Xbox One S and X are virtually all sold out at MS and they're not coming back in stock because MS has likely stopped production. Lockhart is the replacement for One S/X.
Microsoft has two pricing tiers: $499 and $299
Right now they're occupied by the One X and One S. One X is the high-end 4K current gen gaming machine. One S is the low-end 1080p current gen gaming machine. These are now dead for all intents and purposes.
They will be replaced by new machines with the Xbox Series architecture. This architecture is defined by these three components:
- Zen 2 CPU
- RDNA 2 GPU
- Velocity Architecture NVME technology
Series X-Plays games designed for the Xbox Series architecture. Cost: $499
Series S-(Name doesn't make sense, but it's consistent with the current gen tiers) Plays games designed for the Xbox Series architecture at up to 1440p. Cost: $299
This route is much better than what Sony is doing. Here's why:
3rd party devs are not going to ignore the PS4's 100+ million install base. Sony may have given itself this luxury, but devs need to eat and will need to gimp games to run on the PS4. Thus the amount of cross gen stuff shown at Sony's conference. Devs will have to support two completely different architectures.
Microsoft on the other hand is creating a lower priced console with the same architecture as the Series X that will be priced to get One S/X users to upgrade as quickly as possible. This will ensure that developers are able to target their games to take advantage of a single architecture. No, current One X, or One S owners won't go away overnight, but Lockhart will be priced or MS will heavily incentivize them to upgrade as quickly as possible.
Sony won't have a comparable machine to compete at this price-point. Sure, they could price the discless PS5 at $299 and rain on MS parade, but then they would have to price the disc version at $399. Does Sony have the capital to absorb this humungous hit? Can they subsidize this with income from other services?
With Xcloud being basically another Azure subscription, Phil Spencer has the attention of Satya Nadella. Whatever it cost to get Azure subscriptions, Nadella will write that check. Even if it's $2 billion to make $5 billion in ARR down the line.
Lockhart makes sense if you understand that it's just a replacement for the One X/S to occupy that mainstream pricepoint with something on the same architecture as the Series X. This way devs don't have to gimp game design and can simply scale GPU performance like they do on PC.