Microsoft has said the Xbox series so it’s gonna be 299 and the Xbox series x is gonna be 499.
So what’s the difference besides $200?
I’m gonna break down with each console hands and tell you which one I think you should buy.
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Now Microsoft has said both of these systems are gonna launch November 10, and the both named Xbox That’s about where the biggest similarities and they’re actually very different and that surprised me looking back at let’s say the Xbox one versus the One X they share, a physical quality one of those bigger than the other, but they’re not radically different beasts.
Same thing can be said for the PlayStation four and the PlayStation four pro and even going back a generation or two, the PlayStation three and the Xbox 360.
The variant versions of these systems did not feel that terribly different, even if they’re plenty, a little bit bigger or smaller or had some extra features.
In this case, the Xbox series s looks much different than the Xbox series x. It’s much smaller.
Microsoft says it’s 60% smaller than the x and the x, frankly, looks huge.
I think that’s a big plus because number one, it forces you to remove some of the extraneous things you don’t really need like the optical drive.
I know some people love optical drives and consoles.
People love optical drives in laptops.
I hear from these people whenever we talk about how thin a laptop is, and they write in and they say, but it doesn’t have an optical drive.
We’re not living in that world.
Any More the concept even for games of taking, you know a big game, burning it on a disk, putting the disk in a box and another plastic box, putting it on a truck driving into a store, putting it on the shelf.
That’s a lot less efficient than offering downloads, but the series s basically sets itself up as a future streaming game machine even if that’s not going to be what it’s all about at launch.
Although x cloud is certainly going to be a big part of that console generation launch, and you’ll probably look for it to be even bigger in the future, but that series s no optical drive, relatively small hard drive, I’m sure you’ll be able to augment it will either have a higher capacity version or you can buy external hard drives just like people do for consoles today.
And the other really big difference is
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Both of these are really built on the same architecture.
There’s not a huge amount of daylight between them, but they’re optimized for different outputs.
So the Xbox series x promises 4k output to go with your 4k TV and 60 frames per second on at least a lot of games, maybe even more on to very competitive multiplayer games.
Meanwhile, the Xbox series S is optimized for maybe the TCL.
With the Vizio TV you have from a couple years ago, maybe it’s full HD 1920 by 1080, not a full 4k.
So it’s going to be pushing games at that lower resolution either a 1080 or 1440.
But not up to 4k, but I believe it says it’s also going to support 4k streaming media.
Which of course is a lot easier because they’re getting the 4k signal.
They’re not they’re not processing in there from from a game.
It’s just passing along a video and even a little tiny Roku stick can can do 4k streaming video.
So that’s not that challenging.
And of course the other big difference you’re going to see between the series s and the series x hardware is storage 512 gigabytes on the series EFS and a terabyte, I believe on the Xbox series x.
And frankly both of those after even a couple of months or some people are gonna fill up pretty quickly with games.
I use 512 solid state hard drives and a bunch of my gaming laptops.
And frankly after four or five games starts to get a little crowded, you got to start deleting stuff and re downloading it later if you want to play a game again.
Like previous generations, I suspect that it’s going to be pretty easy to hook up external storage to both versions of this.
So Microsoft has announced that one of these versions is going to be 299.
The other one is going to be 499.
We have some of the specs, but not all so we can come to some educated conclusions about what the actual differences are the $200 differences between these two consoles, And they seem to so far boil down to obviously price 299 versus 499.
One of them outputs at 4k for games, the other one is going to have lower output resolution, even though they’re built on the same architecture and will be able to play the same games.
And of course storage one of them will have more built in storage than the other and as game sciences continue to go up, that’s actually going to be important and something people will notice more once you try to get Microsoft Flight Simulator and it says you need 123 gigabytes of free space to download this.
And you start juggling around stuff on your hard drive and deleting stuff just so you can fly over your neighborhood and assess So I know that when we heard about the 299 price for the series sn the more expensive price for the series x.
A lot of people in my office got together on slack and we all thought the S frankly sounded like a pretty good deal.
Usually if you’re upgrading something and you take the storage from 256 to 512 are from 512 to a terabyte.
You bump it up by $100.
That’s what Apple does when you buy a Mac Book.
Get a little more storage $100, all right, I understand that.
And then the output, the additional processing GPU power needed and any extra hardware needed to do the 4k output, maybe you charge $100 for that.
So between those two things I understand the price difference.
This year especially, are people going to be looking to buy the premium version Or are they gonna be looking to say, you know what, it’s been kind of a rough year, maybe I’ll just get the 299 version, and that’s going to look fine on my TV, which frankly, it probably will.
That’s a question, that I think a lot of people are gonna ask themselves, if they’re even enough of these concerts for people to go out and buy, we still don’t know what the supply situation is going to look like.
And of course, there’s another X factor in there and that is the PlayStation five.
There’s already two versions of that, that we know of the regular PlayStation five and then an all digital version of that.
Again, very smartly, if you ask me, takes out that optical drive and I know people love optical drives, but we’re past that era now.
There’s a lot of benefits.
Now you know me, I reviewed high end computers and laptops and other things for many, many, many years now, I would be hard pressed to say that I don’t want to get the biggest, most expensive coolest version of something.
That said, looking at the specs yesterday, I kind of like this 299 Xbox series x, we’re gonna have to see what PlayStation does with their pricing.
I don’t think they want to go above where the high end series x is, are they going to have some room to play at the lower end?
Well a couple of leaked tweets and a couple of confirming tweets from from Sony and then we’ll probably know all those answers to and we’ll be back here talking to you about them again.
