| NJ5 said: I swear I don't understand these removals of the HDMI cables... that crap probably costs like $0.05 to produce, and makes it easier for people to get the best visuals... what's up with that? |
Dropping the price of the Elite by $100 just dropped a huge chunk of their profit margin on that SKU.
Adding a larger HDD (60 - 120GB), as most are aware of, adds very little to the overall cost of a console, given the dropping prices/higher capacity availability in drives, so by essentially making the Elite a standard Xbox with a 120GB drive and a black case, it still costs almost the same to produce as the current $299 Pro.
It's unlikely that MS stands to sell a significant number of larger drives than 120GB at $150 when they finally become available, and presumably the 120GB drives sold separately will be priced at $99 with the upcoming price drops, so neither will completely offset the losses due to the new price structuring.
By dropping the proprietary AV cable from the Elite SKU, MS hopes to recover some of those margins by selling them separately at whatever the current retail price is ($50 retail, $31.50 Amazon), even though anyone could just buy a $10 HDMI cable from anywhere.
On a related note, the new Elites sans HDMI cables are currently showing up at retail as of this week, at $399 (until the price drop next week). Expect to see some $100 refunds being returned to any consumers who don't follow the news but bought an Xbox this week anyway.
