Today, Microsoft has revealed what the next Xbox is. It’s called Xbox One, and a big part of any game console launch is to know what hardware will power the box for the next decade. For buyers, this will be their longest-term consumer electronics “investment” so Microsoft gave the world some important information about it, and here are the specs thus far:
Hardware Specs
The Xbox One will feature an 8-core CPU (now confirmed to be AMD, so is the GPU), 8GB of RAM, a hard drive of 500GB, a Blu-Ray drive, WiFi (802.11N)/WiFi-Direct, USB 3.0 and connect to the display with HDMI of course.
As we expected, Microsoft s didn’t dwell on further details, and some fans may be disappointed by not knowing all the specs today, but it is fair to assume that more will be revealed at E3 and that some critical details like frequency and final performance specs won’t be revealed until Sony and Microsoft have nailed down the details and won’t be able to make any further tweaks
As it stands, the Xbox One specifications matches what we expected given the information that was hinted by the Xbox software development kit and at first view, it matches the PS4 relatively closely, so we don’t think that this generation will be about “hardware superiority”. Today’s event was highly focused on user experience and services for that reason.
Yet, the hardware should prove to be more powerful than any PC you can buy at whatever price the console will be sold (supposedly $499), we’ll know for sure at some point… it looks like Microsoft isn’t ready to share that detail quite yet.
Industrial Design
The design of the box itself was surprising to me: it seemed bigger and bulkier than I expected, and while it looks sleek and clean, it has this “set top box” or “blu-ray player” look, more than a game console look. I’ll leave it to you to decide if you like it or not, but I bet that many of you didn’t envision the next Xbox to look like this.
The Xbox One will most likely evolve over the years and get slimmer. Microsoft most likely chose this design because the Xbox 360 doesn’t always fit like an AV appliance in the living room. Others may have complained that it’s not easy to stack stuff on top of it. What do you think?