Read the full unredacted email where Microsoft reacts to Sony’s PS5 reveal

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

Last night, the biggest Xbox leak in history revealed multiple new Xboxes, including plans for an ambitious hybrid Xbox that could arrive in 2028. It also revealed communications from Microsoft’s top execs — including one conversation from a joyous Phil Spencer to CEO Satya Nadellaabout the just-announced Sony PlayStation 5.

That email is now available completely unredacted, so you can see just how confident Microsoft seemed in March 2020 right after the PS5 spec reveal.

According to an executive summary prepared by former Xbox CVP Elizabeth Hamren for Microsoft’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and forwarded to Nadella, the company believed the Xbox Series X would have up to 30 percent higher real-world performance compared to the PS5 — a passage that was previously redacted.

“We expect that we’ll have 30% advantage on GPU performance and a 25% memory bandwidth advantage in terms of real-world performance,” she wrote.

Another previously redacted chunk: Microsoft admitted that PS5 might have a “long term” price advantage on expandable storage because Sony chose to use a standard M.2 NVMe SSD slot. “In the long term, their approach may provide price advantage.”

That certainly feels true three years later, as SSD prices have fallen off a cliff, and excellent PS5-ready drives have become exceptionally easy to find.

But neither Sony’s SSD speed advantage nor Microsoft’s teraflop advantage has always played out in the real world. At launch, the PS5 turned out not to need a particularly speedy SSD and yet outperformed the Xbox Series X. In June 2022, Digita