I personally am expecting reference devices going forward from MS, and other Xbox “consoles” being third party OEMs.

MS officially responded to the rumors

I'm happy I made the switch to PC this generation and have kept 3 years of Game Pass Ultimate thanks to MS Rewards. 

Looks like I got news to write up later once I'm home. 

I am on the opposite side on this one. They have been working with AMD for literally decades and have never felt the need to announce their partnership so, why now?

My theory? The stock market. The are worried about the impact that the news of their console hardware division shutting down would have in the stock market, so they have to maintain the facade, and kill it slowly.

To summarize, I don't care what any of these "insiders" say, and I don't care what Microsoft says either. I look at what they are doing, and for the past year, every decision they have made seemed to have been designed to slow down their console sales.

Lol, do you really believe Xbox is hardware is driving MS stock price, I highly doubt it.  If MS came out today and said we will not do next gen hardware there would not be a blip in their stock price.  Hell, if anything it might go up because a lot of investors probably believe they should concentrate more on AI, software and Azure.

No, MS stated their agreement with AMD because they wanted to let people know they are still doing something but it will not be a traditional console because right now they are getting owned by Nintendo and Sony and that probably not going to change anytime soon.  

Hey, you might be right. There might be no impact at all, heck, it might even go up, as you said, but if there is one thing certain abougt the stock market, is that nobody really knows exactly how is going to react in the end, so no, I don't think they would risk to announce it just like that.

And you might be right, maybe they are still planning to release another console as a niche product (with no intention to sell more than a couple of millions) but I think it would still be part of the phasing out process that they have already started.

True we cannot always predict the stock market but we can get insight into what investors care about.  The latest situations from MS is a huge tell what investors care about.  First we have MS pricing their hardware where its more expensive than their competitor who already have a huge market lead on them.  Next we have retailers removing MS hardware from store shelves and last we have a huge increase in GPU price.  From all of those situations happening, the stock price has not gone down, if anything its gone up.  I looked at a few investor ratings and forecast and none of them even mention Xbox division as the levers for investing in MS.

I do agree that MS is phasing out the traditional Xbox console but not out of hardware itself.  If anything look towards the surface line to see where MS is probably looking to go.  MS is going back to PC but they are not looking to subsidize a console environment anymore.  While MS will miss that 30% for whatever they get for games selling on their platform, I am guessing they believe they can make it up by selling their games on everything that can play games.  The PC market is very healthy and when you really think about it, all of their focus should be concentrated on making that market much stronger because its their primary market for the software anyway.  The Xbox interface for the ROG Ally is the first step but MS needs to be able to couple and decouple full windows to really make that into the next gaming platform.  We will see how much effort they really put towards that goal but hardware wise, the traditional console is dead at MS.  

The leaker that provided the info about the cancellation of the next Xbox hardware goes by the name of SneakerSO.
Jason Schreier has corroborated info from SneakerSO several times in the past.
While that doesn't mean that they are correct this time, I'm not aware of why this particular leaker should be seen as unreliable?

On the hardware front, we can look back like 2 years, In this very thread where we talk about exactly this. Whats happening today is much align whit what some hace said. MS Xbox plateform will be open to other store. But like back then, I don't think MS will stops producing Xboxes but 2 main will happen for IMO:

1) Xbox will be expensive. It will no longer be sold at a loss on launch. It will aim for profitability even on much lower number.

2)they will reduce the use of semi custom design to enhance compatibility or even remove the need to create a separate pc/xbox build and reduce investment needed in designing new device.

But Xbox remain essential, like other pointed out, to defined the specs of a gen so that devs know what to aim for which will also allow partners to make device without much compatibility issue . I also think they will still make a low tier (mobile device friendly specs) / high tier.

This is kinda the best case scenario for me when I think of for the future of Xbox hardware.

I fact like many other here I have switch to mostly PC gaming from Xbox during the gen. So this is just Xbox following the flow of their userbase.

On Gamepass front lol the opinion press have just been thrasing MS since the change announcement (and rigthly so). I wonder if MS will back down again like they've now done a few time with unpopular annoucement?