I think the Next Xbox should be a premium price console

[Otter]

SvennoJ said:

The problem is, making it modular (and fool proof) will drive up the price a lot, making for a bad value proposition.

Just look at the XBox SSD expansion, double the price of do it yourself.

Modular upgrades need to easily fit and be easily accessible, not get any problems with cooling, fool proof ultra fast connections.

A lot of stuff is integrated in consoles which saves costs. Consoles are also balanced for thermal load, power consumption, CPU, GPU, RAM integration. You can't just upgrade the GPU and hope for the best. The PS5 Pro also has 2GB extra RAM and the CPU runs 10% faster.

There might be room for easy upgrades, but that room disappears quickly when you pay a lot more for the option to be able to buy / add further upgrades. Power, cooling, balance will have to be designed with upgrades in mind.

"The PlayStation 5 motherboard has an integrated CPU and GPU, both custom-designed by AMD; the CPU utilizes the Zen 2 architecture, while the GPU is based on the RDNA 2 graphics architecture, meaning there is no separate, dedicated graphics card on the motherboard - it's all integrated within the single chip"

You got to pull that all apart for modular upgrades or the upgrade would simply be replace the whole console. (Which we already have with pro consoles)


Hence Steam boxes were not competitive. You simply paid more for restrictions in upgrades. And those weren't even designed for easy upgrades. The price would only be higher to achieve that.

PS4 Pro (somewhat) succeeded because the fully integrated design could keep the cost reasonable. To make it modular from the start the base PS5 would cost in the region of the PS5 Pro while an upgrade would be the price of the base PS5...

Besides that, a pro console dumps cheaper second hand consoles on the market. People 'subsidize' their upgrade by selling their original hardware. That's good for the consumer to get a deal, good for resellers, good for console makers. (Since they make more money on software sales than hardware)

Yeah, I agree with much of this in that I there are hurdles. Some degree of cost efficiency will absolutely be lost, the extent of which we can't really say. I'm not aware of any modern systems truly engineered in this way with the might and dedication of a console maker behind it. But there is also absolutely a market for it that could help secure MS a niche "if" they can make it work. That challenge is related to engineering & cost efficiency, not software compatibility as people suggested