Microsoft's next-gen Xbox isn't a console, but a PC in a 'TV-friendly shell' says insider

Microsoft's next-generation Xbox console is reportedly a "TV-friendly shell" according to the latest rumors... ready to battle Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 console.

In a recent interview on The Xbox Two Podcast, Windows Central executive editor Jez Corden corrected rumors that some Call of Duty developers have access to dev kits for "the next Xbox". He corrected this by saying "there is no Xbox dev kit" and that these rumors were "just not accurate".

Corden said that the "whole idea of the next Xbox" is that "it's going to be a PC in essence" and that it would arrive in a TV-friendly shell that also has a "specific set of specs in mind, so developers would be building for a Windows PC in a way... but, in such a way that they know exactly what the specs will be, so they can optimize exactly for it. So, when you're optimizing for PC it's like you've got to target as many specs as you can imagine, or at least what's popular in the Steam Hardware Survey. But if you know exactly what's in the Xbox you can optimize around that".

Corden continued: "Maybe you're right, maybe it's like the Call of Duty stuff is accurate, but the devkit talk is more about what kind of specs they've been told to target for the next Xbox if it is a traditional Windows developer environment, and if you are cutting off past-gen, I mean that would be a good reason to do it, right? Because you're no longer building for Xbox ERA system, which is what the developer environment is called of the current Xbox, it's ERA which is I believe stands for 'Exclusive Resource Access"and it refers to the fact that the current Xbox operating system is split into separate operating systems and if you are running a game you have exclusive resource access to the whole console, whereas an app for example, running Xbox doesn't have full resource access".