Microsoft is going to sell a positively insane number of "Series S" boxes-- lots of them undoubtedly to Sony fans, who want to try some of Microsoft's exclusives. As quickly as Microsoft can keep them flying off the assembly line, they will subsequently fly off of store shelves: it's going to be Nintendo-levels of money printing.

Speaking of Nintendo, they need to get their butts in motion with the "Pro" Switch variant: while it's true the Series S isn't a handheld, it's the same price as a Switch, can run "Cyberpunk 2077" with ray tracing when the Switch can barely run "The Outer Worlds" (for Pete's sake) at twelve frames per second on the lower-than-lowest settings-- and you can have the Microsoft box for $25 per month, with basically unlimited free games.

I saw on IGN today that Nintendo just told licensed Switch developers to make all games henceforth "4K ready"-- so they've clearly got something brewing. It can't come soon enough. I've got a lot invested in their ecosystem, so I'll probably buy one when they hit-- but they'd better hurry before they lose momentum.

But back to the Series S, it's not all roses: estimates put it at somewhere around the four teraflops mark-- and since apparently RDNA2 does the ray tracing using shaders, it will probably have substantially lower ray traced performance than the Series X, even at lower resolutions. In short, I suspect it's going to be more of a 1080p box, and with some additional quality reductions, than "identical to Series X just at 1440p", which is how they're billing it so far.

Still an absurd value though.