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Microsoft Readies Cheaper 360
Officially Microsoft is putting on a brave face, saying they won't drop the 360's price even in the console's weakest market: Japan. Just the same (probably in anticipation of Sony's PS3 price drop), the San Jose Mercury news says the company is secretly working on preparing a lower cost Xbox 360 SKU. Called 'Falcon', it's a cost-reduced system using 65nm chips instead of the at-launch 90nm electronics. This ties right into Michael Pachter's expectation of such a cut; it should be noted he doesn't see the DS or Wii prices moving any time soon. Related to all of this, Newsweek's LevelUp blog has two great interviews today: a Peter Moore discussion harkening back to last week's warranty announcement, and a chat with Jack Tretton about the price cut and the 360's hardware issues.
Imagine the losses Sony endures after they cut their price with additional $100. And now the competition leaves them in the dust again. Let's say MS puts the price with $50 down (let's be conservative right). Note, the prices have been de-retardified for better comparison:
Wii: 250 usd
360: 350 usd
PS3: 500 usd
And the killer feature for each console:
Wii: totally new way to control games
360: the best online gaming experience of all consoles
PS3: Blu-Ray
Notice: PS3's killer feature isn't gaming related one. One reason gamers aren't very excited about it...
A price cut is not expected for the wii because it's still selling as fast as they can make it! Microsoft and Sony are having trouble moving stock at this point, so a price cut makes sense for them.
$rant = "Stop using SKU in everyday conversation."
For those of you who need it spelled out, run this at the command prompt: perl -wc split ('', $rant)
The correct term is 'model'.
The 360 "Elite" didn't fix the reliability issues, what makes anybody think that this new version will be any more reliable? Microsoft has had 20 months since launch and they still can't ship reliable consoles.