So Microsoft finally said the number out loud. Xbox One X, $499, out November 7th. They'd been teasing "Project Scorpio" for the better part of a year with vague talk about the most powerful console ever made, and last Sunday at their E3 briefing they just came out with it. Six teraflops. 4K native gaming. A disc drive that also does 4K Blu-ray. All wrapped in a box that's apparently smaller than the current Xbox One S, which is a neat trick if it's true.
I watched the stream on my lunch break, half paying attention, and the second that price flashed on screen I actually said "huh" out loud at my desk. Not mad huh. Just, huh, they went there. Five hundred bucks is PS3-at-launch territory, and Sony took a beating for that one for years afterward, jokes and all.
Here's my problem though, and it's a dumb one but it's real: I don't own a 4K television. I've got a perfectly fine 1080p set that I bought during a Black Friday sale sometime around 2014 and it still looks great to my eyes. So the entire pitch, the thing they spent forty minutes on stage building up, is functionally invisible to me unless I also go drop another six or seven hundred dollars on a new TV. That's not a console purchase anymore, that's a whole living room renovation.
And I get the counterargument, I really do. Microsoft's own people were saying onstage that even on a 1080p display you'd get better frame rates and cleaner supersampled image quality out of the extra horsepower. Maybe that's true. Probably is, honestly, the specs are the specs. But "buy this so your existing setup looks marginally crisper" is a much harder sell than "buy this and see the future," and I think they know that, which is part of why so much of the messaging leaned on 4K/HDR screenshots that most of the audience watching at home literally cannot reproduce.
The backlog thing nobody talks about
There's also just the matter of what's sitting under my TV right now. I've got an Xbox One S that I bought less than a year ago specifically because it was the 4K Blu-ray one (never mind that I still don't have the 4K TV to use with it, we've established I have a problem). Next to it is a PS4 that I bought even further back. And on top of both of them is a stack of games I have not finished. I am, as of this writing, still not done with The Witcher 3, a game that came out over two years ago and that I keep meaning to get back to on a rainy weekend that never seems to arrive.
So the idea of throwing another $499 at a shiny new box in November, before I've even wrapped up a game I already own, feels a little unhinged when I type it out like that. But that's console launches for you. Nobody buys them because they're rational.
What actually got me interested, more than the hardware talk, was some of the specific games shown off around it. Forza Motorsport 7 running in that keynote looked genuinely sharp, and there was a real sense that at least a handful of studios are going to build with the extra headroom in mind rather than just patching in a resolution bump later. That's the part I'd pay attention to between now and launch, not the teraflop number, which is a spec sheet stat that means basically nothing to a normal person shopping in a Best Buy aisle.
Anyway. November is a long way off, my backlog isn't getting any shorter on its own, and I've got a television that's going to make this whole decision for me one way or another. If I do end up caving, it'll probably be for the TV first and the console second, which tells you everything about how backwards my priorities are as a "tech" person who writes a blog about this stuff and still can't be bothered to upgrade his own living room.