Xbox Series S Is $50 Off Right Now And That's Not Just A Hot Deal, It's A Steal
The Xbox Series S has not been anywhere near as difficult to find in stock as either the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, but finding one at a discount? That's another story entirely. It's also the situation right now, with the Xbox Series S seeing a rare discount to $249.99, saving you $50 over MSRP. If you've been considering this system, today's sale might put you over the top.
You can find the Xbox Series S discounted to $249.99 at Woot (17% off), which is owned by Amazon, while supplies last. And if you're an Amazon Prime member, you get free standard shipping to boot, with an estimated delivery range of March 7 to March 9. Also note that this is for a brand new console, not refurbished or recertified.
Should you consider the Xbox Series S, though? Absolutely. This is an odd time in gaming, with miners and scalpers hoarding every console and GPU they can get their mitts on, leaving consumers left fighting for inventory during the occasional restock. And even then, companies are prone to force bundles or hide restock events behind membership paywalls.
You will have to live with some the tradeoffs, though. The Xbox Series S model sports 4 TFLOPs of processing power, making it substantially less powerful than the Xbox Series X, which touts 12 TFLOPs. As such, it limits gaming to 1440p instead of 4K. It also comes with less onboard storage (512GB versus 1TB) and lacks an optical Blu-ray drive.
This is a different approach than what Sony took with its disc-less PlayStation 5 (all-digital), which is otherwise the same console as the Blu-ray version.
Tradeoffs out of the way, the Xbox Series S supports gaming at up to 120 frames per second. It also supports up to 8K resolution HDR video playback, as well goodies like variable refresh rate (VRR), auto low-latency mode, and the same audio (DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1, Dolby TrueHD with Atmos, Windows Sonic) and connectivity (3x USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, HDMI 2.1 output, Wi-Fi 5, and 1Gbps LAN). And it's armed with a fast solid state drive (SSD) and Microsoft's Velocity architecture for hyperfast I/O performance.
If you've been pondering the Xbox Series S, now is the time to pounce. This is probably the cheapest it will be in a long while. You could take the $50 savings and apply it to a second controller, perhaps the Xbox Wireless 20th Anniversary Edition, which is on sale for $64.98 at Amazon (save $5.01).
