Faxandu - I would attribute the RROD costs to the old-er consoles, for the most part.
Merely because I would say that it *seems* that during other P&L statements, MS had massive losses since launch, and even from last Nov-Jun quarters...Despite supposed profits on the system.
I would advocate/argue that Microsoft was taking a hit each month on repairs. Each bricked X360 costs Microsoft *about* $50 I'd say to get fixed ($30-35 to ship, $15-20 to actually fix).
Now, if RROD rates *were* indeed 30% for the first.........10m units. That might of meant, upto the 1bln loss (which I would think was for current/future RRODs, and not old ones. After all, if they were losing money long before that, it woulda been included in those P&L statements, and not all summed upto one)
So lets say 30% of the X360s from unit #1 to unit #11,500,000 had the huge problems before the 2nd heatsink was added.
That means between November 2005, and May, when each X360 had the new GPU, approximately $600,000,000 USD was spent on RRODs.
Therefore, a whopping $600m was spent on fixing the units. That probably dug well into MS coffers, and probably would prevent MS from being in the black in late 07/08.
So then Microsoft, seeing the lack of profit for the Xbox franchise (and forthcoming stockholder backlash), must of wrote off the current $600m bill, added what was expected for the rest of the lifespan of the X360 for out-of-the-norm repairs (another $400m), and wrote it all off. Why? To make it profitable in P&L statements, since if $600m was taken off in just 1 and 1/2 years. That probably meant the difference between a few quarterly reports being barely in the black, to being in deep ($100m) in the red.
Think about it: RROD issues probably have cost Microsoft, for the first 11.5m units, an added cost of $15-17.50 per unit. That's huge. Once that's fixed, thats a ton of extra money in MS's pockets. So I'd assume with the current fixes aimed at heading off RROD issues, we should see strong profits for the H&E department, since the X360 is profitable both for hardware, but it's failures too (or lack of them since the 5th generation release with Falcon).
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
