Does "adorable" have some other meaning?

"The most powerful Xbox ever, now adorably all digital...Giving our fans more to love."

-leaked Xbox thing

I think we have very different definitions of "adorable" and "more."

Switch to Android? Like a
bunch of barbarians?

Just to be clear, there's nothing adorable about removing functionality, especially when it doesn't come along with a reduction in price. I fully admit that I'm spiraling into the kind of Andy Rooney-esque curmudgeonliness that is suspicious of anything new, but I don't think I'm wrong about this. Remember when Apple removed the headphone jack from iPhones and then called the move "an act of courage"? and we all hated them but bought iPhones anyway, because what are else are we going to do?

On the bright side, thanks to rapidly
spiraling climate change, it probably
won't matter much longs.

It just doesn't-huh? Oh, right, should probably clarify before you--hey, where're you going? Don't you want to hear my un-researched thoughts on the video game industry? The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and Activision in an attempt to stop the former from buying the latter. They eventually withdrew the suit, and now Microsoft is set to buy Activision and bring us another step closer to just one giant company owning everything in the world. The important thing is that Microsoft uploaded some documents to the court and those documents leaked. Whoops, right?

"No, blander! I want people to forget it even
exists! Think Alexa, but with less personality"

-Microsoft design team

Right. Among the documents was that image of a new old Xbox. That is, a new version of the high-end version of the Xbox. Confused? Literally everyone is, because Microsoft can't get its naming conventions together. The current Xboxes are the Series X, and marginally less power-full Series S which doesn't include a disc drive, but costs a hundred dollars less. Still confused? Understandable. The idea is that you can pay less for the S and buy games digitally instead of going to a store and buying physical media.

I guess our living rooms no longer
have to look like this, but still...

Which cool, kids these days don't always want to bother trudging down to Best Buy or wherever, and increasingly the only people interested in physical games are the harder core fans that will buy special editions. But even then publishers are even trying to foist special editions of games that come with all the tchotchkes but no disc. Ok, foist is a strong word, no one's holding a gun to anyone's head, but still, I'm hard pressed to envision a scenario in which the consumer benefits from not having the physical media. So why would anyone want to pay the same amount of money--four-hundred dollars--for a Series X that doesn't have a drive? Who knows? According to IGN, most Xbox game sales are digital now, so what do I know? Like I alluded to before, I'm a curmudgeon who resists change.

Will this thing ever be a thing? It was, after all, a leak of internal documents, so it's entirely possible that it will never see the light of day. And maybe this is where gaming is headed. Digital only, that is. I and a lot of people--olds mostly--prefer a physical copy of games, but not everybody is that particular. And I suppose most of this to me is the principle. Selling people something without actually selling them something feels weird and NFT-y. Good for shareholders, but not great for everyone else.

"Speaking of, I just don't understand why people aren't more interested in NFT's? 
Don't they know how profitable they are? You know, for us?"

-the people who sell NFT's