Xbox Series S Review

Microsoft's bet was that a large share of buyers care about the games and not the pixels, and the Series S proved them right in sales while making a rod for the platform's back. The machine plays everything the Series X plays, at lower resolution and often lower frame rates, and paired with Game Pass it is the best value proposition in the history of the medium: hundreds of games for less than the price of a mid range phone.

The cost is borne by developers, who must ship every game to a box with a third of the graphics memory, and by owners who discover that the internal storage fills up after four large installs and that the expansion card costs a meaningful fraction of the console. The design is the best of the generation, small and quiet and handsome. It is a compromise that mostly compromises other people.