Date: March 5th, 2025 8:14 AM
Author: yapping bawdyhouse
The Xbox Series S failed. That’s the official story. A commercial mistake, a footnote in Microsoft's Xbox division decline. But history isn’t always clean.
In the Southern United States, places like Alabama, it lingered. You could find it in trailer parks, in bedrooms with posters of college football teams and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Kids played Quantum Break and Sunset Overdrive, games that barely existed elsewhere. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t the American Northerners story of pawn shops and clearance bins.
American Southerners don’t mind scraps. They don’t mind things that are broken, incomplete. The region is broken. The people are used to making do. The Xbox Series S was a parasite, latching onto the Xbox Series X, siphoning its power, forcing it to process polygons it was never built to handle. A gimped version of the AMD Zen-2 cpu fought to push games forward. The Xbox Series X strained under the weight. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked.
It sold an indeterminate number. Official figures are a blur. But the people I knew in the American South? They had it. More than you’d expect. Maybe Microsoft dumped stock. Maybe stores cut deals. Everywhere else, it was a poor man’s mistake. In the American South, it just was.
The truth is, American Southerners are poor. You think they aren’t, because they live near giant farms, because they drink bourbon in public. But they are. Their governments smooth it over. Their trailers are small. Their salaries are low. They make do. They buy things late, when the price drops. The Xbox Series S fit that life.
It’s gone now, mostly. A curiosity for collectors, a joke for YouTubers. But in the American South, for a time, it lived.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5689258&forum_id=2Elisa#48716331)