Xbox 360 Price Drop Official
GameDaily is reporting that the $50 price drop on the Xbox 360 is now official. That's for the premium SKU, different boxes have different drops: "The Elite SKU (120GB) has been slashed by $30, bringing it down to $449.99, and the Core SKU now has an MSRP that is $20 lower at $279.99. All prices are effective August 8th. In addition, the special Halo 3 themed Xbox 360 that was casually mentioned by Peter Moore at this year's E3 Microsoft press conference has been assigned an estimated retail price of $399.99. The Xbox 360 Halo 3 Special Edition Console will arrive in stores this September and will feature "an authentic Spartan green-and-gold finish," a matching Xbox 360 Wireless Controller, Xbox 360 20GB hard drive, Xbox 360 Headset, an Xbox 360 Play and Charge Kit, and more."
I've worked in market research, and there we spoke of SKU's all the time. That way, we didn't have to adjust our vocabulary depending on what kind of product we were talking about. That is, instead of having to say "three Xboxes" or "three cereals" or "three toilet bowl cleaners," we could refer to each of them as "three SKU's."
I don't see a problem either way. Just depends on if you prefer typical EB lingo or typical business lingo. :)
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I would bet that they don't plan to tell you. MS has been been putting improved heatsinks in 360s manufactured after march/april and they didn't bother to tell anybody about that. I would assume that the heatsink, and not the process shrink is the solution to the overheating problems. It allows them to own up the the red ring problem, offer the warranty and be able to say the problem has already been fixed. See here for more discussion of that, and how to tell if you have the new heatsink or not.