Out of all the things these next gen systems can and can’t do, I never thought I’d be told to ‘not’ stand my system a certain way. But this seems to be the case wih the Xbox One, as Microsoft’s Albert Penello has stated that the console doesn’t make nice with a vertical orientation.
Said Penello to GameSpot while at TGS: “We don’t support vertical orientation; do it at your own risk. It wouldn’t be a cooling problem, we just didn’t design the drive for vertical. Because it’s a slot loading drive, we just didn’t design it for both”.
Penello went on to say that Microsoft discovered that about 80% of Xbox 360 owners have their system in a horizontal position. I, myself, have both of my consoles –Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3– positioned horizontally, but that’s mostly because I’m afraid it would fall over if it were vertical.
This does make me wonder how the Xbox 360, PS3 and PS4 all manage to have slot loading drives and work just fine, regardless or their orientation, but the Xbox One cannot. Well, we’re told to do it at our own risk, so I guess we’ll find out what happens to an Xbox One in a vertical position when it launches in November. Who wants to experiment?