The race is not to the swift

ON MAY 21st, on a stage flooded with green light, Microsoft unveiled its third video-games console, the confusingly named Xbox One. This followed Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 in February. Together with Nintendo’s Wii U, launched last November, these machines make up the eighth generation of games consoles. They have been a long time coming. Their predecessors were launched in 2005 and 2006, aeons ago by the standards of the computer industry, and were beginning to show their age.

Both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will go on sale in time for Christmas, and Microsoft and Sony are already competing vigorously to convince potential buyers of the merits of their respective machines. But veterans of such battles will notice a curious absence. At previous console launches, executives have boasted about their boxes’ whizzy technological innards. Sony in particular was a dab hand at this sort of thing, coming up with names like “Emotion Engine” and “Reality Synthesiser” for the chips that powered its previous consoles. But this time neither Microsoft nor Sony seems very keen to talk up the technical prowess of their new boxes.