Rumour: Xbox May Be Adding A 'Consistent Social UI' To Games On All Platforms

Only a bureaucracy like Microsoft could have a "project" with a "codename" and a strategy, and a plan, and a rollout for the concept of "hey let's use the same menu all the time."

@NEStalgia Microsoft have the uncanny ability of messing up even the easiest things.

I'm fairly certain, if someone gave them the winning Powerball numbers, somehow, some way, they would even mess up that simple task of playing those numbers.

Crossplay can be a headache when trying to pair with friends on other platforms. This would make sense.

A shared UI could be a positive in the sense that it gets people used to, and possibly liking the way Xbox works and is laid out.

@BacklogBrad I was thinking the same thing. This could be cool. Hope the UI is cool looking and not dull haha.

@themightyant The problem with Metro wasn't that it was uniform, it was that it was uniformly bad.

@NEStalgia Metro was the greatest thing to ever happen to the Mac. It drove numbers of users to the Apple platform.

I will say the COD effect is slowing taking shape. The day after the news broke that COD was coming to GP the sales of Series X was up 220% on amazon. Throw this Ui in and they are pushing players to some sort of Xbox software. Can’t say I’m excited for this, but i suppose i see their angle.

@themightyant Mostly, though, it was just bad. It's not like they took a great UI for one interface and applied it to everything, they took an interface that was bad for anything and put it on everything. Arguably phone was the only place it was even modestly usable, and even there it's probably the main reason Winphone failed. Xbox is the only place that retained it in significant pieces, and it's still kinda bad there. The thing that makes the UI great is the guide menu, which prevents you from having to use the metro parts until you get into settings.

@HonestHick LOL, that's so much the truth. I know Metro was supposed to be a response to Apple, but it kinda did the opposite.

Series X sales up 220% on Amazon: You mean they sold 22 of them this week?!!

Speaking of XB hardware, it sounds like the latest rumor is that the "largest tech leap ever" is about a switch to ARM and AI NPU/Copilot+ stuff. Not where where that goes. Makes sense with their new focus on it and a handheld that would benefit greatly (battery life on handheld PC is horrid), OTOH IDK how I feel about an ARM based console. I know the benchmarks are really good, but it's still kind of the opposite of the sort of gaming PC We'd be looking for. MS was promoting all the games that run at 30fps on their new ARM laptops even without GPU, so with a GPU and another year or two development that could be a thing. A lot of their datacenter stuff is ARM these days. And the "game preservation team" may be more about emulating the architecture on ARM than anything specially game preservation related.

Obviously Switch is already that, but in a mobile context. In a sense it makes me think the focus of the next XB would be more on size/heat/efficiency (and of course AI, AI, AI, AI, AI) more than performance which would be, probably, a painful side adventure for Xbox as a console again.

@NEStalgia so i know a decent amount about ARM. I really like it. I ain’t saying if it’s right or not for Xbox. But this rumor was a thing a year or so ago. It kind of died off. The new ARM Surface Pro and Surface laptop are blowing the doors off in performance tests. Not yet the real world experience but it helped surface cut the gap and even lead in some cases over the M chips in the MacBook Air and MacBooks. MS was looking into making their own chips so this all could be very true and if so. Maybe this is their way forward. If and thats a big IF!!! This took off that could leave Sony in a spot where they would have a mess to catch up. Especially in backwards compatibility. This ties into Sara saying they are working on forward and backwards compatibility and i thought that meant a change to Nvida or Arm.

@HonestHick Keep in mind the new parts are blowing doors off low power hardware performance tests (I.E. mobile parts, M-series, laptop chips, which despite their nearly identical names are barely kissing cousins of their desktop counterparts, so the chips unveiled yesterday are still in a different playground than enthusiast gaming desktop chips - FOR NOW.

That could easily change in a year. Or x86 chips could release new models that jump ahead again. But chips with a >100W TDP are not in the same restricted zone as chips with a <30W TDP. The Intel/AMD laptop space is very different from the desktop space.

BUT, considering the PS4/X1 were using a tablet CPU and the CPU in the XSX/PS5 is only merely "decent", and consoles always go cheap on CPU, it could easily work for the next Xbox. Small, quiet, and power efficient are the name of the game.

MS already makes their own chips for server hardware in the Azure datacenters. Not sure why they went the Qualcomm route for laptops.

I think it's a confusing landscape. It's not like Intel and AMD are planning on closing their doors tomorrow. X86 isn't going anywhere. At the same time IDK if this will shift game dev toward ARM, toward x86, or if it's transparent to development, which it seems to be so far.

It's weird, the tech world wants to say ARM is the future, the datacenter is ARM, MS is pushing ARM, but at the same time I can't imagine MS just ignoring Intel/AMD, the partnership that built and runs the whole PC industry. I can see it for laptops. But for desktop? Way more green, way more power efficient. And again, there's just now way Intel, AMD, IBM just up and abandon x86 let alone all the mobo partners and the like.

I could see it going a few ways. One is just that ARm does just replace PCs as we know it. Another is that laptops and media journos that live and die on laptops gush over it for awhile and the greater PC industry ignores it completely.

Some reports said the new notebooks seemed comparable to a Steamdeck, but, then the Ryzen Z1E already blows steamdeck out of the water (devours battery but that's a different issue.) Both are x86 for now. Next Deck might be ARM of course for the power use. Who knows. Either way the current chips they have out there don't come close to console power, but we're talking just the CPU, not the GPU. OTOH, even if the consoles become ARM, the console CPU is always sucky and matters less than the GPU so it's all a bit irrelevant.

BC for the older games is a big deal, supposedly modern x86 runs native on the new ARM chips (rather hardware or OS transaltion happening.

I could see MS pushing ARM into Xbox, makes sense in a console and fits their ARM strategy. OTOH I could see PC gaming and PS just ignoring it making Xbox the "weird" console yet again.

@NEStalgia great points and all true. I am on ARM guy. For as much as i like about them there is always trade off. I see MS using ARM in the handheld, where it would be less hot and give it a huge advantage in battery life over the competition. All next gen Xbox rumors i have seen have been saying AMD. With a decent CPU. Man CPU is always the bottle neck for consoles. But i do think MS will have AI in the next Xbox and for sure in the handheld. Tech is so wide in todays world that as much as people want their to be a one size fits all tech, thats just not how it works. X86 and ARM both have their pro’s and con’s and are better for a certain device over the other. I am not sure that changes just yet and again i like ARM. But if Xbox didn’t use ARM in the handheld i would be a bit surprised not going to lie. I think that makes sense and all they need to do is make sure the BC is there. Time will tell cause i think we start to hear about the handheld plans in 2025.

@HonestHick ARM on Xbox would bring it closer to Switch (and laptops) than most gaming PCs...that would be weird unless MS was positioning to replace x86, but I doubt Intel/AMD would be thrilled with that.

IT think it's a no brainer for the handheld though. But GPU/APU is where it gets let down. If the best the laptops are doing is Steamdeck performance and "100 games run at 30fps"...yes, including Starfield, but....I doubt they're running sliders at ultra, and if I dial res and sliders down I can get it to 60fps on legion, so the current Qualcomm chips aren't impressing me for gaming. But I still see MS going that way on the handheld (would be horrible if the handheld was Switch level gimped though.)

IDK, I've heard Intel for the console, I've heard AMD, I've heard ARM. Not sure what rumor's true. Or maybe all of them since it's undecided yet. I can easily imagine them going all in on ARM lining up with their copilot strategy with laptops and unifying console and handheld. OTOH, their AMD/Intel copilot parts will be announced later in the year so it's not like that's missing.

There's also one other factor which is: Most AI and the most important AI is going to remain in the cloud. The local AI push is primarily for data security and corporate use where they're outright banning use of AI because of confidentiality and security reasons, so the local AI enabled hardware lets it work (we'll see how well.........) in a closed corporate/offline environment. On an Xbox (it's 2013, it's always online, #dealwithit), I don't see the point of knee-capping it's AI to onboard only without cloud access, and GPU can also be used without NPU. Does it NEED AI hardware? Maybe not unless MS starts requiring it for Win to run.

Weird, I can't even tell if it's a bad time to build a PC with all the changes.

@HonestHick @NEStalgia Interesting conversation that I'm able to understand in spite of not having your PC knowledge. Maybe the new ARM chip that they will manufacture for the hybrid console will have native compatibility with x86 and viceversa, so the high-end console would still be x86 and also both would be backwards compatible. Another possibility is that the hybrid console and the high-end console are the same, but I don't think that it's possible, not even with AI, not even online and also being online for checking licences is one thing and being online for computing power is another, so there will be two consoles.

@Banjo- The new Snapdragons they unveiled do have x86 translation (I don't think it's totally on-die, I think it's OS+chip if I'm not mistaken. In theory it can execute standard x86 exe's. However, games may be a little different as they have a lot more "near the metal" optimization going on. And older games, as well as the existing emulation layers for older non-x86 platforms would probably need work. I'd think Series games probably execute natively (or near natively) on them.

It's not impossible that the hybrid is the entire next Xbox, a supercharged Switch basically, I could see them stepping back from the graphics arms race, and/or maybe having an egpu dock that boosts it a lot more than the limited onboard vs Switch, Ally, Legion, etc that just OC's a bit when plugged in (or rather UC's when on battery). But, I didn't mean that it would use online for computing power but for AI functionality instead of being a "copilot plus" NPU+GPU+CPU certified box. I'm not sure non-cloud AI would even be useful for gaming compared to having the full model available, it would need the reference material onboard, and storage is a premium on console.)

Similarly the PS5 Pro rumor/leak says it has dedicated AI module but mostly for their own proprietary upscaling, because Sony's gotta' Sony and using NV/AMD's existing solutions is so much more boring than reinventing the wheel.

@NEStalgia one thing to consider on those ARM laptops running games at 30fps. Those aren’t optimized to be great for gaming. The system resources are hogging power and taking resources that a handheld would not need to do. Not saying that gets everything running butter smooth. But it will get more performance. Thats the thing about PC and windows I never liked, you don’t get all the power of your machine like you do on a console. If consoles had to give up the same amount of juice that a desktop and laptop did we would be seeing games run at 30fps and below in some cases. Thats why i never liked when YouTubers would take the specs of a console and compare it to a PC. You can’t. The PS5 and series X is going to run GTA6 better than most if not all similar spec’d console. Windows resource hog is a thing is my point. I don’t know where MS goes next with it console, but as long as they have one i will be happy, cause i did a little test this week.

I downloaded Xdefiant for PS5 to see if i could play a FPS game on that controller. Just in the event Xbox is no longer and the short answer is I’d go to PC and play with the Xbox controller.

It hurts my trigger finger and the paddles are just to wide and fat. I can not believe this thing sells in Japan. That size is very not Japanese. 5 generations of Sony and not one controller that i can say i loved. The consoles and games sure the controllers are insanely bad and somehow most people love them.

@NEStalgia Microsoft confirmed that the next console will be the biggest generation leap yet, so if it's a hybrid only and not both a hybrid and home console, the dock will grant a lot of additional power. I agree that AI and cloud computing is pretty useless for consoles, unless like you said basic AI for upscaling like, supposedly, Switch 2 and PS5 Pro.

About another thread, doesn't Xbox have similar sales as Epic? $1 more? You will pay more for the extra power consumption and hardware on PC 😜.

@HonestHick That's very true, consoles and PC are not comparable, that's why I don't like when Digital Foundry use a PC configuration to show you how games would run on the next rumoured console. As you said, consoles are specifically designed for gaming and, most of all, the Xbox consoles because their engineers are very good at optimising the hardware and have access to DirectX, etc. Another great thing about consoles is the lower heat and power consumption.

@Banjo- yeah for sure. I mean velocity architecture and other things that consoles have into them or not in a laptop built to run spreadsheet and send emails and have security checking for viruses and updates, etc etc. consoles push way above their weight in terms of specs. I expect to see further advancements made in the next gen to gain those capabilities from lower end pc specs.

@NEStalgia DUDE that bingo comment on Push has me laughing still man. Dang it that was funny. I don’t think there has ever been a fan base i would love to see lose more than the hardcore PS fan’s. They are not gamers that I respect and i say that as nicely as i can.

@HonestHick Maybe maybe not. If the handheld is a true Windows PC with other store fronts/launchers hidden behind an Xbox shell, then all that resource drain still applies. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still going to be a resource hog.

But.... Legion, Ally are still much more performant than those laptops running an x86, just less power efficient. Still those chips can improve by the next Xbox.

Most pc hardware comparisons are taking that into account and going by bench test performance. When they say a 4060 is about par with PS5 or slightly better, they mean in measured performance usually.

But a 4060 is 300 and was well more when the consoles launched .

Lol that's bad if you'd rather go pc than that 😂

ps5 doesn't really sell that well in Japan.... Just compared to Xbox. I mean it sells ok but not great.

Haha, I read the headline and instantly freaked out with excitement. For a moment I thought Xbox was going to get its own version of Miiverse (on which I spent waaaaay too much time, and got involved in waaaay too much drama).

Ahhhh, those were the days. ( ^ _ ^ )

@NEStalgia true, my point is it’s hard to get an apples to apples comparison is todays tech. So many factors of whats it’s doing and then throw in the exclusive tech consoles use to get more power gains. But i would like to see Xbox stick to x86, i just think for now it makes more sense, but i really love ARM for what it does well right now and i am sure it will continue to advance as well as will X86.

Dude that controller needs a diet. Like a glass of water and a few crackers a day diet. No way i am playing Gears of war on that. Not doing it.

@Banjo- what they actually Said was "the greatest technological leap ever in a console generation.". Note that they said technology, not power. I think a tiny arm console hybrid with built in ai experiences would meet their definition of the biggest technology leap easily. Especially the ai integration.. Useless or not, but still an ai powered tes6 where you actually talk to characters in real time would be a huge leap but needs a potato GPU. I don't want it but it's heavy tech for sure.

Epic, well epic store sucks but they give out good free games like Gold used to without a monthly fee so it has its use.

@HonestHick lol on the last post! Happy to amuse! 😆

@NEStalgia I just read your PS comment and loved it You're a legend. You are able to say anything on the topic or to another user without being offensive but brutally honest and even make fun. You are always honest even when you feel uncomfortable (like HonestHick). You still do the acronym thing I hate, though, like OC and UC, that I guessed 5 minutes later... and you still chat with Otaku?

I have to disagree about consoles supporting other stores meaning hogging resources like a PC. A PC is like a smarthouse taking care of all the Windows, doors, wall sockets and appliances at the same time, monitoring everything every millisecond, just in case. A console can have different layers and profiles and activate just one. Like Wii U, that basically kills the OS when playing Breath of the Wild but not other games. There are ways for a console to be versatile and still focus on a single thing.

They said "largest technical leap ever in a console generation", indeed. Of course, it's not going to be like the leap from 64-bit to 128-bit in graphical terms, but I think that they mean real computing power. We'll see, but what you say about the super-powered dock makes sense to me if they make only one console and it's hybrid.

@HonestHick Stay with me on Xbox mate, you too, NES.

@Utena-mobile I was also part of the Miiverse community, especially on Wii U. I posted a drawing of Iwata with one eyelid open and the other half-closed, like in real life, but he was healthy at the time or so we thought (RIP). The drawing was liked a lot. He was holding the GamePad in hand. "This is Wii U", he said. "What is that, a Wii peripheral?"

@NEStalgia that was funny !!! I mean Push has a Xbox article every few days. I mean they can’t need that many clicks and comments. Then the people that comment bash the games and then turn around and ask for them to come to PS5 in a new article a week later. I mean am i making this stuff and need my head checked or am i seeing this correctly. Goodness man!

@NEStalgia @Banjo- yeah Nes got them good on that. Had i a done that. They would have ripped me for 35 comments. HAHAHA , NES made it look easy and didn’t even get hate. Lol

Nah Banjo, NES and a few others we ain’t leaving Xbox and Pure. This is our home, i mean where else can we watch MS bigwigs shoot their toes off only to try and win us back in ways no one asks for? Jokes aside, i think the June showcase is going to be really good and we will have some good things to discuss.

@HonestHick He is very skilled at that, ha ha. At least, the ABK drama is over, nothing can be worse than that, right? I think that things will be alright in the new multiplatform era, because Sony is also at it. It's like the war is over with the new Actimicrosoftised Xbox and the new Sony CEO. They don't even have AAA games for 2 years LOL.

Fair I guess. I don't care for social features. I don't use them, I play solo and to me I preferred the TV TV TV picture in picture app multi-usage.

It's why I dream of Wii U future potential or dual screen phones app uses, because I liked Windows 8 besides the app closing with task manger all the time (not the TV TV TV era marketing/advertising of course not) then social features but I'm not the target audience anyway.

@Banjo- agreed he’s better at it than me. I think Xbox will find its grove since the ABK deal mainly cause the software sales are about to kick in hard. They need to figure out hardware yes. But after that, where is the weakness? I don’t see many from a financial perspective. I am the most anti Microsoft guy as it get’s and yet Xbox is my daily driver and a place i feel at home. I hope the June showcase blows the doors off!

@HonestHick @Banjo- You guys are making me blush It's all just a biproduct of realizing that while everyone else argues in circles about whether the glass is half empty or half full and what that says about their attitude, in actuality, the glass is neither half empty nor half full, but the bottom was made convex with a slightly conical graduation on the sidewalls so that it appears half full while only being filled to 37% of it's actual volumetric capacity to improve customer perception and increase margins per sale.

@Banjo- Power hogging, if it's a full windows setup, is sort of a "how competent do you believe MS is" question. On this forum we'd rather trust MS Tay than Nadella at this point. Yes, they can have different power profiles and the like, XSXS already runs a windows kernel but with a massively stripped down and customized setup and SDKs.

But the thing is full-on Windows with all the normal tools and SDKs just needs most of the garbage running. No a gaming-only box doesn't need Norton popping up every 5 seconds about email scanning, (Or does it, would modern MS have an Outlook app for Xbox? Maybe. Maybe Nadella would notice all those "WTF, Man?!?!?!?!?!" emails from pspencer while he's playing Minecraft on his $1000 Chromebook at 30fps if the AI interrupted the game and made the zombies read the email in Marylin Monroe's voice. )

Thing is though Windows could already include such power profiles for gaming, because, it actually asks you what role the machine serves at setup, you can actually select gaming, which is, yknow, a big category of PC use....but...it doesn't....

Although how much power does it all really hog? Or how much less do modern consoles hog? Ultimately a clean windows install without much else installed is running mostly what it needs to, and even Series already runs full-on Edge, and all the Chromium bloat that entails. It's not as different as you may think!

Hardware: IDK, I think they're choosing that word "technological" leap very deliberately. That's not to say it won't be powerful, but I don't think they're looking for just "raw power". It's not working for them. It's not really working for Sony either. Heck, it's barely working for nVidia who's past 3 $1800 video cards are closer together than they are apart. The tech leaps just aren't happening in raw power outside the new fangled AI NPU. And as Phil said, costs aren't coming down. And even if they could build it super powered, no devs can actually afford to make games that use it anymore, and super expensive consoles are probably not likely to sell better than $500 consoles while up against PCs too.

Meanwhile MS is advertising Starfield running at 30fps on a $1000 laptop with an all day battery. I think we can get a general feeling for where corporate synergy may take both the games they produce (every screen!) and Xbox itself (focus on technology advancement over raw performance devs are going bankrupt trying to utilize.)

OTOH, if MS goes all in on the "technology" of AI, AI, AI, and form factor/low power without a gimmick or hook to make that happen, it may be poorly received (again.) Nintendo gets away with it, but they have hooks (and IPs) (and kids.) OTOH a handheld with an eGPU dock that's as powerful as XSX or more when docked and runs even cooler and is smaller? That's high tech. Not the kind of thing that makes gamers salivate, but the kind that makes the masses take notice.

Meanwhile I have my huge Legion and love it so far (and my biggest problem has been Win/XB related.) IDK, an Xbox handheld could woo me with an all day battery because this beast runs for like an hour to hour and a half with decent settings and that's with a fresh battery. But it's seriously nice. But it's expensive. It's more than an XSX for a handheld. OTOH, it's cheaper than those shiny new AI laptops with less graphics power.

IDK if I'll jump to PC or XB. I'm about 50/50 on the fence. The MONEY is really the main factor, as well as worse suspend/lack of quick resume. Either way I'm still associated with XB. Play Anywhere games will still get my purchase on the Xb store (or I already own them), I may keep GP if I jump (even if it's the cheaper PC GP), and obviously MS games are on PC (I mean with Bethethesda, id, and Blizzard, it's easily arguable that they're primarily a PC publisher that also makes console ports...) There's pros and cons. The MONEY/size/heat/suspend/keyboard are all negatives.

@NEStalgia Yes but if that was the case, Sarah wouldn't have said "largest technical leap ever in a console generation", because what she said was meant to be understood as "largest computing power (not graphical) leap" by every fan watching the podcast. I think that Microsoft chose Sarah as one of the main spokespersons because she looks very friendly, but I know that those words are not her own and were carefully chosen.

I agree that the industry can't afford more expensive to develop games, but a technical leap doesn't mean that, but the opposite. More power to create "current-gen" games in 60fps in quality mode, without letterboxing and, of course, easier to optimise because of the more capable technology. In other words, machines that can run Unreal Engine 5 in 60fps with ray-tracing. Meanwhile, PS5 Pro is PS5.1 if power rumours are to be believed.

On top of that, new technology allows lower power consumption, that screams hybrid console. Moreover, a dock makes a hybrid console as powerful as they want it to be. I see two possibilities, a true hybrid console with a powerful dock or a Switch-like dockable Xbox and Series X2.

The first option is more impactful and easier to market, as long as they market it as the "most powerful console" like Series X. The problem would be the price, so the second possibility is more market-friendly: a cheap dockable Xbox and Series X2. I think that it will be the latter.

About PC/console gaming, I don't have any doubts myself because time is money and precious!

@Banjo- I see the words as carefully chosen, absolutely. But I still don't think they're talking computing power/graphics outside stuff like AI. For that matter PC isn't really doing that much more at the very very high end, other than newer RT engines and some more brute force. Not much for console to borrow from at decent pricing,

I think there's some "highest quality pixels the world has ever seen" shennanigans in the wordplay. "More power!" means devs are just going to push it as they always do for more fx. "Same thing but better frame rate" doesn't seem to sell consoles or games, so that's boring and will not interest people in the platform sadly.

You have to consider for running UE5 at 60fps with RT in res at 1400-2400p you're talking even 4090's at over $1400 now (just for the GPU) are struggling to do that still. Most of the high end results on 4090s are running 1080 or 1440p with full RT and using DLSS to upres that, which even Switch 2 is rumored to start doing. I just don't see a next gen xbox tackling at under $1k what exotic PCs are currently struggling to do at over $3.5k. I know XB has always sold itself on "power" but based on the reality out there, Phil's points on hardware pricing, I don't think competing on raw compute cuts it anymore. I think "technology leap" in their case is going to mean something different. IDK what for sure, but I don't think we're talking RT performance in a vacuum. Plus, aligned with MS's broader goals in gaming, AI, and beyond, and the "every screen" approach, coupled by how they're using their games business to promote their (creepy) new PC business, I think their "technology" focus is going to be more around removing platform barriers, dev barriers, port barriers, etc to make moving from device type to device type easier, more than focusing on a gfx powerhouse. They already have a product for GFX powerhouses: Windows.

And honestly, they need to have their blue ocean Wii/DS moment and try to forge a new gimmick to make their platform desirable because right now, competing on 1:1 power comparisons, it isn't, and it's not working for them.

So with all that, I do think the true hybrid console with a powerful dock would be a really solid business direction for them that meshes with their larger corporate directions. And helps them copy the market leader, Nintendo, and if Microsoft is good at only one thing it's: Buy whoever's winning, and if they won't sell, copy them and claim it's original.

But Xbox being Xbox I could see them doing a separate handheld and new console that will be marketed with flowery words but at the end of the day be just another Xbox but more powerful than the previous one.

The main issue I see is Phil was already direct about the costs of hardware not coming down and the console subsidy model basically being over (to them.) SO if they go with a powerhouse console, is it going to be $700? 900? Is there a market for that that wouldn't just go PC? Lots of question marks they probably don't know either.

Money is the big thing for me with PC. Because it really is money. BUT...that depends, too, on if Xbox would eventually go the route I thought they were going to go back on the old forum in the 1X days: A yearly cell phone cycle. Even Jimbo was talking about doing that before he believed in generations. If consoles start going the yearly refresh route, then PC may end up being cheaper after all

(And to add to that there's that article on Push about the PS executive talking about the future of games not being about graphics anymore. Yep, the graphics arms race is over. Dockable superswitch it is! Maybe a dockable PS6 to go with it.)

That'll be funny if they didn't cancel the Pro though. (Though at this point, who knows, maybe they did cancel it.)

BTW, when talking about eGPU docks on a windows handheld, it's not a far reaching idea. The ROG Ally already supports this as an addon. Asus makes a model external (wired) eGPU dock:
https://rog.asus.com/us/external-graphic-docks/rog-xg-mobile-2023-model/

Now, that's $2000, but it includes a 4090 inside so that's like $1600 of the MSRP, so it's like $400 or less for the box that's not sold separately. But that's the for profit PC parts price not console subsidy pricing, and obviously an Xbox version would have a custom GPU in the box, not a PCIe 4090 card with a leaf blower on top. And it would be a homogenized dock like Switch, not a box on a cable. A $400 handheld PC and a $500 "power console" dock base for it....I could see that with phil talking higher prices and all. The Xbox would lierally just be a ROG Ally with an eGPU dock, with a custom, cheaper build, and subsidized, and maybe ARM based (though Intel's new chips are said to be much lower powered too.) Even if it's marginally more powerful than XSX (but people actually buy it) that's a big tech leap (by copying Nintendo and throwing more power behind it lol)

Working on crossplay could bode well for all.