Xbox Series X vs Ayaneo Air 1S: Is the 2023 Model Worth the Change?
Xbox Series X or Ayaneo Air 1S? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Daniel Reyes
The short answer
Xbox Series X at 3.8s average against Ayaneo Air 1S at 2h 05m in demanding titles. Where they part company is who they suit: the Xbox Series X is the one to get if you are anyone who plays broadly rather than chasing exclusives, the Ayaneo Air 1S if you are travel, where weight and size matter more than battery.
Price difference: The Xbox Series X undercuts the Ayaneo Air 1S by £170. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | Xbox Series X | Ayaneo Air 1S |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £479 | £649 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 3 / 5 |
| Output | 4K 120Hz, 8K capable | — |
| Chip | Custom AMD Zen 2 / RDNA 2 | AMD Ryzen 7 7840U |
| RAM | 16GB GDDR6 | 16GB LPDDR5 |
| Storage | 1TB NVMe | 512GB NVMe |
| Weight | 4.4kg | 450g |
| Power draw | 211W under load | — |
| Load time | 3.8s average | — |
| Display | — | 5.5in OLED, 60Hz, 400 nits |
| Battery | — | 38Wh |
| Play time | — | 2h 05m in demanding titles |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks as the reviewer’s only games machine, across a fixed set of twelve titles. The same twelve games on every device, handhelds at a metered 200 nits, consoles on a calibrated 4K 120Hz OLED.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Play time | Battery life in three demanding titles at default settings, averaged, from full to shutdown. |
| Sustained frame rate | Thirty minutes of continuous play, reporting the 1% low rather than the average. |
| Load time | Cold boot to playable across ten titles, timed to the tenth of a second. |
| Thermals and noise | Surface temperature at the grip and fan noise at 30cm after the sustained run. |
| Power draw | At the wall under load, because it is the running cost nobody quotes. |
We deliberately do not report peak frame rates in menus, and any performance figure from a launch trailer.
The honest caveat: Handheld battery figures assume default power profiles; capping frame rate changes them substantially.
Where the Xbox Series X wins
- Game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close
- Backwards compatibility going back four generations
- Quick Resume across multiple suspended games
It also has the edge on the intangibles: Quick Resume held five suspended games across a reboot.
Where the Ayaneo Air 1S wins
- 450g makes it the only Windows handheld comfortable for long sessions
- A genuinely excellent small OLED panel
- Strong performance for the size
And in day-to-day use, it is 190g lighter than the Steam Deck OLED.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The Xbox Series X has one clear weak point — a thin first-party exclusive line-up — and the Ayaneo Air 1S has its own: a 38Wh battery in a machine that can draw 30W. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
The Ayaneo Air 1S costs £170 more and scores 1 point higher — roughly £170 per point of difference. Whether that is good value depends on whether the extra buys you 450g makes it the only Windows handheld comfortable for long sessions, or only a number. In our testing it is the former, but only just.
If neither quite fits
Look at the Steam Deck OLED at £479 — it scored 5 out of 5 and suits anyone with a large Steam library who wants it to just work. If the budget will not stretch, the Xbox Series S at £249 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the Xbox Series X the thing you adjust to is a thin first-party exclusive line-up, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its output (4K 120Hz, 8K capable) is the part you stop thinking about. The Ayaneo Air 1S asks for a different accommodation: a 38Wh battery in a machine that can draw 30W, against a display of 5.5in OLED, 60Hz, 400 nits that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The Ayaneo Air 1S is 3 years newer, which usually means 3 more years of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: a 38Wh battery in a machine that can draw 30W on one side, a thin first-party exclusive line-up on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the Xbox Series X, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 3 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the Xbox Series X for game Pass is the best value in gaming and nothing is close. Buy the Ayaneo Air 1S for 450g makes it the only Windows handheld comfortable for long sessions.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the gaming we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Xbox Series X vs Legion Go: Is the 2023 Model Worth the Change? and Xbox Series X vs Xbox Series S: Is the Xbox Series X Worth £230 More?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
