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Why would you buy a console anyway?
Previously easy to play in living room, low barrier to entry.
Nowadays, a lot of the benefits have been lost due to censorship bullshit. Only one left is probably Nintendo thanks to the iron grip on their IPs that are still good.
Since Steam and Big Picture Mode compatibility became more optimised, most consoles even lost out on this little advantage. I learned this first hand when I bought a PS4 years ago, and soon after bought a high-end gaming rig. It took the PS4 like close to a minute to cold boot and my gaming rig as quick as 19 seconds to cold boot. Also you couldn't access any games when an update had to take place, and sometimes those updates were huge and slow.
Some years ago I remember I had to wait close to an hour for the PS4 to do some massive update and I couldn't do anything while it was going through that lengthy OS process. I had my gaming rig on in seconds, my Xbox controller plugged into the front of the PC like a console, and was playing Super Indie Karts on the large-screen TV while waiting for the PS4 system and game(s) to finish updating. It was at that point that I realised that the new consoles were more cumbersome to use than my gaming PC.
The Switch has near instantaneous boot times (it's faster than it takes HDMI to sync with my receiver and projector) and most games, particularly first-party titles, have trivial load times. The OS hypervisor is also instantaneously responsive.
It was one of the things that surprised me the most about the Wii U -- the boot time was awful and the home screen was painfully slow.
Also, who cold boots their PC? Sleep, or at least hibernate.
Sometimes I will go months at a time without using the gaming rig. So it doesn't make sense to have it idling; plus I don't want Windows running updates in the background (I occasionally have to go in and manually disable all of the auto-updates in the registry). It literally just has games on it and is hooked up to the TV; no keyboard, no mouse.
As for the Switch -- I love it for the reasons you just named. It really does have instantaneous boot times and most games load pretty quickly. There are a few titles with poorly optimised loading (usually Unity and UE4 titles), but that's the nature of general purpose game engines. Otherwise, you're spot on that the Switch is fast, fun, and very accessible.
I've had games that HARD CRASH my PC after five minutes, play perfectly without issue on the console version.
Convenience matters.
The old argument was:
You get better hardware than what you pay for during the first one or two years.
It’s simpler. No installing. No patches. Minimal technical issues.
Both of these points have gone away.
If you could even buy them in the first place. A lot of Sonys woes are due to the scalpers making buying a PS5 a chore. Now though? You can buy them but they never made any games. Could also be due to the low amount of people buying said new games. Oh wonder, people probably gave up trying to get one, kind of a vicious circle.
After my PS3 died because of the heat-overload issue, I never really wanted another console, even though they make the best home-theater idea as a media player (CD/DVD/Blue-Ray) simply because you can also multipurpose it as a game-system.
Other than that, I see no real reason to buy a console in the first place as you can do everything with a PC box ... and most likely easier with a PC box ...
I miss my FAT ps3, was my first console I myself owned(I usually shared with family members before), died due to overheating also.
Same here. You could cook an egg on it, though, and they were louder than a jet engine.
Not many people care about it these days, but to actually own your games. Since le PC master race sold their consumer rights for a copy of HL2 20 years ago, physical console games are almost the only option.
GOG's library of recent AA/AAA games is growing but still very lacking.