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Elite Won't Replace Premium or Core Skus
As the day has progressed, more information about the 'Elite' has become available. GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that the other two 360 skus will still be available. The Elite is not replacing either of them. Interestingly, there's no word on a price drop for them either. Major Nelson's most recent podcast has several interviews and details about the new offering, which you may find informative. There's more analysis available, if you find that interesting: CVG wonders aloud who is going to buy this thing, while a Wedbush Morgan analyst mentioned to GamesIndustry.biz that he thinks this validates the PS3 strategy. "'It appears to me that Microsoft sees the writing on the wall - Blu-ray is going to win the format wars ... Ultimately, Microsoft will likely offer a Blu-ray drive with the 360 Elite, and I think consumers will be able to select based solely upon other drivers.' Pachter also believes that although the Xbox 360 Elite will register with early adopters of hi-def content, the current 20GB model will still be sufficient for many consumers."
I work in a company that does open world games (and good ones actually). I have to tell you the "hobbling" isn't true. The 512 megs of ram that we have on the system is a bigger issue than anything that has to do with the media we are working on.
Blu-ray sounds great but what do you need to fill it with. As it is the amount of money we pay to get the game shipped now is a lot. Cost is what's stopping us from making bigger or more diverse games, rather then size of the media again.
The people who are hurt the most by this are the JRPG companies who just explode with FMVs, blue dragon is a 3 dvd game, other then them I've heard no complaints about the size of the media. Hell, The only reasons they are filling up Blu-rays are they are using "stupid" tricks like uncompressed audio for Metal gear solid. I just have a simple question. Now that both systems are out, and we already have seen that the 360's dvd has a higher read speed then the ps3's blu-ray device (overall blu-ray SHOULD be faster, but in these two actual system the 360's drive is faster). Why are you using larger files sizes rather then using the "extra" power of the ps3 to uncompress these files? The simple answer is no, the ps3 isn't that powerful (Insomniac today claims you have 8 cores? funny we only have access to 6 cores).
In the end blu-ray isn't going to be the answer. Sony's system has some good marks, but blu-ray isn't necessary, and the Cell processor is doing more to hurt the developer than it is helping it.
If anything the 360 developer's biggest problem has nothing to do with DVDs, it's due to the fact that the Hard drive is non standard and we can't guarantee using that for caching, but that's a relatively minor complaint in the long run.
...just not a common term for it.
SKU stands for "stock keeping unit". It has an actual meaning and proper use, but it's always struck me as ludicrous to use it outside of a store stockroom.
When I was in high school (and this was 20 years ago now), I worked as a stockboy in an electronics store. We used "SKU" the way it was intended, just as stockboys probably still do now. Every product has a "SKU number" used like a UPC code to track stock counts, and that eventually got shorthanded to refer to the product itself. (Note that I'm not contradicting you, just adding a little more info.)
It's always annoyed me when I see this in regular life, just like I see games now referred to as "IP's". In most cases, it's a vain attempt at looking "hip", as if you're cool enough to throw around industry-speak. Usually, though, the true origins of such terms come from marketdroids, lawyers, or worse.
There's no reason even for an analyst to use the term "SKU". They're not tracking stock. It actually would make somewhat more sense to use UPC as a generic term meaning "product model". I think terms like this are always annoying, though, and would much prefer it if everybody could just settle on plain English outside of their work environment. Why do all of our casual conversations have to include so much meaningless industry jargon?
"Model" is a perfectly fine word to use. #7 definition at dictionary.com: "a style or design of a particular product". There's no reason to repurpose industry acronyms when we have perfectly meaningful English words already. Unless you REALLY don't have time to utter that extra syllable.
Plus, the hard drive is 179. So, you have the core at 300 + the 179 hard drive. = Elite + headset + wireless controllers