The Perfect Thing 2020 (Premium)

At the end of every year, tech blogs lazily pump out “best of” lists culled from back-end site queries. And, yeah, we’ll get to that here soon enough. But in keeping with my description of the Xbox One S as “the perfect thing” four years ago, I’m wondering if we can advance the state of thinking on such things and hand-select the best of the best using more subjective criteria. Do any personal technology products from 2020 qualify as “the perfect thing,” even remotely?

Not exactly. But for all the terribleness of 2020, there were some products that I reviewed that came close. As with anything subjective, these choices, are of course, specific to me and my needs, and many will disagree. And that’s fine. Feel free to chime in with the choices you prefer.

My picks, in no particular order, are...
Xbox Series X|S
While there some real dubs---the Halo Infinite delay and Cyberpunk 2077 among them----there also were many reasons for videogame fans to celebrate in 2020. Key among them, of course, is the side-by-side launches of new console generations from both Sony and Microsoft.

That each firm entered the market with two console models at the same time is unprecedented and thus fascinating, and we’ll be debating the relative strategies of each company for years to come. Sony launched the PlayStation 5 ($499) and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition ($399) with identical internal components, the only differentiator being the Blu-Ray drive in the former. And Microsoft launched the Xbox Series X ($499) and the Xbox Series S ($299) with different components (and thus performance profiles) and price points, which might help it attract more casual gamers for the lower-end console.

We’ll see. For now, there are three key things that make both consoles nearly perfect, and two are huge advantages over PlayStation. (With the disclosure that I’ve not experienced PlayStation 5 yet.)

First is the product design. Where Sony has created a bizarre and humongous Georgia O'Keeffe-looking hunk of plastic that won’t fit into any home décor, let alone any home entertainment space, Microsoft has created next-generation versions of the design it debuted with the Xbox One S, my first “perfect thing” choice. Both consoles are gorgeous and silent, and though each is it’s own thing, each also is clearly part of the same product family.

Second is the speed at which everything happens on both consoles, and here Microsoft has finally solved the problem that dogged its previous two generations of consoles. The Series X and S boot from a dead stop in just a few seconds and from there, everything---from Dashboard UIs to game loading times---happens even more quickly. They’re both Tesla-fast.

The third is how these products fit within a far-reaching ecosystem that respects both the past---your game library from OG Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One---and the future, in which we’ll be playing games on whatever devices we prefer, and n...