After much hemming and hawing, Asus and Microsoft are finally ready to talk pricing on their handheld PC team-ups, the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X. It’s nothing too egregious in the King’s sterling, with the Xbox ROG Ally confirmed at £499.99 and the Xbox ROG Ally X at £799.99 – while hardly chump change, these are pretty standard prices for entry-level and premium portables respectively.
Those in the US, however, will be paying $599.99 for the ROG Xbox Ally and $999.99 for the ROG Xbox Ally X, the latter representing a big increase on Asus’ current ROG Ally X model.
That, at least, won’t quite make it the most expensive Windows handheld around, as the MSI Claw 8 AI+ has also hit (give or take a penny) the one-grand mark in recent months. But still, this looks an awful lot like the effects of US tariff policies, with the added cost of importing Taiwan- and China-made hardware being passed down to aspiring owners. It’s a process Microsoft’s console business will be familiar with, its current generation of lounge-dwelling Xboxes having hiked their prices twice in the past year, with big green fingers pointing at macroeconomic conditions on both occasions.
By contrast, the ROG Xbox Ally X’s UK price merely matches that Asus’ 2024 predecessor, while upgrading its innards with a newer, faster AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme APU. The ROG Xbox Ally, mind, still seems like something of a wildcard. It’s only £21 more than the equivalent 512GB Steam Deck OLED, and £50 less than the already budget-minded Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS. Yet mystery surrounds its own APU, the Ryzen Z2 A, a chip whose four cores and ageing RDNA 2 graphics processor gives it specs largely in line with the original Steam Deck. If performance is a match as well, then it’ll struggle with the GPU-threshers that are modern 3D games.
That said, Microsoft and Asus aren’t just banking on framerates. The ROG Xbox Ally duo will be the first Windows 11-powered handhelds to include the operating system’s new, bespoke, Xbox-branding gaming mode, where many of Win11’s extraneous guff remains switched off at launch to preserve speed and batter life. It’ll have a more handheld-friendly UI than standard Windows as well, potentially wiping out a major advantage that SteamOS has always held over its desktop-tuned rival.
I’ll be seeing whether this mode will be worth the money, especially for stateside punters, with a review prior to the handhelds’ October 16th launch date. That’s assuming they’re not partaking in ongoing boycott calls against Microsoft for their alleged dealings with the Israeli military, including providing access to Azure cloud storage and AI tools for the purpose of running a mass surveillance programme against Palestinians. Microsoft have, reportedly, since revoked this access.