Xbox series S , Xbox series X – An awesome overview on its price and specifications.

Xbox series S vs Xbox series X

Microsoft has just announced the Xbox Series S. They set this console to hit the market on November 10, 2020, alongside its bigger brother the Xbox Series X. While they set the Xbox Series X to compete against Sony’s Playstation 5, which will also be available on November.

What is the Xbox Series S all about?

Let’s find out.

The Market

They set the Xbox Series X and Series S to replace the previous generation consoles; the Xbox One X and Xbox One S. While Microsoft revealed the Xbox Series X as early as December 2019, the gaming community didn’t expect the Xbox Series S to be announced soon.

Now that they set it to launch in November, it has turned a lot of heads away from the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 consoles. Well, we believe Sony somehow influenced this move by revealing its two PS5 consoles back in June which will both hit the market on November.

Microsoft, however, has strong bragging rights for this one with its price. While the Xbox Series X will release at $499 (roughly Rs.37,000), the Series S will release at $299 (roughly Rs.22,000). Let us expect the Microsoft can win the game by its price leadership.

(Although launch prices in the Indian market are expected at Rs.49,990 for the Series X and Rs.34,990 for the Series S because of various reasons, we struggle to understand).

For the $200 difference, there are few compromises. Let’s check it out.

The Specs that matter

Yes, it’s true. The new Xbox Series S is the smallest Xbox ever. Yes after 3 generations of Xbox consoles Microsoft has built their smallest console yet in their 4th generation Xbox Series S.

How has Microsoft manages this?

Well, there are some specs to make a note of.

First, just like the upcoming Digital Edition of Sony’s PS5, the Xbox Series S is all-digital, which means there is no disc drive. This has saved them a lot of space to make the Series S a more compact gaming console.

Also by the first looks of it, Microsoft has used the traditional cooling technology. It could get loud at high temperatures, but who would care when you’re gaming sounds are high.

4 generations of Xbox consoles

Well, it seems like the tower-mounted style of the Xbox has drawn the attention of Sony. After 4 generations Sony has finally designed the Playstation 5 with a vertical mount. If you aren’t a fan of the vertical mount, you’ve no options. This year, both Xbox and Playstation have designed vertical consoles.

Anyway, you can place the consoles horizontally, but make sure you don’t block the thermal vents of the Xbox Series S when you lay it horizontally.  Then the resolution.

They say the Xbox Series S to support up to 1440p gaming compared to the Xbox Series X, which supports up to 4k at 120 frames per second.

This is due to the fact that Xbox Series X has a 3 times more powerful GPU at 12 teraflop to the 4 teraflop GPU in the Xbox Series S. Although both these consoles support 4k streaming media playback, the Xbox Series X also has a disc drive which is a Blu-ray player and also for Games if you’re a person who loves to have a physical box for your games.

Xbox has moved from the Jaguar CPU cores on the earlier generation consoles to the more powerful AMD Rizen cores for their CPU.

Microsoft says that with the new Xbox Experience, the Home screen or the Dashboard will load about 50 percent faster when you boot your Xbox than it does in its current iteration and will be almost 30 percent faster to load when you’re returning from a game.

The trade-offs between Xbox series S and Xbox series X

The only big trade-off being made is the gaming resolution. Although, the Xbox Series S  lacks the Xbox Series X in terms of hardware. Microsoft has claimed to make use of their software for 4k up-scaling. There won’t be much of a noticeable difference unless you’re gaming on a gigantic screen.

Low resolution means the games won’t take as much storage and memory as it would in the Xbox Series X. Therefore the console has only 10 gigs of RAM and 512 gigs storage as compared to the 16 gigs RAM and 1 TB storage of Xbox Series X.

The Exclusives

The gaming community agrees that,

Sony has always had an upper hand in the battle of Gaming Consoles.

This is mostly because of the Playstation exclusive games offered to be more popular than the Xbox exclusives. Playstation exclusive games to name a few like God of War (the series), the Uncharted series, the Last of Us, Spiderman, Horizon Zero Dawn has been very successful in the last decade.

Although not as celebrated, Xbox has had some fantastic exclusives like the Forza series, Gears and the Halo series of games.

Though the most popular games like Grand Theft Auto 5, FIFA and NBA have made it to both the consoles, the exclusives offered to the consoles break the tie and have always favoured Sony’s Playstation over the Microsoft Xbox unless you are wealthy enough to afford both the consoles which are not the case in a majority of the gamers.

The Battle of the consoles:

This time with the Microsoft offering the Series S at such a price, it might just get an edge over its counterpart. Although Sony hasn’t revealed the prices of its consoles, we are to expect the cheaper PS5 digital edition to launch around $400- $500. Xbox with the Series S has become the pioneer for the next-gen’s

“Budget Gaming Console”

1. Will the trade-offs be worth it? or
2. Will it perish under the big boys i.e. Series X and PS5?
3. Will it succeed in the Indian market considering the mammoth GST that is levied on console prices?

We must wait till November to find out.

From this, hope you have got some clarity about the launch of Xbox series S and Xbox series X.

If you have any other thoughts or doubts, please post it in the comment.

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