How much internal storage will the new Xbox reportedly pack? One measly terabyte (TB), at least according to some early rumors. (Other storage capacities may also become available but that's unclear at this point.)
It's like having all the best things in the world thrown at you with some small print at the bottom that completely changes everything. Don't get me wrong, I'm ridiculously excited for Project Scorpio, as is everyone else here at Windows Central.
But while you can throw all the teraflops in the world at me, cheaping out on internal storage will still leave a bad taste in my mouth as I'm handing over my hard earned money to buy one.
Everything we know about the next Xbox, 'Project Scorpio'
1TB is just not enough
Project Scorpio isn't using solid-state-drive (SSD) based storage, therefore there's honestly no reason not to give us more. Games are larger than ever before, and Project Scorpio isn't suddenly going to change that. It's going to make the problem worse. Halo 5 and Gears of War 4 are more than 100GB each on the Xbox One. Take off the space reserved for the system and even with a 1TB console you've already chewed through a lot of that internal storage.
In a completely unscientific way, you can go to Amazon right now and buy a 2TB 7200RPM Seagate hard disk drive (HDD) for under $70. For $100, you can double that to 4TB. Microsoft's margins are sure to be fine on the console, but given that manufacturers pay much less than consumers anyway, the company should give us more.
HDD storage is fundamentally cheap. Its prime purpose in this day and age is mass storage. So give the masses masses of it!
External drives are not the answer
External drives are an additional cost to Xbox owners. Yes, it's absolutely fantastic that we can use them to expand our game libraries, but they are not the answer. It'd cost less for consumers if Microsoft put more storage inside in the first place and charged a little more for the console.
External drives are also unsightly and not something everyone wants in their living rooms.
Or Microsoft could follow Sony's lead and make it easy to upgrade the internal drive. We don't know if that's the case yet, but I for one would take that option every time instead of plugging in drives with cables.
There needs to be more
Hopefully, there is more than just a 1TB option. And there may very well be. A leaked spec sheet isn't the best source of definitive information, and the 2TB options that have been available for the Xbox One S leave plenty of hope. But those weren't the norm. A special edition with more storage is less awesome than just giving everyone more to begin with.
There's a lot we still don't know about Project Scorpio, and we'll hopefully learn more at E3 later this year. Just as 8GB and then 16GB became less viable on smartphones, 1TB on a console should be swiftly swept away as we go into the next evolution. There simply has to be more than a 1TB option.
Do you agree? Or am I ranting about something that ultimately doesn't matter? Let me know in the comments below.
