Or at least  breaking even? Anyone know?

The unit made a profit for the FY08 Q1 which just completed, and is expecting a full year profit for the devision.

More than likely

We can't know for sure, since it's one of MS's highly guarded secrets, but if we just took the amount it took to build/package/ship a unit and the cost to buy one then it seems very likely they do make money off of each console sold.

Yes, by alot.

Isuppli, last year, did a cost analysis breakdown of each console. The Xbox 360 was costing Microsoft, as of last November, roughly $323 per Premium unit.

I'd assume by now it's well under $250 per premium unit. Now, having said that, that doesn't include massive marketing and packaging costs.

So by now, Microsoft is making a hefty profit off of the X360. Now, if you wonder why it isn't showing up in P&E statements (sans last quarter being so great): since MS has made money on the consoles (which would of been post-Christmas), sales took a nose dive. For the first 2 quarters they were in the red this year, they failed to ship anything over 1m units. Because of this, you really can't make cash on a profitable console: all of your profits are going elsewhere. And you had/still have the RROD issue eating into profits. MS has most likely taken care of the vast, vast majority of issues via the heatsinks and falcons. Because of this, profits should take an upturn.

And lastly, Microsoft itself had predicted that after Q1 2008, the Xbox 360 would always be profitable. It seems that they were right in their analysis, as it seems that everything now should make the X360 profitable, since the hardware has been profitable (for the most part) from probably early this year.

Stick, we would also need to include shipping costs et al - how would you treat the 1 bn they wrote off for repairs? should it be atributed to only the old consoles?

RROD issues have no bearing on profitability of the 360 units THIS FISCAL YEAR. They took a write down on last years profits (er... losses..). This is a general accounting principal, and IS on the up and up.

Fundamentally, how much of the box has changed? Likely economies of scale have ramped up on the "fixed" components (i.e. the AC adapter, case etc), while production costs for the chips have come down (with the move from 90 to 65nm). I'd guess that they make excellent profit on the Elite, Fair profit on the Pro, and minimal profit on the Arcade.

When Jasper rolls out, their profit will improve across the board, but of course, we can probably anticpate a timed price reduction as well (likely to coincide with GTAIV).

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).

Being in the black shouldnt be hard if they now no longer loss lead with their incredible software sales and whatever they get off of xbox live.(subscriptions, MP points, ect. )

Anyone think that the Xbox division can ever make back all the money they ever lost?