The official XBOX 25th anniversary is approaching fast, with November 15 flanked on both sides by plans for special hardware, celebratory merchandise, and a wave of themed cosmetics from Microsoft's gaming division.

It's almost hard to comprehend, given that I remember the much-anticipated launch of the original XBOX quite clearly.

But time marches on, and XBOX has proven it can iterate its hardware and innovate its experiences over the years.

So, in another mix of self-indulgent nostalgia and reflection on how far the technology has come, I'm looking back at how far performance has leaped across these console generations, from the original XBOX to the Series X and beyond.

XBOX (2001)

Microsoft's first console was comically gigantic and heavy, packed with parts that felt at home in a mid-to-high-tier desktop PC of the time. Its DVD drive sat alongside a 3.5-inch hard drive with 8–10 GB of space, connected via old-school IDE ribbon cables, and together they made up most of the heft. Some of my braver friends replaced their HDDs, requiring injected softmods to work.

Deeper inside, Intel provided a modified Pentium III x86 CPU built on a 180 nm process, which it has since scaled down incredibly far to the latest 18A process node used in its mainstream chips. Running at 733 MHz, the processor sat alongside 64 MB of DDR RAM (that's megabytes, not gigabytes) clocked at 200 MHz and an NVIDIA GeForce 3-based GPU at 233 MHz.

Looking back, it's fascinating how the OG XBOX resembled many of my friends' PCs at the time; we either paired Intel CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs or opted for AMD CPUs with ATI (later acquired by AMD) GPUs. It wasn't a permanent partnership for Microsoft, but it powered a compelling competitor to Sony's PlayStation 2, even if it remained out of reach for my teenage self.

XBOX 360 (2005)

Design-wise, this slim console was a far cry from its behemoth predecessor. Sure enough, the XBOX 360 made an instant impression on me and an even faster dent in my first self-earned paychecks. This time, Microsoft opted for a 64-bit PowerPC-based CPU design from IBM, moving further away from traditional PC architecture, with a massive clock speed jump to 3.2 GHz in its tri-core chip.

This leap to a multi-core processor makes direct clock speed comparisons a little moot, but it's still impressive to see how far the XBOX jumped in one generation. Its unified memory moved from DDR SDRAM to 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 700 MHz for eight times more capacity and triple the bandwidth, and the GPU swapped teams to the ATI-designed 'Xenos' at 500 MHz.

Storage space is where it gets harder to define, because Microsoft offered so many different models, redesigns, and expandable add-ons. The earliest XBOX 360 consoles I saw ranged from selling with no hard drive at all to a 'Premium' model with a 20 GB HDD in the box. For game discs, Microsoft kept DVDs, but increased the read speed and moved to a SATA-connected, dual-layer disc drive.

XBOX One (2013)

Ah, the all-in-one entertainment unit. I bought into the XBOX ONE so eagerly because I wanted to play Quantum Break, but I was also intrigued by its appeal as a TV tuner with live programming snapped to the side of my screen. Of course, I'd never get the promised DVR function, and the Kinect 2.0 sensor did little more than collect dust, but the console still had its gaming appeal.

This is when Microsoft's consoles started resembling PCs again, with an octo-core AMD Jaguar CPU running x86-64 instructions, clocked at 1.75 GHz. It wasn't as mind-blowing as the XBOX 360's evolution, but the XBOX ONE came with 8GB of DDR3 RAM for a 16x generational memory capacity leap; all part of a new console that was generally easier for game developers to target.

This is also where Microsoft's modern AMD era began, building a GPU running at 853 MHz into its singular APU and delivering raw graphical compute performance about five times faster than the XBOX 360. Storage saw a huge jump to 500 GB to support game installations, and Microsoft finally adopted Blu-ray with a BD-ROM disc drive, but games were already going digital.

XBOX Series X (2020)

Yes, the current generation is almost six years old. We're once again entering an age of speculation about what comes next, but the XBOX Series X (and Series S) remain the brand's primary focus. There's even a transparent green 'Xbox Series X25' special edition console and controller launching in November, though I'm still quite satisfied with my original Series X|S variants.

The specs have more nuance these days, but the AMD octo-core Zen 2 CPU runs at 3.66 GHz, paired with an AMD RDNA 2 GPU at 1.82 GHz in another custom APU. For unified memory, Microsoft moved up to 16 GB of GDDR6 RAM, while storage starts with a 1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, depending on the model you choose. Proprietary external storage also returned this generation, up to 4 TB.

An Ultra HD Blu-ray drive was also standard at launch, but later 'All-Digital' models have dropped it, in keeping with an ongoing trend shift towards digital gaming. Some major releases are already launching without physical media, and it's reasonable to assume that the Series X could be Microsoft's last console to support them by default.

XBOX Project Helix (2028?)

So, what comes next? We already know that Project Helix will be "powered by a custom AMD SoC", much like the APUs in previous XBOX consoles, and that high-end visuals are a focus for the brand. Ray-tracing technology, in particular, delivers incredibly realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows, but it's demanding on any hardware, which is where AI comes in.

AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling tech is already making its way to current-gen XBOX consoles via FSR 4.1, and early testing with beta drivers on XBOX Ally handheld gaming PCs shows some promise for improved visual fidelity at the same performance. A new AI-assisted upscaler seems likely for the next XBOX, but it'll depend on what AMD can support with its hardware plans.

Of course, the utterly gigantic elephant in the room right now is the ongoing memory crisis. Shortages have pushed up the cost of components and completely removed some of the highest-end consumer GPUs from sale, as major brands like NVIDIA focus on hardware for large-scale artificial intelligence platforms instead. It'll likely be the most PC-like console yet, but at a severe cost.

Its literal cost will continue to be the most pressing prediction posed by long-serving XBOX gamers. Both of the Series X|S consoles already suffered a price hike, which has many wondering what they'll have to pay for the next-generation console. Is $1,000+ a realistic expectation, or can Microsoft pull some favors to offset the inflated manufacturing costs? Let's see what 2027 reveals.

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Browsing the web without an ad blocker is a brave adventure, especially on the mobile web. That's a big reason why I opted for Microsoft Edge and its built-in blocker on Android so many years ago; I just wanted to read articles in peace. Then again, it's sometimes an experience that's forced upon me when certain pages manage to bypass my ad blockers.

Of course, there are plenty of other browsers to choose from. Almost too many. But I'm not in a position to migrate my bookmarks, history, and logins to yet another Chromium clone just to escape overbearing ads for a while. That's why I've been leaning more on Reading Mode for the past few months or so, and it's a mostly flawless experience.

Reading Mode isn't new, but underappreciated

Microsoft Edge switches into Reading Mode for compatible articles with a single press of the F9 key, while Google Chrome needs a slightly more involved Alt+Shift+R shortcut. Alternatively, a tiny 'page' icon appears in the address bar on desktop browsers, while the Android app uses an 'open book' equivalent and activates the same thing.

Inside, I can toggle a few customization options, like text size, paragraph width, and color themes for the entire page that go further than a simple light or dark mode. A sepia-toned background might be easier on the eyes for some, and overriding the font to serif (or sans-serif) also helps some users read dense text faster. It's designed as an accessibility feature, but it helps in other ways.

The only downside is that, occasionally, some articles are inexplicably incompatible with Reading Mode, and it doesn't work as the icon disappears completely. It's usually specific to a certain website or outlet, which is even more confusing when they're often geared toward written content. I could probably solve it with another browser plugin, but I'd sooner look for a better ad blocker.

It isn't perfect either, but it's better than ads

It's a small change, but switching to Reading Mode on the regular has made the mobile web (and sometimes the desktop web) feel less cluttered and, for the most part, less annoying. Admittedly, there are still times when it goes a little haywire, blowing up tiny .svg icons into full-page eyesores, but, again, it's better than ads that follow me down the page.

There's nothing magical or groundbreaking about it, and no implication that I struck gold on finding some hidden feature. Instead, it feels more like one of those "Huh, I should have been using this for years" kinds of moments. I already contribute to brands that I care about the most through various memberships, but for the rest of the time, I don't want to be bothered with ads.

"Yet you display ads on your website. Curious!"

Indeed, but you also control your own devices, and what you see generally depends on your choices. Advertising can work when it's done well, and we request ads relevant to our content, even if that doesn't always work out. In that, I'll generally only switch to Reading Mode once I've landed on a (usually long-form) article, to keep distractions to a minimum.

Ultimately, I'd much rather read some creative writing and human-driven opinions over an AI summary, and Reading Mode is proving to be the best way to do it. Again, I could consider an even better plugin as a replacement, but so far, I've been quite happy with this setup for now. Hopefully, Microsoft won't mess with it (or remove it entirely) on mobile.

Maybe you've found an even better solution? Perhaps an extension that has a little more determination to work on absolutely any article? I'm open to suggestions. Let me know in the comments if you have a setup that works for you, or what you think about reading articles on the mobile web in general. We'll always forward any feedback on our ads to the right people, too. We hear you.

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