My Xbox Mini Fridge finally arrived this week and I have to say, the experience has left me, well, a bit cold.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen my excitement growing this week as I realised my long-awaited novelty mini fridge would soon be arriving.
Yes. YES. My stupid, impractical Xbox mini fridge is finally on its way to me. pic.twitter.com/J8qGQPJVam
— David Smith (@RhunWords) October 24, 2022
Well, it showed up yesterday and the getting-to-know-you process has been bumpy, to say the least. This is a weird little device, that puts the meme of its very existence ahead of any real practicality as an appliance.
I’m sure there’s plenty of you rolling your eyes and saying “No shit, David, you paid $230 to find out it’s a gimmick?” Listen, when someone tells you they’re selling you a mini fridge, you might consider that you are receiving a product not unlike the little fridges you find in your hotel room. The ones that cost you $45 for even looking at a 14-month-old can of VB.
And you’re not wrong. Maybe I should have set my expectations a lot lower. Nevertheless, here are my first impressions of the Xbox Mini Fridge.
1. It took forever to get here
I ordered by Xbox Mini Fridge back in August when JB Hi-Fi re-opened preorders. I thought, it’s pricey but maybe I’ll get a review out of it, so I submitted my order expecting it would arrive a little after its release date in September. That date blew by, with JB advising it would now arrive in October. It did not, JB revising this new arrival date to the rather more concerning “At Some Point, But Probably November”. There was no communication between these updates, and no real explanation for why it was taking so long to get the stock.
It also seemed as though there had been a supplier or manufacturer change around the fridges, because the dimensions listed on the JB website had changed. It was all very weird, and no-one was really saying anything.
And then, out of the blue this week, months after I put the order in, I got a notification that my Xbox Mini Fridge was finally on the way.
2. It arrived covered in someone else’s grubby fingerprints
When it finally got here, it was grubby. Whoever had packed my Xbox Mini Fridge had left their dusty fingerprints all over the device. On this list of complaints I have, this honestly ranks fairly low, but it leapt out at me because it’s rare to take fresh home electronics out of the box to find they’ve been visibly fondled.
I think this probably speaks to the likely rushed conditions of the unit’s construction and shipping more than any lack of care on the packer’s part.
3. It looks quite cool though
Manufacturer Ukonic has done a pretty good job of getting the look of the Xbox Series X down pat. To put it across the room and compare it to the real thing, it does indeed look like a perfect replica of the Xbox Series X. They’ve gone to the trouble of recreating not only its exact shade of matte black, but its more unique features like its bright glowing power button and the details of its case and fascia. The moulding on the back of the device reflects all the ports that adorn its real-world counterpart, and Ukonic has gone to the extra trouble of ensuring that the USB port on the console’s front face is represented here. Yes, this is a mini fridge with a working USB port for charging your devices.
4. The door opens from the left, not the right
I don’t know why, but this bugs me. The actual, proper fridge we have in the kitchen opens from left to right and it’s never bothered me before. But this? This feels like it should open from right to left. I cannot explain to you why I feel that way, I just do.
5. You can turn the lights off, but it might take you a second to realise how
The first thing you notice when you plug your Xbox Mini Fridge in and turn it on is that it produces an ominous green glow from the top of the console (which the real Xbox Series X does not produce) and a bright white light from its pretend power button (which the real Xbox Series X does produce). There are buttons on the fridge that allow to turn these lights off, but they might not be readily apparent to you. This is because they are bound to buttons that appear on the real Xbox Series X console. The button to turn the Xbox logo light on and off is the controller sync button. If you’re looking at the fridge standing upright, that’s the button located above the front USB port in the bottom right. The switch for the big green light on top of the console is bound to the eject button above the “disc tray”.
This means that, without perusal of the menu or poking around to see if any of the buttons actually worked, you could easily miss these on/off switches. If that were the case, and you wished to store the device in a room you might use for watching movies or television, and you liked to turn the lights down when you do so, you’d have to live with a bright white and green beacon in the corner of the room.
Anyway, just a PSA. The front buttons do work and they turn the lights on and off.
6. You can’t actually run it like a fridge
For most people, a fridge is something that is always on, keeping your perishable items or drinks cool until you want or need them. The Xbox Mini Fridge, by its own admission, is not the kind of fridge you can run all the time. In fact, right there in the instructions (and repeated on a sticker inside the door) is a notice that the device should only be run on a situational basis.
This sort of defeats the purpose of being a little bar fridge, making it more of an esky with a bit of extra oomph. Indeed, the Xbox Mini Fridge has no thermostat so you can’t actually adjust the temperature inside. The box and manual describe the device as both a mini fridge and a thermoelectric cooler. I think the second descriptor is much more apt and, fun as it is, maybe they shouldn’t have been allowed to call it a mini fridge.
7. It isn’t big enough to fit your damn cans properly
Here’s the real heartbreaker though. The Xbox Mini Fridge was not designed for robust 375ml Australian soft drink can sizes. Rather, it was designed for inferior (and slightly smaller) 355ml (or 12 fl oz) American soft drink cans. What this means is that the two shelves inside the main fridge cavity are about 2-3mm too small to fit an Australian can of Coke No Sugar standing up. Energy drink cans, like a standard Red Bull, are slightly taller again putting them about 5mm too high to be stood up.
This means your only option is to lie the cans down on each shelf, but then another problem rears its head: the cavity isn’t wide enough for more than two cans, with a gap between them. You can then stack a single extra can on top of this gap to squeeze three standard Coke No Sugar cans per shelf for a total of nine cans. Here’s the promo shot:
And here’s the reality:
Big Homer’s barbeque vibes.
Now, you can remove the shelves to create some extra stacking space but that still doesn’t quite give you enough room to play with. It’s just a lot of compromises and, for an organisational freak like me, it makes my eye twitch.
8. It took a while to get cool, but once it did it worked pretty well
The Xbox Mini Fridge took a couple of hours to really get that thermoelectric cooler cranking. The instructions say you’ll get best results when you let the fridge pre-cool before you go putting any cans in, which makes sense. Once the fridge did hit peak coolness, it was able to chill a full set of cans — four Red Bulls and six Coke No Sugars in pretty quick succession. So it’s got that going for it.
9. It’s portable for camping, which I did not know
I was not aware that the fridge came with a car charger in the box. This means you could take it camping with you, or make it part of a party in the backyard without having to run an extension cable. Cool little extra feature, I’m sure someone will get a lot of use out of that.
In the end, the Xbox Mini Fridge serves its purpose: a dopey meme device that will look fine as a piece of furniture in a Twitch streamer’s bisexually lit backdrop. But if you actually want to use it as a mini fridge, you will find it rather lacking. I’m certainly glad I got one, and had the chance to use it, but I don’t know that I’ll keep it.
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