this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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I don't have any issues with that, I just think that fragmenting the brand across so many different SKUs makes it tough if you're a retailer.
That's more or less what the Xbox already is, just without the Windows desktop. In fact, that's pretty much what the original pitch for the first Xbox was. Obviously they don't bother with the desktop environment or the print spooler or whatever, but "PC in a suit" is basically the way they do everything. And the Switch is Nintendo's "Android tablet in a suit." I think PlayStation is still on a bespoke kernel, but I'm not sure.
Is it simple, though? You boot up your Xbox (app) to connect to Xbox (Cloud) and play a game on Xbox (GamePass) with your friends on Xbox (Live)? That's simple?
If they were all bundled, that would be one thing. But you have to buy all of those elements individually, and there are probably different tiers of each, and it might be doable, but I guarantee you that I'd prefer not to think through it all.
That would be pretty nice, and since Valve has already done the market research on that, it seems like an easy win for Microsoft. But then again, the "PC in a trenchcoat" is what they've nominally been doing this whole time, so who knows if the "Windows living room box" is ever going to happen.
I doubt they'll ever truly give users that freedom. OEMs (like ROG) sure, but I kinda doubt they're going to let people just put the Xbox app on whatever hardware they bought.
Xbox is nothing like Windows?
Not visually, but under the hood it is Windows. Windows 2000 in the case of the Xbox and Xbox 360, Windows 8 (and later Windows 10) in the case of the Xbox One, One X & S, and Series X & S. Kernels, drivers, APIs, etc. are all shared with the Windows codebase.
That's like saying Android is Linux "under the hood". No. They share almost nothing.
Very much not true. Accounts from the development team call the dev process "fork and run;" meaning, they made a fork of the operating system. Yes, it diverged over time, but part of the reason that a Windows port of an Xbox game is so much easier is that they're fundamentally the same OS.
And Android is Linux under the hood. They've committed code back to the Linux branch and maintained alignment with the LTS kernel since the start, and even the Linux Foundation calls Android a distro.