When the new consoles launched back in 2020, the only one I could personally afford and find in the market initially was the Xbox Series S. In fact, I quietly ordered one direct from Microsoft on US election night that year while everyone else was scrambling to post hot takes on the internet. The following week a nice “premium” FedEx van pulled up and a kind man hand-carried it right to me on launch day.
That was both my best-ever FedEx delivery experience, and the last time I felt so uncomplicated about Microsoft’s tiniest gaming machine.
The folks at Xbox somehow knew that this console generation would be plagued by higher hardware costs, an inflation-strained tech economy, and diminished raw visual returns from faster GPUs. So rather than launch just one high-powered Xbox machine, they launched a second cheaper tiny unit. The Xbox Series S has almost the same CPU as the bigger “X” model, but its GPU, memory, and storage size are all trimmed back.
The original pitch was that the Series X would run games in 4K, and the Series S would go for 1440p. The reality has been much more muddy. Series S titles are lucky to hit that original target even when using modern upscaling techniques, and their true internal resolutions often go much lower —…
