[Journalists and fans have been pointing out for months that Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are very confusing console names, especially since Microsoft already sells systems called Xbox One X and Xbox One S. The only question, however, is whether these are truly soon-to-be-disappointed customers or simply bots who know nothing.

Andrew Alerts, an Amazon deals contributor on Twitter, shared some interesting information about the Xbox One X yesterday (September 22), after the initial pre-order fever for the Xbox Series X had died down a bit: the sales rank for the Xbox One X on Amazon is up 747 percent, from 2,804 to 4.

The first possibility that Andrew and many of his readers came up with was that people simply confused the two consoles. It is not at all difficult to see how that could happen. In the frenzy to pre-order an Xbox console with an "X" in the title, it is very likely that a user would order another console by mistake. (This is especially true since Amazon's search interface is generally poor at pinpointing specific products, but that's another discussion.) Regardless of whether buyers were unaware of the differences between the two consoles or were simply desperate to click "add to cart" before something disappears, there is a good chance that there will be a surge in new owners of the Xbox One X who are disappointed.

But another possibility is more amusing, and has a causal aspect: from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 to the Xbox Series X, vicious duffers have set up complex bot systems to place pre-orders, usually in time for the big holidays, at abysmally high prices. It's no secret that they resell them.

Unlike humans, however, bots do not have the ability to distinguish between two similarly named products. It is quite possible that many duffers find themselves sitting on a stock pile of old consoles instead of the more desirable new consoles.

Of course, unless one hears from a confused buyer or bot programmer (the latter is unlikely), one cannot be sure which is what actually happened. Occam's Razor suggests the former, but we cannot rule out the very real possibility that computer systems exacerbate human stupidity and greed. In any case, remember that the Xbox Series X is Microsoft's new next-generation console, while the Xbox One X is the current console, which was discontinued three years ago.