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bobobologna on 30 March 2010
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binary solo said:
Squilliam said:
binary solo said:
Interesting prediction. I wonder why MS would do away with a revenue stream in ridding themselves of a proprietary HDD in favour of letting people use any USB external memory device.

I'm guessing a Slim Elite will come either with a built in HDD or a proprietray USB HDD that has the current std memory capacities (120Gig / 250Gig).

I'm also thinking that perhaps MS will hold on to that proprietary HDD market by only giving >32Gig memory cdapacity to people who buy the MS HDD. If you buy an after market USB HDD you might remain limited to 32 Gig (at any one time).

Just wondering if there's more than one Selnor on VGC, or is the thread title missing an apostrophe?

Its not a significant revenue stream and its probably worth more to them to reposition the Arcade as an even more viable hardware SKU because for a reasonable number of people in makes the Arcade viable as a console. In addition to this they'd probably gain more in revenue for their Live services than they would ever lose from some few HDD sales lost. Its effectively a hardware pricecut for the proportion of the market who want some but not much download capabilities.

Perhaps not, but MS seems to like keeping hold of these things by creating proprietary products either with HW designs or middleware restrictions that prevent widespread use of 3rd party products that are capable of exactly the same functionality. Hence their steps to prevent people pulling the supplied HDD out of their proprietary HDD case and replacing it with a bigger one.

It just seems to go against MSs general philosophy of wanting to stay in control of HW to allow for [potentialy] unlimited external HDD memory through anything other than a proprietary MS HDD. For people wanting to get better functionality on their Arcade giving them freedom up to 32Gig is all they need. After that it's consistent with the MS modus operandi to put proprietary controls on their customers. MS and retailers should be able to convince most people to buy one proprietary MS 120 or 250 HDD than multiple 16gig  3rd party devices.

And a profitable revenue stream is a profitable revenue stream. Why hand any profits over to other companies if you can keep them to yourself?

I agree with you.  I think it's wishful thinking to believe that Microsoft is going to allow people to use their own HDDs rather than their proprietary ones.

I think the reason why they are allowing USB drives up to 16 GB, is so that they can eliminate the memory card readers, saving money.  They can stop manufacturing memory cards, and license out official XBox360 USB drives, saving them money.  They aren't doing it so that it'll make the transition easier for when they decide, out of the goodness of their heart, to allow people to use 500GB external HDDs instead of their $130 250GB HDDs.