Phil Spencer Confirms Xbox is Planning an Xbox Handheld, But It's a Few Years Away
Phil Spencer Confirms Xbox is Planning an Xbox Handheld, But It's a Few Years Away
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has confirmed that Xbox is planning an Xbox handheld console, but it's a few years away from release.
What Microsoft has been saying about Xbox lately strongly implies that this is a Windows handheld designed to solve software and user experience problems with using current Windows handhelds. And signs are pointing toward the next Xbox console coming sooner than the next PlayStation and essentially being a PC running a console version of Windows. Some speculation on my part, but I'm not the only one coming to those conclusions.
Microsoft following the same pattern.
- There is a need in the market they are aware of, but don't care
- Someone else makes a huge splash by doing a great job
- Microsoft gets butthurt that someone else is making profit
- They take way too long coming up with a rival
- Microsoft hires thousands of engineers to work on the product
- The rival is way too late to market, and everyone has already chosen the cool product
- Microsoft quietly lays people off and kills off the product
You forgot
- MS buys all the competition
- MS kills said companies they bought before so everyone has to use their half assed shit product
That doesn't really happen though what happens is-
-
MS buys one of the biggest older players, then changes whatever direction they were going in, to their 'new hotness'
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MS kills the company they bought after being way too late to market, and everyone has already chosen the cool product
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Too expensive and too late mostly.
The surface is one of my go-to examples of Microsoft's ineptitude. The surface is honestly an amazing tablet. It works very well, great battery life, and you can either use a standard tablet mode or it as a full Windows machine. For businesses too it was a slam-dunk, where since it's Windows it already interfaces with most IT systems out of the box, no special setup or store integrations or Apple stuff, it'd work with Microsoft AD. Unfortunately it followed the pattern.
- They gave up on tablets before fully vetting the market
- Apple lands the iPad, and it takes off, is groundbreaking
- Microsoft got butthurt that Apple made profit on a thing they gave up on
- They take years coming up with the Surface, in the meantime every 3rd party came out with an Android one that was slow and choppy so the people have all decided iPad was the winner
- Microsoft hired thousands of engineers and pivoted the entire world to touch, forcing Windows 8 down everyone's throats, making the public hate it
- Surface finally lands, but everyone already hates the interface, and anyone who wants a tablet already has one
- Microsoft quietly lays off everyone. Surface is still around, but on life support.
Cannot wait to not purchase it.
20 minute battery life incoming, also msft account required
Knee jerk reaction based on OEM feedback for a built in handheld interface for the OEM handhelds like the rog ally. Steam deck clearly caused a disruption in the market that Microsoft simply cannot stop. It'll probably have alps joysticks that drift, they'll slap an over powered AMD apu in it with a shit battery that it'll chew through in an hour like every other handheld PC. Valve hit the sweet spot with the deck, and there's no real reason to upgrade it, sure you have more powerful apu's but battery tech hasn't caught up yet and the only way to counteract it is slap a bigger battery on the device. At that point what's the point of putting a power hungry apu in a handheld?
Would there even be a demand for a dedicated handheld console? PC has "issues" because of the set up, while console is easy because its already built.
The steam deck is already built, + it has desktop mode + more games than xbox and playstation combined?
In all likelihood, this would be a handheld PC that solves the problems that Windows has in that space.
Maybe they should focus on it quicker. Surely it cannot be that difficult to build a handheld based on how quickly Steam Deck competition hit the market within, what, a year of the Steam Deck release?
(I'm lazy and did not read the article, only the headline.)
That few years is going toward making Windows less of a hindrance on handhelds and likely not so much into the hardware itself.
It'll [attempt] to make Windows less of a hinderance on THEIR handheld. If all these other Windows-based devices are now rivals, why let them benefit from hard work when you can force them out?
If they released one NOW they'd probably be shooting themselves in the foot. At best they'd get mid-generational performance improvements whereas likely in the next year or two Valve is probably going to drop a true SteamDeck 2 with significant improvements. All speculation at this point, but if you're a bean counter at Microsoft, speculation is like 90% of your job. Unless they abandon the standard console release cycle and shoot for faster iteration, they'll want to come out absolutely swinging to compete.
With any luck they actually want to bring true innovations to either Windows or Xbox. Getting support for gyros, accelerometers, back buttons or touchpads into Xinput would even benefit gaming on Linux since most games seem to default to that as a lowest common denominator.
So, Microsoft -- how's Windows for ARM coming?
So, Microsoft – how’s Windows for ARM coming?
Phil Spencer doesn't know his employer makes ARM computers. Not even Microsoft Solitaire Collection has a native ARM port.
Yeah right