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Xbox One In 2019! (Still Worth It?) (Review)

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Xbox One Offers Affordable Ecosystem Access

Six years after it launched alongside a $499 price tag and a mandatory Kinect bundle, the original Xbox One is having its final moment as a budget buy. Tech creator Simple Alpaca’s review, “Xbox One In 2019! (Still Worth It?),” puts Microsoft’s launch-era console back on the bench to see whether it still holds up against its own successors, the Xbox One S and Xbox One X, as the eighth-generation cycle winds down ahead of next-gen hardware. The verdict hinges less on raw power and more on price, since the base unit’s specs haven’t changed since 2013 but its street value has collapsed.

• The original Xbox One shipped with a 1.75 GHz 8-core AMD custom CPU, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 500GB internal hard drive.
• Its biggest drawbacks in 2019 are a bulky chassis, an external power brick, and no native 4K media playback.
• The 2016 Xbox One S counters with a built-in power supply, a 40% smaller footprint, HDR support, and 4K video playback.

The Hardware Reality Check

Nothing about the original Xbox One’s internals has aged well by 2019 standards. The 1.75 GHz 8-core AMD chip and 8GB of DDR3 RAM were middling even at launch, and the 500GB hard drive fills up fast once a handful of modern AAA titles and their day-one patches land on it. The console’s size doesn’t help its case either — that boxy launch unit is noticeably larger and heavier than either revision that followed it, and it still relies on a clunky external power brick instead of the internal supply Microsoft eventually built into the One S.

The review is blunt about the console’s most glaring omission: no native 4K media support, meaning it can’t stream or play back Ultra HD content the way the One S and One X can. For anyone building a modern home theater setup around a 4K television, that’s a hard limitation the original hardware simply can’t be updated past.

Advantages of the Base Console

The one category where the original Xbox One holds its ground is price. Its resale and refurbished market value has cratered since 2013, which makes it the cheapest physical door into Microsoft’s console ecosystem — Xbox Live, backward compatibility, and Xbox Game Pass all included. That’s the crux of the review’s argument: this isn’t a console you buy for performance, it’s one you buy because it’s dirt cheap and still functional.

The primary appeal of the base console in 2019 is its heavily depreciated price on the second-hand market — it’s an entry-level gateway, not a performance pick.

Game Pass access is a real differentiator here, since it puts a rotating library of first-party and third-party titles in front of buyers for a flat monthly fee regardless of which Xbox One revision they own. Combined with backward compatibility for select Xbox 360 titles, the base console still functions as a legitimate everyday gaming machine — it just does it slower and bulkier than the hardware that replaced it.

The Case for Spending a Little More

Simple Alpaca’s comparison keeps circling back to the Xbox One S as the smarter buy for only a modest price bump. The One S trims the footprint by 40%, folds the power supply into the console itself, adds HDR support, and unlocks 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and streaming playback — all things the original launch unit simply cannot do. For anyone who already owns a 4K display, that gap alone tends to tip the recommendation away from the base model.

The review frames this as less about raw gaming performance than about full functionality as a media device. Both consoles run the same games at the same resolution targets, but only the S and the X-series hardware bring the multimedia features modern living rooms expect.

With Microsoft’s next generation already looming on the horizon and titles like the ones showcased at the Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase pointing toward where the ecosystem is headed, the original 2013 Xbox One’s role in 2019 is narrow but real: it’s a cheap way to get a foot in the door on Game Pass and backward compatibility before deciding whether to jump up to the One S, the One X, or wait out the generation entirely.