Microsoft has announced a new gaming console today, the Xbox Series S which has been leaked for months.
The company revealed this on their Xbox Twitter account where they claim it will bring “next gen performance”. Additionally, Microsoft revealed tha this is their “smallest” Xbox ever which means it is smaller than their already small Xbox Series X.
The design that they display on the marketing material is quite striking. It is a white box that looks like the Xbox One S but with a weird black circle. We still don’t know what that huge black circle contains, which I suspect to be cooling. It also seems to have one USB port at the front with no indication of a drive. This may well be an all digital Xbox but we are yet to get more details about that.
The controller seems to look unchanged from before and could be the white version from last year or the white version of the Series X controller.
Microsoft did not reveal any more details about this console like its system on a chip, VRAM, storage and so on. Those are the kind of numbers that geeks are looking for, for us to compare against the Series X and the PS4 Pro. However, they claim it has ‘next gen’ performance, which could mean it might be more powerful than the old Xbox One X.
The interesting bit about this announcement is that they haven’t announced the price of the Xbox Series X. They claim that the Series S will have an estimated retail price of $299, which is quite interesting. The annoying bit is that they managed to announce the price of this console but not of their flagship Series X.
Xbox Series S announcement is a price war move by Microsoft
This announcement is Microsoft firing their first salvo to test the waters with the price. Microsoft and Sony are engaged in a price chicken race to see who will announce the price of their next gen consoles first.
They may have done this to shift hype of an impending Playstation 5 price reveal to see what Sony would do. If the PS5 manages to be more powerful than this, they will then drop the price of the Series X. That seems to be their game plan here so we have to wait and see.
