A small comment from Head of Xbox Phil Spencer was the final bit of news necessary to convince me Microsoft’s Project Scorpio will be named Xbox 10 S, and it will serve as a Windows 10 gaming PC built for the living room. I know, that’s a big claim – and I don’t encourage anyone to gamble on it. But ahead of Microsoft’s E3 event on Sunday, I’d like to collect the evidence that Microsoft is eager to put a computer beneath your television.
If true, this could be a great move by Microsoft. Imagine the sales pitch to, say, older high school students and first-year college students: a games console that also servers as a full Windows PC. That’s not a bad package.
On a related note – Microsoft’s latest preview build for the Fall Creators Update contains a lot of changes for Windows 10.
Maybe I am the only one who lived in a bizarro world for whom being a student meant 3 things:
1. I did not have money
2. I did not have space
3. I was always on the move
My experience says that students need a cheap laptop they can carry around to the class room for example to do presentations, or to the study room or to the library.Add when they game, they do it over the weekend on the big TV at home.
My experience says that most students can’t allow a 599$ console, and that’s the price that I expect. And Sony will drop PS4 Pro price to 349$. Maybe do do wonders, and release it for 499$. In that case hurray, PS4 Pro price will be cut to 299$ by next summer. Mind you, there are rumours now that PS4 will be 250$, which sounds really attractive price for the base console.
I expect market penetration for the Scorpio around 5 to 8 percent of the current console market in 3 years. I would say MS expects 15% maybe…
I base my estimation on 2 things:
Steam Hardware survey shows around 5% penetration of hardware enthusiast users. I expect similar market size for Scorpio.
And Sony will provide very stiff competition.
College students in the US often have a $1000+ Macbook plus a gaming console in their dorm rooms.
You can buy a very powerful 5yo ultrabook (i5i7, 8/1GB RAM, 256Gb SSD) for a tiny fraction of the cost of a Macnook.
Can you point me to such a system? I’ve seen some around 800, but not with that much memory.
I’m in Australia so I can’t really help.
My local computer shop is selling used Dell Latitudes i5, 14″ 1080p, 256GB SSDs, Win7 Pro, 8GB RAM for AUD425 (USD300).
You have to find a supllier of ex-corporate computers. You will probably need to buy some (used) RAM as well.
Certainly in the UK that demographic has shifted. The spending power of students is a prime target for many businesses.
1) Those who get student loans get them as lump sums 3x a year, inevitably this leads to spending splurges by the individuals
2) Space is sortof an issue, but there is always space for a playstation/xbox. Even back in my day when we had CRT tv/monitors
3) As long as it can fit in a car, moving isnt a problem. During my uni days I think I filled a Ford Fiesta to bursting point about 20 times
I’d say that with the crazy schedule and costs of going to a higher education institution, a cost that keeps rising, will definitively see students gaming on their portables (laptops/phones). Those two are far more important than a console, and they’re already expensive enough.
While it’s commendable and a great strategy for microsoft to win the long game, in the short term they should not be expected to have a lot of users that can’t afford it.
For families that are looking to consolidate, it is however an affordable solution, especially since they can save a couple of dollars by having one game copy and being able to play it on several devices.
This in USA could be moot however if the spending power of the middle class keeps shrinking, as people would rather have health insurance and food instead of video games, but that’s a different, although related problem.
If you’re going to the university in the US you are filthy rich anyway, so it does not look like $600 total would make any difference to the $600 weekly (or would it be more than $1600 weekly?) that the university adds up to.
That said, I don’t think a PC hooked up to a TV screen sitting away across 10ft of shared space will do any good to students needing to do actual work.
I was’t aware that US undergraduate students were required to do any real work at college.
I despair at the US education system when even MIT offers undergraduates such basic subjects as introductory statistics and introductory calculus.
You should see how bad our pre-college system is. If you think our University system is awful (and oh, is it ever!) you’ll probably die of a heart attack looking at what comes before.
I discovered how bad it was back in 1980. One of my Australian high school classmates went to California on exchange. He even won the American history prize at the US school – despite being very mediocre student in Autralia.
The US is a very large country, with an equally large population.
There are lots of shit educational institutions, but there are also some great ones.
There’s also the matter of the difference in emphasis. Some of the countries that put lots of pressure and weight on pre-college education have, ironically, rather mediocre college systems. Whereas in the US is the opposite, they have a weaker pre-college system while having a big chunk of the top universities in the world.
University rankings are mostly based on research output. That means it is the quality of the faculty and research students that is the overwhlming factor in deciding how great a university is. In practice the top US S1TEM schools are full of overseas trained doctoral students and faculty.
Edited 2017-06-11 11:19 UTC
That some of the top students around the world want to study in American universities furthers my point regarding their quality.
In any case. The US produces plenty of homegrown talent. Check out the volume and quality of research produced by their national laboratories, for example.
Again, the US is a very big and diverse society, it produces some real dumbasses but there are also plenty of talent.
Over 60% of US STEM doctoral students are born overseas. A consideral percentage of US born doctoral students have overseas born parents.
Before WW1 the top students went to Germany. Between 1920-60 they went to Britain. In future they may go to China or India.
A country of immigrants attracting immigrants. Shocking!
BTW The US was attracting significantly more talent than the UK by the 40s.
And yes, in the future maybe more students will go to China, or India, or maybe an asteroid lands and wipes us out. Who knows? If you have to use a nebulous future for your argument, it means it does not hold much water in the present.
Still, that does not change the fact that like anywhere else, the US has plenty of bright and stupid people. The point is that they still have the largest number of top universities within their territory, the largest share of Nobel Price winners, and they still dominate a large area of science and technology. So you can discount them at your own peril.
Edited 2017-06-13 22:26 UTC
If true, this could be a great move by Microsoft. Imagine the sales pitch to, say, older high school students and first-year college students: a games console that also servers as a full Windows PC. That’s not a bad package.
The problem is nobody cares about “full Windows PCs” anymore.
College students use notebooks, tablets and iPhones.
Exactly. No one wants a pc they can’t take with them to class.
My Guess being on the media creation side. The power there, you know.
Nothing with game code should be shared with critical systems. This is power, but home grade.
Sony ran into this with the PS3 – they tried marketing it to college students the same way: it’s a game console/multimedia player/full computer (using linux) for cheap! That didn’t work out. MS is hoping the full computer part is more appealing when the OS is Windows instead of linux.
At least Windows proved itself on desktop for decades. Linux on desktop in 2006 ? On PS3 without GPU acceleration under Linux ? Without Cell compiled drivers ?
Yes, it performed like a dog. But it worked! I had Xubuntu 9.04 running on my PS3 for quite some time… until Sony removed my ability to run it.
Anywho, it was mostly just the graphics that were slow. The machine itself was still quite fast, and you could use the IBM compilers to make programs using the vector units for blazing speed.
These days, I have the custom firmware running on my PS3, and it allows me to run linux again.
Sony crippled the Linux stuff on purpose with 256MB RAM, weird not-quite-PPC architecture, and blocking off access to the GPU.
Actually, the CPU was indeed just a PPC… with some bitchin’ vector accelerators (that no one used). The “PS3” linux was just standard 64-bit PowerPC linux with a framebuffer for graphics, and drivers for the USB and ethernet. Blocking linux from using the GPU was a bad move that pissed off everyone.
…it’s a Windows PC…
Soulbender,
Haha, this is what happens when marketing speak juxtaposes blunt reality
For a trip down memory lane, here’s Bill Gates demoing the PC in the living room concept from the 2005 CES keynote.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPAqra8zCnk
(Honestly the only reason I remembered this is because of the technical problems)
Far from what Gates was moaning about ;D
A crappy one too.
Pre-Ryzen AMD chip — so absolutely crap compared to Intel — at ~1.6 GHz, this is mid-range Intel Atom at best, coupled with some very middling graphics hardware.
That’s true regarding the CPU but the Scorpio has a lot of improvements over a regular PC like unified RAM, super fast bus, DirectX instructions “hardcoded” into the GPU, ecc, ecc.
It’s super powerful for gaming, obviously as a “Desktop PC” it won’t be stellar… but for browsing, office, watching videos and any GPU accelerated task it will be more than ok.
Also a guess: this is the new “hardware base”, to the core Windows. Anything below to belong to “mobility” arena.
Most games don’t need anything better than an i5 from 4 or 5 years go.
My gaming machine is a 2007 Core Quad machine with 8gb of ram, runs almost all modern games well except games like Rome Total War 2 since that is CPU intensive.
Edited 2017-06-09 21:02 UTC
From a PC, as in a computer I use for work, I need: a keyboard, a mouse and a display close to my eyes. Some “living room” device would be painful: hard to read, hard to type, hard to point with precision. Even a tablet would be better.
Now to be honest, a playing device has the same requirements from me: keyboard, mouse, close display. If there’s need for a bigger display (family movie watching), a laptop car use the HDMI cable or the TV can use a wireless dongle.
That’s only if the display is far away. If the display is a VR headset, then well all is well again. Kinda.
Your 600 xbox gets upgraded to support vr => 1200 + cost of vr headset 800 and you’re looking at a $2000 solution.
But assuming that had no drawbacks, that might be a plausible sales pitch.
To be honest, if Microsoft really wanted people to be using Windows in this way, they would have allowed the XBox app in Windows 10 to actually run Xbox games. All the technology they need is already present on any reasonable gaming PC, Hyper-V is already integrated in Windows, and the JEOS kernel they use for the games themselves should have no issue running on a PC. The only reason they keep deluding themselves that the XBox is special is because they’re desperate to make money on hardware.
I can literally count on one hand the number of people I know who have thought rationally about it and would still buy an XBox (or a PlayStation) over a gaming PC (or more commonly, a custom built HTPC with a high-end GPU), and the few I know who would would do so solely for specific games (although most of them are of the same opinion as me in that they aren’t willing to shell out 600 USD for hardware that’s actually worth closer to 450 USD just to play a couple of games).
Of the Scorpion. S S
“a games console that also servers as a full Windows PC. That’s not a bad package.”
Sarcasm?
So… we could expect consoles to be hit by ransomware, a slew of viruses and start running anti-virus in the background?
Thom, you sure about this ?
The cpu is shit – which college student that actually wants to get work done would buy this ?
If its for watching movies all games consoles already do this and do this well, if its for actual productivity who in their right mind is going to plug a keyboard and mouse to their games console to try and work on it, when they could just use a laptop?
All will be revealed @e3 tomorrow, lets face it they tried tv,tv,tv and that failed miserably, they’ve said its all about the games now, you really think they are gonna roll up on stage and shout pc,pc,pc productivity at this e3 ?
If they go down that route this thing will bomb harder than the xbox 1 reveal. I’m sure Sony will be laughing hard if MS go down that road.