Slashdot Mirror
XBox Adding HD Tuners Next Year
iloveCarla writes "Microsoft is partnering with Toshiba to turn the Xbox into a full fledged HTPC. With built-in HD DVD, a larger hard drive, revamped "MCE" interface, and possibly HDTV tuners, the Xbox would be in a better position to compete against the PS3 in the race to serve as the defacto entertainment hub for couch potatoes. According to the article "The new device is expected to be released late in 2008 or at the 2009 CES show in Las Vegas."
Unbelievable - "better position to compete"? Are they so incredibly afraid of Sony, then, despite their enormous lead? Or are things not quite as rosy for the XBox as various sources would have us believe?
The one feature that would make the 360 into a descent media centre would be support for SMB (aka Window's) shares, so you can easily access all the media from your PC or NAS. It's the thing that makes XBOX Media Centre rock. No-one wants to be forced to use Media Player 11's crappy media streaming when they could just as easily browse their network shares.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yet another Xbox model? Might as well get a PC that isn't locked down and 100% controlled by Microsoft.
...to own one of these new 360's you'll need to buy a tv license as if you own any equipment capable of receiving TV signals you need to own a license. That's an extra £130/year (unless of course you have a license anyway).
Flibberdy
the PS2 did cost $500, thats what i paid for mine when i got it at launch.
The PS3 needs help developing native X drivers that work on the Cell's SPEs. Linux currently runs on the PS3 Cell's PPC core, but that doesn't even have the accelerated graphics that cheap PCs have on their videocards (the PS3 RSX is locked out to Linux). The SPEs are so much more powerful, and designed for exactly the pixel pushing that X needs. Once they're running instead of sitting there, the PS3 will be by far the best $600 HD terminal out there. Especially with home theater/automation systems on it like LinuxMCE. But it needs help across that basic milestone.
--
make install -not war
Just ask sega about how well console "upgrades" sell - eg MegaCD, 32X, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
### It's not "guessing" at all, it's the logical conclusion to draw from the fact that the chips had detached from the motherboard due to overheating and weaker solder.
Yeah, but how then did it take Microsoft way over a year to figure that one out and (maybe) fix it? Nobody knows the failure rate of currently released XBox360s and plenty of those that Microsoft had 'repaired' after they broke, broke again a while later.
### If you're waiting on Microsoft to admit they did something wrong to believe they did something wrong, then you'll be waiting a long time.
When Microsoft would want to sell a few more boxes they better start to be honest to the user. I am just a little sick of them telling us bullshit over and over again. Any word on when they will fix the DVD scratching issue that has been their for now almost two years (sorry, but blaming the user is *not* the right thing to do when a pair of rubber pads could fix it)?
The problem with releasing new generations of a gaming platform is that it spits your existing installed base. It forces users to decide whether to upgrade (and many won't if the price is significant, as it is with high end graphics/processor upgrades) and it forces developers to decide whether they want to target their games to actually benefit from the advances of the new generation, or to aim for the lowest common denominator.
Incidentally, that was the same problem for the Amiga, NeXT, and other advanced platforms: why would the mass market upgrade? The catch-22 for users and developers meant the market instead gravitated toward the basic PC, which slowly evolved in a lowest common denominator way and finally caught up to advances released a decade or so prior.
Now look at the PS3: Sony's biggest competition isn't the Xbox 360, it's the PS2. Microsoft's console is big in the US, but has very limited sales outside. The 360 has sold more units so far, but that's because has been on sale twice as long as the PS3. Since the PS3's release, Sony has shipped around 7 million units, while Microsoft has only shipped an additional 2 million. In contrast, Nintendo has sold 12 million Wii units. Xbox sales look good only if you can't do math or don't understand how time relates to the graph of a sales chart.
Nintendo Wii vs Sony PlayStation 3 vs Microsoft Xbox 360: Q2 2007
Sony is worried about two things. First, there's already 115 million PS2s in the world; the PS3 has to be desirable enough to convince those users to upgrade. $500 for fancier versions of the same games is a difficult upgrade to force. Until it can sell 10-20 million PS3s, developers will make more money delivering new titles for the PS2, because there are more users buying games for it. Sony is still selling cheap PS2 units, so it's competing against itself on price.
The second problem for Sony (and the reason it competes with itself) is that it's trying to push sales of Blu-Ray players and drive down the manufacturing costs of blue lasers. That means Sony is willing to lose money selling the PS3 at an initial loss, just to get Blu-Ray widely installed. Microsoft has taken sides with Toshiba in selling the rival HD-DVD format. If Sony weren't pushing Blu-Ray in the PS3, HD-DVD would be ahead in installed base.
At last count:
HD-DVD standalone players sold around 150k units
Blu-Ray standalone players sold around 100k units
However:
HD-DVD options Xbox 360 players sold around 150k units
Blu-Ray players bundled with the PS3 have sold 7 million units
So Sony's PS3 game isn't just about replacing the PS2, it's also about pushing the Blu-Ray disc format. It has single-handedly turned the HD wars around and put HD-DVD in a distant second place to Blu-Ray: 7,100,000 to 300,000.
Without Blu-Ray, it wouldn't make much sense for Sony to be trying to sell an expensive games console to replace the PS2. The games war is being won by the Wii, which costs much less and has no installed base to compete against, thanks to the poor sales of the GameCube. Nintendo can't make enough to meet demand. Nintendo also doesn't care about selling an HD platform.
Microsoft is being left in the middle, selling a console that's losing on the game popularity end to the Wii, and losing on the HD end to Sony. It's also competing against itself with in the area of PC gaming; the Xbox 360 overlaps with PC gaming, eating up the cheap end of a finite market in the US. At least it's trying to make it easier for developers to redeploy PC games in console versions.
Blu-ray vs HD-DVD in Next Generation Game Consoles
PlayStation 3 vs. Xbox 360 vs. Nintendo Wii
With their crapulent MCE OS offerrings MS has just about convinced Intel there is no market for HTPC. Now we find that MS wants the whole market with its non-Intel XBox.
Will Intel respond with some non-Microsoft developments, or will they surrender another market to the Beast of Redmond?
Ultimately Microsoft has to take ownership of the entire PC hardware market if they are to sustain growth. They are already an OEM of desktop PCs in India. If they take the consumer electronics space also there's nothing left but servers. How long before they're drooling over that high margin business?
Help stamp out iliturcy.