What Does a $199 Xbox Really Mean? Is this the Beginning or the End?

[Squilliam]

HappySqurriel said:

Squilliam said:

Actually its the fact that there is no HDD which will allow Microsoft to scale the price of the Arcade SKU all the way down to $150 or less. The HDD is more or less a fixed cost and it doesn't scale down in price nearly as quickly as the other components. This means theres no reason why an Xbox 360 Arcade couldn't eventually be cheaper to produce than the Wii will ever be. *This is a product of the design which enables the whole system to be scaled down, whereas there isn't much room to cut costs in the Wii*

 

 

The hard-drive is a fairly major problem because the manufacturing costs and materials never seem to come down in price enough to (truely) make the device inexpensive.

In my opinion, Microsoft's biggest mistake this generation was not including 2GB to 4GB of flash memory on the motherboard as a way of saving games by default and giving people access to (some) downloads. Had they done that the core XBox 360 would be (about) as inexpensive as it is now, and people would be far less likely to see it as being a "gimped" system.

2gb-4gb of flash would probably be too expensive for the system, I think we'll have to wait for the slim version coming next year before we see an increase in flash storage space on the Arcade. Flash is getting cheaper but its probably not cheap enough and they have the problem of dealing with the old stock when the release an updated SKU with different features.