It doesn’t matter if the next Xbox is a PC. What matters is if it’s usable.
The $1,000 Asus ROG Xbox Ally X alone won’t be enough to tide gamers over until the next-gen Xbox arrives. It’s a factor of cost and expectation. Even if the next so-called Xbox is far more of a PC than what gamers are used to, that doesn’t mean it has to feel like a Windows machine. The problem is players don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes, and it’s time the company became more transparent about what’s in store to help us understand what’s on the line for Xbox’s future.
In an interview with Variety, Xbox President Sarah Bond reconfirmed the company is making a next-gen Xbox. However, for now, it’s still trying to re-contextualize what “Xbox” even means anymore. Bond said Microsoft set the price of the ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X based on Asus, “because this is their hardware.” Of course, Asus is one of the major PC original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that is tapped into the computing market, not necessarily consoles. Asus and fellow PC maker Lenovo set their prices of their top-end handheld PCs at $1,000 or more. For instance, Lenovo’s 2023 handheld, the Lenovo Legion Go, cost $700 at launch with AMD’s top-end handheld chip. The sequel, the Lenovo Legion Go 2 with a screen and chip upgrade (the same AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme as the ROG Xbox Ally X), costs $1,350.
PC makers have been put through the wringer over President Donald Trump’s rotating, often nonsensical tariffs and resulting international trade war. These companies (Asus is headquartered in Taiwan and Lenovo in China) cannot subsidize their hardware nearly as much as Microsoft can. And still, Microsoft boosted the price of the five-year-old Xbox Series X by $150—up to $650. This year, Microsoft also hiked prices of its Game Pass Ultimate subscription from $20 to $30. Getting access to all of Game Pass’ day-one titles would end up costing players $360 a year.‘Is it actually just a branded laptop with joysticks?’
Xbox is treating the ROG Xbox Ally like a true-blue Xbox, despite the fact that any regular console gamer might get confused when they load up their device and realize OneDrive and Microsoft Teams come pre-installed, and their Xbox-specific games cannot run on the handheld hardware (though some cross-saves between console and PC will work on the ROG Xbox Ally).
