Agreed. I absolutely loved my PS1 and PS2 but the main draw was the third party stuff. I had a handful of games made by Sony (Ape Escape, Omega Boost, the Crash games, God of War, and a few others) but they were always second to my Street Fighters, Metal Gears, Resident Evils, and such. With the PS3, Sony took charge and started making games that were absolutely at the top of the industry.

I still gravitated towards Xbox but Sony couldn't be denied. In my house, the PlayStation 3 was the "Exclusives machine" and the Xbox was for everything else.

People say the Series S is a great system but I absolutely don't want one and I'm an Xbox fan. Not knowing that it's a lesser experience. That FoMO is real! I'd rather go without. Sad thing is I'll probably still buy one but not until after I can get a Series X--which hasn't happened yet. I wonder if others feel the same way--just waiting for a Series X to be readily available.

Then again, my love for gaming has diminished so much since the start of this generation, who knows?

Considering you buy multiples systems per gen, even from same maker, I think you would benefit for getting S for now until X is made easy to find.

Same thing happened with me with XBox One S and One X. The One S was the perfect system, until the One X was announced right after... One X was a bit too pricy for my liking (here in Canada) while the One S just felt inferior. So I played the games on PC lol.

The Xbox Series S is just cheaper and easier to mass produce... You can get many many many more chips per wafer than a Series X or Playstation 5, hence why it seems they are able to flood the marketplace with them. (Because they CAN!)
Especially as we are in a chip crunch, the more Series S they can produce and potentially sell in volume as we enter the 9th gens second year/holiday season, the better.

It probably is easier to mass produce. But well, if the spread in Japan is similar for the rest of the world (and I believe it is), Series X is shipped/sold twice as much as Series S, and still there is shortage of X and surpluss of S. So even though it is a good proposition to get a S and GP for people with less room on their budget, the market haven`t been so warm with it yet at least. Perhaps the GP Ultimate with Xcloud will make it a little redundant.

Um, I think you were a regular member of the npd predictions threads on Era.

Japan is not a territory that I would use to ascertain sales/success/popularity/anything to do with Xbox. It's never been an Xbox territory even when the console was dominating elsewhere.

Obviously Series S vs Series X's success will vary from region to region, especially in low vs high income nations.

Fair point.  But at least on my thinking I always thought something like 2/3 X, 1/3 S for Xbox and 1/5 Digital and 4/5 Physical for PS5 at least in the start. During gen if one or another  makes more success sure production will increase accordingly to that.

Brazil would be a "low income nation" if we look at per capita, and even here for some reason (GP seems like very successful and Ultimate for Cloud as well) the Series S is also the one that is regularly available in stores while the other 3 is like one batch a month on sale for 2h. I don't think there were ever a gen like this, even gen 7 it was only Wii that was constrained for such a long time. Gen 8 Xbox was constrained only on the Holiday launch, but in January was already possible to find in stores (some countries even had day one editions in March), PS4 had been on regular supply by April or so in most countries and Switch was like 1 year more or less of constrained. I'm really curious to see if AMD boss was right with the second semester of 2022 having the consoles not being supply constrained anymore and how everything will change with that (distribution per models, per region, and gap between plaftorms in those regions and WW).

I would not be surprised if supply constraints continue into 2023... Fabs don't get built super quickly unfortunately... But once we head into 2024 and 2025, we will have an influx of fab capacity, which should place downward price pressures with some luck.

AMD's wafer supply could continue to be eaten up by GPU (Radeon, FirePro etc') and CPU (Ryzen 6000 series with extra 3D cache.) in 2023.
Remember TSMC's biggest customer (Apple) moved on from 7nm and that freed capacity didn't improve supply constraints on CPU's, GPU's and APU's much... So a late 2022 could see improved capacity, but I would imagine supply constraints would definitely continue to exist as new state of the art fabs haven't come online... The bet is for other markets to move from 7nm to 5nm, giving more capacity to the consoles.

Plus consoles need more than just the APU, they do need GDDR6 memory chips, NAND chips, NAND Controller (With Ram), Optical drive controller (With Ram), South Bridge, Powersupply components and IC's, Ethernet controller, Regulators, Capacitors, Resistors, LED's and more.

Any shortage on one of those components will hold back the production of consoles.

Ironically, this is one instance where Nintendo's insistence of using older/outdated technology has paid off in spades.