Price hike: ROG Xbox Ally X now $200 more expensive in Australia

Xbox quietly raised the price of its flagship handheld gaming PC by $200 in Australia, with the more expensive listing now live across retailers.

As spotted by Press Start Australia, the ROG Xbox Ally X now costs $1,799 via the Asus online store and JB Hi-Fi, up from its original $1,599 launch price. That works out to be around a 12.5 per cent increase from the price of Xbox and ROG’s portable hardware when it arrived in October last year. At the time of writing, the Australian Xbox website still listed the obsolete $1,599 price.

Xbox’s website still displayed the old pricing this morning. Screenshot: Chris Button.

So far, Japan is the other region affected by the Xbox Ally X’s price increase. In Japan, the high-end version of the device now costs ¥169,800, up from ¥139,800. Converted into Australian dollars, Japan’s increase is close to $275.

At this stage, the lower-spec ROG Xbox Ally still costs $999 in Australia. Aside from a different colour, the ROG Xbox Ally X uses the more powerful AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme chipset and a higher 24GB RAM allocation that uses LPDDR5X memory. By comparison, the cheaper model has 16GB of LPDDR5 memory.

Why the ROG Xbox Ally X price increase?

Neither Xbox nor Asus have publicly explained the reasoning behind the price increase. However, given the current economic environment, including global memory shortages driven by demand for AI datacentres, price increases are on the agenda for many tech companies.

Another factor to consider is the ROG Xbox Ally X’s Australian launch price. In the US, the device launched at US$999, which was US$200 more expensive than the non-Xbox-branded ROG Ally X. Meanwhile, $1,599 in Australia was the same price as ROG’s older hardware, so the recent increase could be to catch up with the comparatively higher overseas pricing.

As I wrote in my review of the ROG Xbox Ally X, I enjoyed the device’s improved comfort and performance, but found the Windows 11 integration frustrating.

GadgetGuy has contacted Xbox for comment.

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