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."

Comments

Slashed?

[frederec]

I like how a price drop of 6.25%, or $30 on the elite version, counts as "slashed" prices.

SKU SKU SKU SKU

[Nozsd]

That's for the premium SKU

NO! It's for the premium XBOX. People don't buy a SKU, they buy the XBOX! Come ON, what is with all the SKU nonsense? I used to work at an EB Games and I nor any of the other employees EVER talked like that. Don't any of you realize how lame you sound?

Re:SKU SKU SKU SKU

[Golgafrinchan]

This may not be how EB employees talk, but it's how A LOT of business people talk.

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. :)

Re:SKU SKU SKU SKU

[hal2814]

"People don't buy a SKU, they buy the XBOX!"

You're very wrong. That little barcode thingy on the box is what costs $449. The rest of the package is their way of saying thanks.

Re:SKU SKU SKU SKU

[bomanbot]

Maybe they always bring up the Stock Keeping Unit to differentiate it from the Wii, which should be labeled a Flying of the Shelf Unit or something ;-)

65nm chips?

[Belisarivs]

The $50 price drop is nice and all, but I'd be more interested in getting a unit that didn't run a significant risk of dying on me, extended warranty or no. What I want to know is when can I get my hands on the long-rumored 65nm chip version.

Re:65nm chips?

[MooseMuffin]

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.

Some odditities in the price drops...

[bomanbot]

Well aside from that annoying habit of attaching that stupid SKU (stop it already. people!), I think those price drops are a bit odd.

Why didnt they drop the price uniformly across the board? With a price drop of $50 the Core version would have been priced directly against the Wii, which I think would have made sense for Microsoft at least from a psychological and marketing standpoint.

And why did the Elite get a price drop that soon? AFAIK it is still pretty new so the people who bought one already could be pretty annoyed (although $30 on formerly $480 is not too deep of a cut).

Oh and one laughable bit from the article:

"The fact that we have been able to keep our launch price longer than any other console while retaining our leadership position demonstrates that consumers believe in the value of Xbox 360," said Mitch Koch

Yeah right and it has nothing to do with the fact that the Xbox 360 was the only next-gen console available for about a year, which makes the leadership thing sorta automatic...

O Come On

[Duffy13]

Honestly, they could do better then this. The amount is negligible, bump it up to to at least $100 then come talk to me.

Integrated wifi

[theantipop]

I'll admit there are a few upcoming 360 games that entice me and at $350 the premium system seems like it's in my range. But the lack of an integrated wifi adapter really still kills it for me. At $100 (!!!) to get the console online, it seems especially ridiculous in light of the offerings of its competitors.

Re:Integrated wifi

[Blakey Rat]

Personally, I put my wireless router in my entertainment center and wire-in the Xbox and my media server, then use my computers wirelessly. But then I'm strange.