PS3 got uglier, IMO

Points to consider, reasons for PS3 sale increase.

$100 price cut.
Food of kick ass exclusive games.
Sony's 1st party was in the process established superiority over comp.
Yes smaller hardware.

A lot of people are overlooking the key feature of the PS3 Slim, or the PS Two or the PS One.

They cost a lot less to produce.

And that is where the savings passed on to the consumer comes from. And that is where the overall larger pool of consumers buying these things comes from, and subsequent higher sales.

One of the biggest problems of the PS3 was not the form factor (a minority were put off by the size), but the cost of per unit production (the housing alone allegedly cost $60 initially).

The main reason for MS to completely redesign the chassis of the Xbox 360 would be if they could use significantly fewer parts in a case that uses less material (case, packing/shipping materials, etc.) allowing them to accommodate another price drop without it cutting into the slim profits they make on the $299 SKUs.

The thing is, the 360 chassis has always been inexpensive to produce, making it harder to significantly drop production costs on the case. A significantly redesigned logic board on the other hand, would have to be where the majority of cost saving took place.

End result could just be that MS puts a smaller, simplified logic board into the same inexpensive housing without going through a redesign process. That would allow them to keep the current designs of their clip on peripherals without having offer multiple SKUs for each for new and old consoles.

MS will redesign and it will be easy.

1. Have you seen the empty space in the 360?
2. They have thousands of engineers.
3. The hard drive could be placed at a different location such as on top.
4. They may just make it shorter (when oriented vertically) and keep the hard drive the same location (this would be easy).
5. The 45nm combined cpu/gpu chip aka valhalla should be ready by fall 2010 drastically reducing power needs and cooling needs.

So yeah, it should be easy.

The PS3 didn't sell better because it was slimmer, it sold better because it was cheaper. There may have been a few people who bought a new console because it was smaller, but the majority finally bought it was because it was affordable. I don't see how MS can benefit from a slimmer model.

Don't see how they would pull that off with that huge HDD on top.

it will probably blow up within 30 minutes of boot up

Slim = cheaper to produce = cheaper price.  That's how.

The ramifications of this are obvious.. Japan for one would see a HUGE boost in sales.. recently sales have been hovering below the 4k mark consistently.. this would bring it up to atleast 8-10k(we all know how much the japanese love new SKU's).

As for EUR/others and NA.. we'd see a similar increase in sales.

Design wise, I wanna see the ugly tray drive go.. it high time we got a slot drive, a quiter fan and that ugly massive powerbrick needs to shrink a few inches... and while theyr at it.. a wifi chip would be nice too..

Thats actually quite funny.