Let me offer a counter-example. I'm an aerospace engineer. Why? When I was little, my parents always encouraged me to go into engineering. Sure, when it was time to go and make the choice, it was my decision, but would I have made the same decision if my parents hadn't encouraged me? Maybe not.
The point is, it's quite stupid to pretend that your wants and desires and passions aren't shaped by the external world. Especially in your early life, most of your desires are the result of external influences. The simple fact is that the external influences on girls are quite different than the external influences on boys, often for very innocent reasons.
I agree with you on one point: that women aren't being actively kept out of computer science or engineering, but are choosing to not follow opportunities in those fields. However, I don't think its acceptable to just leave it at that. We have to figure out why exactly that is the case, and what we can do to fix the problem. We have to figure out the root cause. I think the root cause is social. It may be that the root cause is biological. However, unless we do something to find out, we'll never know.
The thing is, the Macbook *was* designed with longevity as a prerequisite. The polycarbonate exterior is there because its durable, doesn't dent under normal use, and hides scratches better than aluminum. The case entirely lacks all the moving parts, flaps, nubbins, etc that inevitibly get lost or break off on many portable devices. The hinge for the LCD is very thick and securely attached. The new keyboard is designed to make it easy to clean out the crap that gets between keyboard keys. The keyboard surface and palm rests are free of grooves and are rubberized, to make it easy to clean just by wiping it off.
If the keyboard discoloration is a real issue, as opposed to a localized problem (mine doesn't show any signs, though I've only had it for a little while), then its an oversight in the design, not a sign that it was designed without regards to durability.
If the Mac in question is as aesthetically shoddy as most clone PCs, then why would you drop the extra money on it?
As a Linux user turned Mac user, let me tell you the least of the reasons for my Mac purchases (a PowerMac and a Macbook in the last year) has been asthetics. Yes, they're beautiful machines, but they're also incredibly trouble-free, reliable, and simple to use. My Macs have never let me down at a critical moment. XP machines have, and they've done so repeatedly.
You guys are so naive. Race matters enormously in the real world. It matters in small ways, and it matters in big ways. Pretending otherwise is just burying your head in the sand. You don't have to get hung up about it, but pretending it's not one of the most important characteristics in a person's life is silly.
Um, why do you think they ship from Shanghai when you order them from the Apple Store?
All of Apple's stuff is made in China! Most of it these days even says as much. Just taking a look at the back of my iMac remote: "Designed by Apple in California Made in China".
All on the same line, no period, no comma, nothing.
$50 a month, or $600 a year is low, even in China. If you look at the difference between China's exchange-rate GDP ($2.25bn) and its purchasing-power-parity GDP ($8.86bn), you can derive a factor of 4 conversion rate between the exchange rate and the equivalent purchasing power. That means $600 USD gives you a purchasing power equivalent to $2400 USD in China, which is still low. For reference, the per-capita GDP in China is $1700 (exchange rate), equivalent to about $6800 in equivalent purchasing power.
The whole reason these telcos exist is because of state intervention. All we're talking about now is using that state intervention for the public good, instead of letting the telcos profit from it by screwing the customer.
If you're against state intervention, then back a proposal to get telcos to leave their grubby hands off people's private property. Because the biggest state intervention to this point has been when it claimed eminent domain and allowed the telcos to put their lines on our property to begin with.
It has nothing to do with faith. I'm not a big Sony fanboy (I bought a PS2 mini last summer to play some RPGs), or a heavy gamer at all. My opinion isn't derived from a faith in Sony, but a belief that you don't get to sell 200m consoles by being clinically retarded.
It's nothing at all like the XBox 360. The low-end 360 isn't a "true console", because it lacks the HDD. That basically neuters its usefullness for games. The low-end PS3 is a "true console", in that it has everything needed for gaming. The $600 PS3 is a "deluxe console", for people who are interested in viewing BluRay video.
There's nothing wrong with offering different versions of a product to people with different needs, as long as each of those versions is complete for what its intended to do. I mean, should Apple stop offering Macbooks because its better to get a Macbook Pro upfront? Of course not! The Macbook Pro serves certain needs, and if you don't need its extra features, the lower end model is perfectly appropriate for you. On the other hand, if Apple released the Macbook with the OS on flash and no hard drive, then you'd have a legitimate complaint.
To put it simply: it's not better to get everything up front if you don't need everything in the first place! I'm getting a low-end PS3 because I'm hooking it up to a display (2405FPW) that lacks HDMI, and I don't need wireless because it'll be sitting 2ft from an ethernet jack. The $100 premium of the high-end PS3 would be wasted money for me. The same thing with anybody who doesn't own a TV with an HDMI input, and doesn't plan on buying one, or isn't interested in BluRay at all. The $500 PS3 is for those people.
You're assuming Sony's going to be upgrading the CPU or something like that. That's not necessarily how they'd do it (and its probably not how they'd do it). They could very well tell game developers "program to the low-end PS3", and upgrade other parts of the machines for other functions. For example, a DVR add-on could upgrade the hard drive. Game developers would never notice, because they'd be working to the 20GB spec in the low-end PS3. They could release networking upgrades (eg: wireless for the base PS3), add-ons for media center functionality, etc.
If you think about it, aside from RAM, there is really no reason to upgrade the core of the PS3. It's not like there is a CPU/GPU arms race that Sony has to keep up with, because its competitors have fixed CPUs and GPUs. And its not like the stuff that people would do with a computer hooked up to their TV would require upgrading every year.
It's really cynical to believe that Sony is just monumentally stupid, and trying to go after the regular PC market with the PS3. It makes for a nice circle-jerk, but its probably not an accurate prediction. For more likely is that Sony saw the projections that showed online games (poker, flash sites, etc), becoming a bigger market than PC games in the next several years, and wanted a piece of that pie. They likely saw that most people spent more time in front of their TVs then in front of their computers, and if they could offer access to the internet for the cost of some extra software, that it'd make for a more sellable product. They likely saw (like Microsoft), that home-theater PCs are an upcoming market, and realized that the PS3 would make a perfect competitor to such devices.
Again, it's easy to dismiss Sony as stupid, but probably not a good idea. Nintendo, for all its innovation, has taken second place to Sony twice now. Microsoft, the company used to walking into a market and dominating it, had their ass handed to them the last round. Converging console functions with some PC functions is an idea with potential, and I wouldn't count on Sony botching it.
Yes fuck legal. And hassle-free. And compatible. And not buggy. We don't need them.
Oh, and what is this CPU that you thought is comparable to the PS3's? The closest thing I can get to a PS3 is a $300 7900GT, a $300 Aegia PhysX card, and maybe $400-$500 more for a cheap CPU and motherboard (just fast enough to feed the two cards), RAM, HDD, PSU, case, and Windows license.
They don't have to do either. Nokia got GTK+ into a 250 MHz ARM with 64MB of RAM. The 770 is pokey, but 256MB and 3.2 GHz should be just fine for GTK-based apps.
It's unlikely that Sony's going to present you with a stock GNOME desktop. They'll probably some sort of launcher for specific tasks (e-mail, web-browsing, photo editing), which can be fit into the PS3's memory, and will be enough to serve most users.
The graphics cards in the PS3 is comparable to a 7900GT. Better throw in one of those Aegia cards too, because that's what Cell is for. Just those together blow your $600 budget. Factor in the fact that consoles do more with a given level of hardware, and you're not going to find a comparable PC gaming experience for under $1500. And even then, you'll have to deal with the hassle of maintaining a Windows PC, downloading game patches, waiting for bootup, etc. PC gaming is an absolute PITA.
What $600 computer has the equivalent of a 7900GT in it, along with a custom CPU for handling physics and AI?
Oh, and if you get a $600 computer, you've got to deal with shitty PC games, Windows, spyware checkers, virus scanners, patches, etc. There is a reason the PC gaming market is 1/4 the size of the console gaming market and shrinking. Projections suggest that online games (which the PS3-as-computer will be able to play) will replace PC gaming as the #2 gaming market by 2009. With Carmack and Sweeny porting the big FPS engines to the console, and the upcoming batch sporting USB ports for the addition of keyboards, the only thing left is to get the RTSs ported over and we won't need PC gaming.
Nobody at Sony ever said the PS2 could do "Toy Story" in real time. Point me to a press release that said that. The Toy Story comment was one made by a journalist that didn't fully understand the underlying technology. I've looked, and the closest thing I've found to Sony saying the PS2 could do Toy Story was a technical reference to the polygon capabilities of the system. The PS2's triangle rate was indeed high enough to render the geometry of Toy Story (5m polygons per frame) in real time (10+ fps). The result wouldn't look anything like Toy Story, because what makes Toy Story look so good is the shaders in Renderman, but that's not really the point of the comparison, unless you take it out of context as the journalist did.
Now, as for the PS2 being a super computer, that seems more like something worth criticizing Sony about.
And why is the $500 model "pointless"? If you don't care about Blu-Ray over HDMI, then it has everything you need to play games. If you do care about Blu-Ray over HDMI, then you're thrilled to get a Blu-Ray player for $600. I don't see anything pointless here, except the constant bashing.
If you're not completely cynical, I don't think Sony's "the PS3 is a computer" approach is all that retarded. A console has a good deal of hardware in it, and when its not playing games, it's just sitting their doing nothing. Moreover, the console is generally connected to the biggest screen in the house. If you could take advantage of that hardware to perform some of the tasks that you might otherwise use a computer for, well, that seems like a decent use of resources. Even Microsoft seems to think there is potential in the idea of "media consoles", with the whole Windows Media Center Edition, and in a way it makes perfect sense to merge your media console and your gaming console into one device.
On the other hand, convergence doesn't seem to have taken off like some hoped. Betting on convergence with the PS3 is definitely a gamble. It is not, however, a completely left-field idea like some people w ould like to believe.
When Sony and Microsoft do price drops depend largely on when they transition their chips to 65nm. None of the chips in question (Xenon, Xenos, Cell, RSX) are small chips by any measure. Dropping the price until a 65nm transition is going to be a stretch. Microsoft is scheduled to do a 65nm transition for Xenon in Q1 2007, meaning a price drop maybe around spring of that year. Sony definitely won't be able to transition to 65nm so early, but they'll do so as soon as their fabs in Japan are able to pump out 65nm Cells. I'd put money on that happening in 2007, meaning that the 360's price drop won't occur much sooner than the PS3's.
The thing is, I think Sony really was planning on releasing the PS3 with a 65nm Cell in 2007. I think the 2006 launch at the fairly high price is a matter of realizing fairly late in the process that they didn't want to miss Christmas '06.
The question comes down to: why do people buy consoles? It's to play games, of course! How did Sony get a large installed base if it wasn't for the games? Consider the PS1. With the PS1, Sony had no momentum going in, since it was their first attempt at a console, and was facing competition from Nintendo and Sega, which had owned the console industry for nearly a decade. What made the PS1 sell so well against the Saturn? I'd argue it was a strong set of launch games, a good followup in the first year, and some high-profile franchise defections (eg: Final Fantasy).
Now, with the PS2, your point is probably correct. The PS2 came out a year before the GC and the XBox, and by the time either of those launched, Sony already had 15m+ PS2s in place. However, I don't think you can take the quality of the library out of the equation. It's important to remember that of the 100m PS2s out there, over half were sold in the last three years, and 80% were sold in the last four. What allowed the PS2 to reach that level of sales, when both its competitors topped out at about 20m? It was the library that did it.
For all the ragging Slashdot does about Sony's stupidity, I think they often overlook the reason that Sony is in the top spot and Microsoft and Nintendo are a distant second. Sony's is extremely adept at handling 3rd party developers. Contrast the PS2's first year with the 360's first year. Both consoles launched a year ahead of their competitors. Both consoles had an initially weak launch lineup, which mainly rode on compatibility with the previous generation's lineup. Both had healthy sales after their launch. Yet, in the PS2's first year, Sony focused very strongly on building up its library. They were so successful that the PS2 managed to beat the GC and XBox in Christmas 2001 sales, despite the fact that both new consoles were being driven by launch hype and the fact that the PS2 was a year-old product. Does anybody believe that Microsoft has managed to build up the same sort of momentum with the 360's library? Does anybody believe that Microsoft can repeat Sony's trick, and outsell the Wii and PS3 with a year-old console this Christmas?
I didn't say you were an American. I said people (particularly Americans). The parenthetical comment was for the benefit of Slashdot's readership, which does display the typical American delusion.
Uh yes, we should kill the company that had the best console the last two rounds.
Repeat after me: Sony sold over 100m units each of the PS1 and PS2. They didn't do that because of hype, they did that because those consoles weren't dedicated Halo/Madden players (XBox), and had more of a library than Zelda/Mario/Metroid.
If you look at the great gaming libraries (post NES), the PS1's and PS2's are maybe 2 and 3, with the ordering depending on your taste. The SNES's, of course, is first, followed by either the Genesis or NES depending on your preferences. The N64, GC, and XBox fight it out for the remaining slots. The N64 didn't really have games, the XBox had a few gems and a whole bunch of PC ports, and the crap/creamy ratio was really high on the GC.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me offer a counter-example. I'm an aerospace engineer. Why? When I was little, my parents always encouraged me to go into engineering. Sure, when it was time to go and make the choice, it was my decision, but would I have made the same decision if my parents hadn't encouraged me? Maybe not.
The point is, it's quite stupid to pretend that your wants and desires and passions aren't shaped by the external world. Especially in your early life, most of your desires are the result of external influences. The simple fact is that the external influences on girls are quite different than the external influences on boys, often for very innocent reasons.
I agree with you on one point: that women aren't being actively kept out of computer science or engineering, but are choosing to not follow opportunities in those fields. However, I don't think its acceptable to just leave it at that. We have to figure out why exactly that is the case, and what we can do to fix the problem. We have to figure out the root cause. I think the root cause is social. It may be that the root cause is biological. However, unless we do something to find out, we'll never know.
Not the only one :) Mine's perfect so far, knock on wood.
Apparently, there is a way to piss without touching your penis that has eluded me all these years...
The thing is, the Macbook *was* designed with longevity as a prerequisite. The polycarbonate exterior is there because its durable, doesn't dent under normal use, and hides scratches better than aluminum. The case entirely lacks all the moving parts, flaps, nubbins, etc that inevitibly get lost or break off on many portable devices. The hinge for the LCD is very thick and securely attached. The new keyboard is designed to make it easy to clean out the crap that gets between keyboard keys. The keyboard surface and palm rests are free of grooves and are rubberized, to make it easy to clean just by wiping it off.
If the keyboard discoloration is a real issue, as opposed to a localized problem (mine doesn't show any signs, though I've only had it for a little while), then its an oversight in the design, not a sign that it was designed without regards to durability.
If the Mac in question is as aesthetically shoddy as most clone PCs, then why would you drop the extra money on it?
As a Linux user turned Mac user, let me tell you the least of the reasons for my Mac purchases (a PowerMac and a Macbook in the last year) has been asthetics. Yes, they're beautiful machines, but they're also incredibly trouble-free, reliable, and simple to use. My Macs have never let me down at a critical moment. XP machines have, and they've done so repeatedly.
Ah, the "color blind" contingent.
You guys are so naive. Race matters enormously in the real world. It matters in small ways, and it matters in big ways. Pretending otherwise is just burying your head in the sand. You don't have to get hung up about it, but pretending it's not one of the most important characteristics in a person's life is silly.
Um, why do you think they ship from Shanghai when you order them from the Apple Store?
All of Apple's stuff is made in China! Most of it these days even says as much. Just taking a look at the back of my iMac remote: "Designed by Apple in California Made in China".
All on the same line, no period, no comma, nothing.
$50 a month, or $600 a year is low, even in China. If you look at the difference between China's exchange-rate GDP ($2.25bn) and its purchasing-power-parity GDP ($8.86bn), you can derive a factor of 4 conversion rate between the exchange rate and the equivalent purchasing power. That means $600 USD gives you a purchasing power equivalent to $2400 USD in China, which is still low. For reference, the per-capita GDP in China is $1700 (exchange rate), equivalent to about $6800 in equivalent purchasing power.
Except we're already at 100% state intervention.
The whole reason these telcos exist is because of state intervention. All we're talking about now is using that state intervention for the public good, instead of letting the telcos profit from it by screwing the customer.
If you're against state intervention, then back a proposal to get telcos to leave their grubby hands off people's private property. Because the biggest state intervention to this point has been when it claimed eminent domain and allowed the telcos to put their lines on our property to begin with.
The OP wanted to cut the price in half. For the low-end PS3 (why do you want HDMI if you don't want a BluRay drive?) that'd mean a price of $250.
It has nothing to do with faith. I'm not a big Sony fanboy (I bought a PS2 mini last summer to play some RPGs), or a heavy gamer at all. My opinion isn't derived from a faith in Sony, but a belief that you don't get to sell 200m consoles by being clinically retarded.
It's nothing at all like the XBox 360. The low-end 360 isn't a "true console", because it lacks the HDD. That basically neuters its usefullness for games. The low-end PS3 is a "true console", in that it has everything needed for gaming. The $600 PS3 is a "deluxe console", for people who are interested in viewing BluRay video.
There's nothing wrong with offering different versions of a product to people with different needs, as long as each of those versions is complete for what its intended to do. I mean, should Apple stop offering Macbooks because its better to get a Macbook Pro upfront? Of course not! The Macbook Pro serves certain needs, and if you don't need its extra features, the lower end model is perfectly appropriate for you. On the other hand, if Apple released the Macbook with the OS on flash and no hard drive, then you'd have a legitimate complaint.
To put it simply: it's not better to get everything up front if you don't need everything in the first place! I'm getting a low-end PS3 because I'm hooking it up to a display (2405FPW) that lacks HDMI, and I don't need wireless because it'll be sitting 2ft from an ethernet jack. The $100 premium of the high-end PS3 would be wasted money for me. The same thing with anybody who doesn't own a TV with an HDMI input, and doesn't plan on buying one, or isn't interested in BluRay at all. The $500 PS3 is for those people.
You're assuming Sony's going to be upgrading the CPU or something like that. That's not necessarily how they'd do it (and its probably not how they'd do it). They could very well tell game developers "program to the low-end PS3", and upgrade other parts of the machines for other functions. For example, a DVR add-on could upgrade the hard drive. Game developers would never notice, because they'd be working to the 20GB spec in the low-end PS3. They could release networking upgrades (eg: wireless for the base PS3), add-ons for media center functionality, etc.
If you think about it, aside from RAM, there is really no reason to upgrade the core of the PS3. It's not like there is a CPU/GPU arms race that Sony has to keep up with, because its competitors have fixed CPUs and GPUs. And its not like the stuff that people would do with a computer hooked up to their TV would require upgrading every year.
It's really cynical to believe that Sony is just monumentally stupid, and trying to go after the regular PC market with the PS3. It makes for a nice circle-jerk, but its probably not an accurate prediction. For more likely is that Sony saw the projections that showed online games (poker, flash sites, etc), becoming a bigger market than PC games in the next several years, and wanted a piece of that pie. They likely saw that most people spent more time in front of their TVs then in front of their computers, and if they could offer access to the internet for the cost of some extra software, that it'd make for a more sellable product. They likely saw (like Microsoft), that home-theater PCs are an upcoming market, and realized that the PS3 would make a perfect competitor to such devices.
Again, it's easy to dismiss Sony as stupid, but probably not a good idea. Nintendo, for all its innovation, has taken second place to Sony twice now. Microsoft, the company used to walking into a market and dominating it, had their ass handed to them the last round. Converging console functions with some PC functions is an idea with potential, and I wouldn't count on Sony botching it.
You want Sony to release a $250 console, when their next nearest competitor is at $400, and their last console came out at $300???
Yes fuck legal. And hassle-free. And compatible. And not buggy. We don't need them.
Oh, and what is this CPU that you thought is comparable to the PS3's? The closest thing I can get to a PS3 is a $300 7900GT, a $300 Aegia PhysX card, and maybe $400-$500 more for a cheap CPU and motherboard (just fast enough to feed the two cards), RAM, HDD, PSU, case, and Windows license.
They don't have to do either. Nokia got GTK+ into a 250 MHz ARM with 64MB of RAM. The 770 is pokey, but 256MB and 3.2 GHz should be just fine for GTK-based apps.
It's unlikely that Sony's going to present you with a stock GNOME desktop. They'll probably some sort of launcher for specific tasks (e-mail, web-browsing, photo editing), which can be fit into the PS3's memory, and will be enough to serve most users.
The graphics cards in the PS3 is comparable to a 7900GT. Better throw in one of those Aegia cards too, because that's what Cell is for. Just those together blow your $600 budget. Factor in the fact that consoles do more with a given level of hardware, and you're not going to find a comparable PC gaming experience for under $1500. And even then, you'll have to deal with the hassle of maintaining a Windows PC, downloading game patches, waiting for bootup, etc. PC gaming is an absolute PITA.
What $600 computer has the equivalent of a 7900GT in it, along with a custom CPU for handling physics and AI?
Oh, and if you get a $600 computer, you've got to deal with shitty PC games, Windows, spyware checkers, virus scanners, patches, etc. There is a reason the PC gaming market is 1/4 the size of the console gaming market and shrinking. Projections suggest that online games (which the PS3-as-computer will be able to play) will replace PC gaming as the #2 gaming market by 2009. With Carmack and Sweeny porting the big FPS engines to the console, and the upcoming batch sporting USB ports for the addition of keyboards, the only thing left is to get the RTSs ported over and we won't need PC gaming.
This has become an urban legend.
Nobody at Sony ever said the PS2 could do "Toy Story" in real time. Point me to a press release that said that. The Toy Story comment was one made by a journalist that didn't fully understand the underlying technology. I've looked, and the closest thing I've found to Sony saying the PS2 could do Toy Story was a technical reference to the polygon capabilities of the system. The PS2's triangle rate was indeed high enough to render the geometry of Toy Story (5m polygons per frame) in real time (10+ fps). The result wouldn't look anything like Toy Story, because what makes Toy Story look so good is the shaders in Renderman, but that's not really the point of the comparison, unless you take it out of context as the journalist did.
Now, as for the PS2 being a super computer, that seems more like something worth criticizing Sony about.
And why is the $500 model "pointless"? If you don't care about Blu-Ray over HDMI, then it has everything you need to play games. If you do care about Blu-Ray over HDMI, then you're thrilled to get a Blu-Ray player for $600. I don't see anything pointless here, except the constant bashing.
If you're not completely cynical, I don't think Sony's "the PS3 is a computer" approach is all that retarded. A console has a good deal of hardware in it, and when its not playing games, it's just sitting their doing nothing. Moreover, the console is generally connected to the biggest screen in the house. If you could take advantage of that hardware to perform some of the tasks that you might otherwise use a computer for, well, that seems like a decent use of resources. Even Microsoft seems to think there is potential in the idea of "media consoles", with the whole Windows Media Center Edition, and in a way it makes perfect sense to merge your media console and your gaming console into one device.
On the other hand, convergence doesn't seem to have taken off like some hoped. Betting on convergence with the PS3 is definitely a gamble. It is not, however, a completely left-field idea like some people w ould like to believe.
When Sony and Microsoft do price drops depend largely on when they transition their chips to 65nm. None of the chips in question (Xenon, Xenos, Cell, RSX) are small chips by any measure. Dropping the price until a 65nm transition is going to be a stretch. Microsoft is scheduled to do a 65nm transition for Xenon in Q1 2007, meaning a price drop maybe around spring of that year. Sony definitely won't be able to transition to 65nm so early, but they'll do so as soon as their fabs in Japan are able to pump out 65nm Cells. I'd put money on that happening in 2007, meaning that the 360's price drop won't occur much sooner than the PS3's.
The thing is, I think Sony really was planning on releasing the PS3 with a 65nm Cell in 2007. I think the 2006 launch at the fairly high price is a matter of realizing fairly late in the process that they didn't want to miss Christmas '06.
The question comes down to: why do people buy consoles? It's to play games, of course! How did Sony get a large installed base if it wasn't for the games? Consider the PS1. With the PS1, Sony had no momentum going in, since it was their first attempt at a console, and was facing competition from Nintendo and Sega, which had owned the console industry for nearly a decade. What made the PS1 sell so well against the Saturn? I'd argue it was a strong set of launch games, a good followup in the first year, and some high-profile franchise defections (eg: Final Fantasy).
Now, with the PS2, your point is probably correct. The PS2 came out a year before the GC and the XBox, and by the time either of those launched, Sony already had 15m+ PS2s in place. However, I don't think you can take the quality of the library out of the equation. It's important to remember that of the 100m PS2s out there, over half were sold in the last three years, and 80% were sold in the last four. What allowed the PS2 to reach that level of sales, when both its competitors topped out at about 20m? It was the library that did it.
For all the ragging Slashdot does about Sony's stupidity, I think they often overlook the reason that Sony is in the top spot and Microsoft and Nintendo are a distant second. Sony's is extremely adept at handling 3rd party developers. Contrast the PS2's first year with the 360's first year. Both consoles launched a year ahead of their competitors. Both consoles had an initially weak launch lineup, which mainly rode on compatibility with the previous generation's lineup. Both had healthy sales after their launch. Yet, in the PS2's first year, Sony focused very strongly on building up its library. They were so successful that the PS2 managed to beat the GC and XBox in Christmas 2001 sales, despite the fact that both new consoles were being driven by launch hype and the fact that the PS2 was a year-old product. Does anybody believe that Microsoft has managed to build up the same sort of momentum with the 360's library? Does anybody believe that Microsoft can repeat Sony's trick, and outsell the Wii and PS3 with a year-old console this Christmas?
I didn't say you were an American. I said people (particularly Americans). The parenthetical comment was for the benefit of Slashdot's readership, which does display the typical American delusion.
Uh yes, we should kill the company that had the best console the last two rounds.
Repeat after me: Sony sold over 100m units each of the PS1 and PS2. They didn't do that because of hype, they did that because those consoles weren't dedicated Halo/Madden players (XBox), and had more of a library than Zelda/Mario/Metroid.
If you look at the great gaming libraries (post NES), the PS1's and PS2's are maybe 2 and 3, with the ordering depending on your taste. The SNES's, of course, is first, followed by either the Genesis or NES depending on your preferences. The N64, GC, and XBox fight it out for the remaining slots. The N64 didn't really have games, the XBox had a few gems and a whole bunch of PC ports, and the crap/creamy ratio was really high on the GC.