What Exactly is Xbox Now? (Premium)

I've often found myself in meetings with Microsoft or other companies when a PR representative will try to save everyone a bit of time and dispense with the basics because they understand I know the underlying topic well. I appreciate that, of course, but I always ask whether it's OK for the person I'm meeting with to start at the beginning regardless. I want to test my understanding of the topic, to some degree, but mostly this is to see whether anything subtle has changed in the messaging. Regardless of the product or service we're discussing, I find the ways in which companies promote them to be interesting and sometimes revealing.

With that in mind, I've been thinking about Xbox a lot in recent weeks, for obvious reasons. Microsoft isn't talking right now, also for obvious reasons. And so I was clicking around the Xbox website, wondering about the point of it all. And it occurred that even that presentation can be useful. The first three top-level menu items there--Game Pass, Games, and Devices--serve as a simple and obvious reminder about the fact that this organization shows to the world.

So let's discuss that. In reverse order. For reasons.
? Hardware
Microsoft launched the Xbox Series X and S in late 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting component shortages. This was a not-so-subtle shift from previous Xbox generations. With the Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Microsoft had followed up the initial console release with multiple revisions that combined the usual cost reductions with new capabilities. By the end of the Xbox One run, we had Xbox One S and Xbox One X models selling side-by-side, and so Xbox shipped two consoles side-by-side for the current generation. Sony did the same thing with the PlayStation 5. But Sony now has three PS5 models thanks to the PS5 Pro.

I point this out only because things change. Despite this, many diehard Xbox fans quibble with any deviation from what they feel is the "correct" way of doing things. But what some might call I correct I would describe as old-fashioned. Consoles carve a unique niche between smartphones/tablets and gaming PCs, and all these platforms are evolving. Nintendo has seen great success with its mobile-first Switch console, a market most experts didn't feel existed.

Thanks to that success, Xbox and PlayStation are now plotting their own mobile console strategies But these two hardware makers have also pushed for years to make ever-more-powerful versions of their consoles that can compete with gaming PCs on the other end of their niche. As currently architected, consoles will never beat the graphical fidelity or raw performance of high-end gaming PCs, but they offer good-enough visuals and performance along with a simpler, hassle-fee experience.

There's just one problem. Suddenly, even pedestrian laptops built with the latest AMD and Intel silicon--Radeon Zen 5 and Core Ultra Series 2, respectively--deliver excellent Full HD gaming experiences that...