxes:

• Some kind of activity stream box, because people really wanted another Facebook.
• Every game you've ever played. In my case, one demo I tried and will never touch again.
• A web browser, which for some inconceivable reason doesn't use the touchpad on the controller, but has to be controlled via the thumbsticks and triggers, like Capcom wrote a game called Devil May Surf.
• An ad for Sony's video service, which nobody is going to use instead of Netflix, and which can't be removed.
• An ad for Sony's music service, which nobody is going to use instead of anything, and which can't be removed.
• Something called the Playroom, which is useless if you don't have the PS4 camera, but can't be removed (there is a theme here).
• A single item that contains all of your video streaming applications, even though these are probably where most people spend at least 50% of their time these days.
• Oh, and of course, an item marked "Library" that shows a subset of the same list, I guess in case you want to see them arranged in vertical rows instead of horizontally.

At least the list is in chronological order by use, but only for certain items: no matter how often I open Amazon's video app, it'll always be cordoned off in a submenu, alongside a bunch of other video providers that I haven't actually installed but which Sony really wants me to know about, like Vudu and Crackle.

Apparently I'm a little grumpy about the menus.

Anyway for us, this is a media player, which means we'd like to have a remote control, but those don't exist for PS4 yet and it can't use regular IR remotes. The controller layout may make sense to someone who owned a PS3, but it's just baffling to me: why is the button normally used to go backwards assigned here to play/pause duties? To be fair, the XBox never really had a great controller story for DVDs either (both of them put fast-forward on the triggers, where you're guaranteed to accidentally hit it while setting the controller down), but at least it tried to be consistent with the rest of the OS.

You can pair a smartphone with the PS4, which one would think could be a chance to show custom controls for media, what with the touchscreen and all. You'd be wrong: the PS4 app dedicates 90% of its surface to a swipeable touchpad, apparently on the assumption that the three directional inputs on the actual controller are insufficient.

The whole time you're watching a movie, of course, the controller will glow like some sort of demented blue firefly, which helps the camera (which I don't have) to see where I am (hint: the couch). Since you can't just turn off the LED, I've got the whole controller set to shut itself off after ten minutes. This solves the glow, and keeps the batteries from draining themselves at an alarming rate, but now when I want to actually use the controller for something — say, to pause the movie because our dog has started making that special "I'm going to throw up" face — it interrupts with a bright blue screen, every single time, to ask me who I am. Meanwhile, my movie keeps playing in the background.

This is worth some emphasis: on the XBox, a console where we actually had multiple accounts, each new controller that was activated would either log in as the current user or just kind of wait in "guest" mode until the player actually signed in. On the PS4, a console where we have one account, to which I was already signed in with our only controller 20 minutes ago, Sony needs to know my identity before I can perform the critical, account-bound task of pausing a movie. Meanwhile, the dog is now standing sheepishly in front of a vomit-stained rug.

I'm a little grumpy about the media functions, too.

I'm well aware it's a little ridiculous to gripe this much about a free game system. It's not that the PS4 is a bad machine — it's on par with your average DVD player in terms of usability — but I tend to feel like maybe they should aim a little higher. I'm really hoping that these kinds of fixes will be easy to update, since most of the UI is apparently built using web technology instead of painstakingly coded native widgets.

What's really interesting about comparing consoles from both companies is that the kinds of things I really miss from the XBox (pinned items, Kinect voice commands, good media apps) weren't there from the start. Microsoft has gone through at least three major revisions since they released the 360 in 2005. Even though there have been regressions (and the ads have certainly gotten bigger over time), the overall trend has been for the better — in part because they've been effectively allowed to throw the whole thing away and start over. As far as I can tell, the PS3 was also improved, even if it wasn't reinvented in the same way. It takes a lot of nerve to make sweeping changes like that, and as well as a conviction that the physical box is not what you're selling — a philosophy that's well-suited to Microsoft's software background, but that even hardware companies can no longer ignore.

I've been so embedded in a constantly-shifting web environment for so long that I sometimes forget that not everything updates on a monthly basis. Sony will be more conservative than Microsoft, but even they will be rolling out patches to the PS4, many of which will probably address my complaints. We live in a world where you can turn around and find that your DVD player, or your phone, or your browser suddenly looks and acts completely differently. That's great for people like me who thrive on novelty, but it now occurs to me just how disorienting this might be for ordinary people. It may be worth considering whether a little stability might be good for us — even if it means preserving the bad with the good — and whether the technical community might benefit from a little sympathy to users overwhelmed by our love of change.