Xbox Series S Review: At $499.99 the Budget Console Has Lost Its Budget
The all-digital Series S jumped from $399.99 to $499.99 in August 2026, the same price as the Switch 2. We ask who should still buy a 512GB, 1440p box at that money.
The verdict
Still a small, quiet, capable console, but $499.99 for 512GB, no disc drive and a 1440p target is no longer a budget buy. It now costs the same as a Switch 2 and only a little less than a 1TB Series S plus a game. Buy it only if Game Pass and Xbox exclusives matter more than price.
Best forGame Pass subscribers who want a small, quiet digital console
What we liked
- Compact and quiet design that fits under almost any TV
- Quick Resume and fast SSD loading keep sessions short
- Plays thousands of backward-compatible games across four Xbox generations
- Game Pass plans start at $9.99 a month for a big library
What we did not
- Price rose $100 to $499.99 in August 2026 with no new hardware
- 512GB leaves roughly 364GB usable, enough for a handful of big games
- No disc drive, so you cannot buy used or borrow games
- GPU is about 4 teraflops, so 1440p is the ceiling and 4K is upscaled
For five years the pitch for the Series S was one number. It was the cheapest way into current-generation gaming, and everything else, the missing disc drive and the small SSD, was forgiven because of that number. The number has changed.
What happened to the price
Microsoft raised Xbox console prices worldwide effective August 1, 2026. TechCrunch's report lists the Series S 512GB moving from $399 to $499 and the 1TB model from $449 to $599, and quotes Microsoft blaming memory and storage costs that it says are more than 2.5 times higher than before, with a further doubling expected by fall 2027. Nothing about the console changed. It is the same 2020 hardware at a higher price.
Windows Central's review is headlined "Still compact and capable, but no longer the budget", and we cannot improve on that summary.
The Switch 2 comparison nobody wanted
Here is the awkward part. Nintendo announced that from September 1, 2026 it will move the Switch 2 from $449.99 to $499.99. That puts the two consoles at the same price, which they were never meant to share. They do different jobs, a handheld you take on the train against a box under a TV, but a shopper with $500 to spend now has a real choice, and it is a close one.
Our rule of thumb: if you play mostly alone, travel, or buy for children, the Switch 2 is the better $499.99. If you already own a PC or you want shooters and big open-world games on a TV, the Series S is the more sensible one, but only because of what comes next.
Specs
- Price
- $499.99 (512GB), up from $399.99 on 1 Aug 2026
- Storage
- 512GB or 1TB custom NVMe SSD
- GPU
- 4 TFLOPS, 20 CUs at 1.565 GHz
- Memory
- 8GB GDDR6 at 224 GB/s
- Target resolution
- 1440p, with 4K upscaling
- Frame rate
- Up to 120 fps in supported games
- Optical drive
- None, all-digital
- SSD throughput
- 2.4 GB/s raw, 4.8 GB/s compressed
- Expansion
- Xbox storage expansion cards, sold separately
- Controller
- Xbox Wireless Controller in the box
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