Despite their spin, they aren't doing appreciably better. People forget that Bone lost momentum almost overnight and 360 had huge supply issues post-launch that lasted half a year. Easier to sell faster when the other consoles in your history either took forever to build momentum (Xbox), had massive quality control issues that basically stopped shipments for months (360) and were such a raging disappointment that people just plain didn't want them other than the few hardcores they hadn't managed to alienate completely.Damn it's so weird.
Series S hasn't sold what they would have expected, and has been widely available since launch and heavily discounted for much of that time.
But without it MS would be way behind Playstation in terms of volume of sales.
Basically are they doing any better than last gen given that they have a ~$250 console available?
They aren't offering what the consumer wants. Plain and simple.
Not including a disc drive in the Series S was a huge fuckup. Can't sell it as a cheap backwards-compatibility model to lower-end consumers and markets if it can't play disc games. I have personally seen people in stores ask about that issue and decide they aren't buying based on that one criteria, because they just wanted something new to play their discs because their last Xbox is dead. The insanely expensive memory expansion doesn't help either. Buy a Series S and the storage module and you could have bought a Series X, which has more storage!