Believe it or not, even Microsoft likes saving money. If they feel they can get away with shipping with a low capacity HDD, they will. But I don't think they will since digital will be a huge part of their nextBox. I say 500GB will be the lowest they should go.

even the 360 currently does this. I think what they are talking about is slightly different though. More automated, no need to tell it to update certain games, it just does it with out you knowing. It will also give kinect the ability to use your voice to turn on your console too.  Thats what I took from it.

kinect required -- if kinect is bundled in the hardware (per rumors) i don't see the issue.

no optical disc play -- not sure what the repercussions are but it could be great or terrible depending on the details. there was that thread a few weeks back about watermarking discs to transfer the license from a disc to an account and visa verse. that, imo, sounds like an amazing way to get the benefits of digital delivery without any of the drawbacks.

always online-- no biggie for me personally, i'm always online. seems like it would severely limit their potential market however.

But this is a rumor thread tho...why have issues with people speculating? That's the whole point. And this is not even the worst kind of rumor/speculations either in the past week or so. Been reading the next box might have two APUs etc too lol I AM being reasonable here whether you agree or not. It's just the nature of rumor threads. No reason to complain about it, especially since most are being very good in the way they are discussing what this could mean. The only reason why you think people repeat the same opinions is because the same rumor or similar rumors keep coming up from different sources from time to time. VGleaks, Gaf, EDGE are some examples

Im not so sure this is reflective of final specs.. What if these are just development kits specifications?
I'm just having a hard time believing that ms would go the always connected route. That would be a huge mistake. One I hope that they are a aware of.

You'll end up with "enlarge your penis now" adverts on the dashboard.

Not sure, I think 11.1 is the latest we will get, DirectX Blue support will probably come 2014 and not this year. But who knows its possible.

As for the Specs you asked. This document gave birth to most of the rumors about Xbox 3 and the Specs.

1.2 Tflop GPU 12 CUs 

1.6 ghz Jaguar 8 Cores.

32 MB Esram 100gb/s

8gb DDR3 68gb/s

Data Move engines

Thats what the specs say.

Speculation is fine though.  Posts such as "Random bullshit rumour #1 confirmed, Nextbox sucks".  I've no problem with reasonable discussion on the topic, but there is a distinct lack of it occuring in most of these threads.  A lot of the early posts were basically bashing the Nextbox and treating this as a confirmation when it is in fact easy to fake this news and the rumours are nothing new, they're just recycled rumours put in a pretty package to try and get more hits.  This is fake, pure and simple.  As mentioned earlier in the thread, there was plenty of rumours about the PS4 that were bullshit too but they get forgotten quickly in every speculation thread about the nextbox as people are constantly trying to spin negatives. 

All I ask is if you must question the impact of these rumours, using words such as IF, COULD, POSSIBLY, MAYBE would be nice instead of posting opinion as fact constantly.

P.S - I read the thread again and to be honest there was only 2 people that were annoying before my initial post but they posted multiple times and basically posted a load of crap that wasn't true.  There were others after my post but they fell under the category of obviouis troll accounts.  Anyway, I think I'll leave you to debate away with anyone else you like about the rumours as I said my thoughts on what I thought about the validity of the "leak".

I refuse to believe that they're stupid enough to release such a closed and tied system, developers were already complaining about Live (the Indie ones mostly) and a lot of people don't like always online, kinect or paying for online. Forced subscriptions next?
No, with Steam releasing their Piston box I don't believe for one second that MS would send something like this to compete with that and the PS4.
Let's wait for confirmation, a console reveal is likely only a month or two at the most, away.

I doubt its true, but if it i look forward to the Sony/Nintendo domination.