| etking said: Because of the highly expensive ESRAM, the X1 is a huge design failure. Even if they would drop Kinect to sell at a cheaper price, the much slower APU would still be much more expensive to produce so they will never be able to be competitive in power and price. |
I agree for design, but if the APU is more expensive (it can't be that much different, the impact on cost is moslty the yield rate and it will improve), DDR3 is a lot less expensive (30~50% ?), so it should compensate more than APU cost difference. For a significant cheaper price, they will still have to bleed more money, but they can afford to.
More than manufacture price, what is the point for a company like Microsoft to improve market share in the not so (and even less) profitable console market with inferior hardware if it means throwing away most hope for a casual/kinect wii-like market ? 1 year ago hey had the super dream of a blue ocean with DRM/Casual/3rd party exclusive with a powerfull enough console (compared to wii vs ps360), I'm not sure what they will do.
