well I'm pretty sure Kinect will work like the GPS chip on your phone... some apps will require it to work and will expressively ask you to turn it on when you start them....
so even if you want to turn it completely off, which you can do, you will need to have it connected because you will be prompted to activate it from time to time... in games, in the dashboard and for some apps... so unless you want to waste even more time than you already do by just using the pad and refusing Kinect and want to go back and forth to the closet you put it in, you should leave it plugged in....in other word some of the games and dashboard features and apps will be unusable without Kinect from what I get so far... se very usability of the XB1 seems tied to the Kinect and even if you default it to off, you WILL have to turn it on from time to time....

anyway that's how I perceive it so far and the reason why it has to be plugged in at all time IMO.... again, it's because even though you can default it to always off for everything, there will be some things that WILL require Kinect no matter what....

and I say it again there is absolutely no way they will use the Kinect to spy.... it is plain stupid.... the amount of useful information that could come out of it are close to nil.... and there is no way they can collect information from on you without you knowing... you just have to open your router UI and you'll know in a heart beat... once again using Kinect as a spy bot is the dumbest idea ever imagined.... they might as well put a guy in your living room it would be more likely to be efficient....

My guess is that all the kinect stuff is strictly for data mining. They won't unbundle it, because that's their trojan horse.

It is a problem. It adds $100 to the price. Some people don't want Kinect. Some people already bought the first one and don't care if the next one is more accurate. It's always great to give consumers options instead of forcing things on them.

I just prefer the controller, in all honesty. Though I admit to only ever using Kinect at friends houses.

Call me old fashioned.

I was the same way with touch screens for a long time. they just didn't work well for me. They do now as they have come a long way and are more responsive and better. Maybe kinect will grow on you once you have it.

it adds a minimum of 200$ 

I guess the fact that nobody is even trying to answer  the actual "Why does it have to be connected"-question can be interpreted as:

Nobody knows or at least has an idea.

So here's my thoughts, considering some of the things we know:

• We know that Kinect-developer Alex Kipman and Xbox-developers Andrew Fuller and Kathryn Stone Perez filed a patent about charging digital content like pay-per-view-movies depending on the number of viewers. The fact that it was Kinect and Xbox developers who filed the patent shows clearly that Microsoft has considering use cases for Kinect that will rather be in Microsoft's interest, not in the customer's. Even if Xbone will not ship with such use cases like this:
  IF they want to at least reserve the possibility to introduce some use cases that are not in the customer's interest like the one described in the patent, they HAVE to force the customer to have Kinect attached, AND they'd even have to prohibit the customer from doing things like simply covering Kinect's all-seeing eye or making Kinect face a wall. Interestingly, while Kinect's very expensive depth-sensing technology is completely useless for the vast majority of games, it's perfectly capable of detecting and preventing such tricks
• Another use case for Kinect that would be rather in Microsoft's than the customer's interest is using the Xbone for TV audience measurement. Even if they didn't file a patent, Microsoft has definitely at least considered this idea, for it makes perfect sense for a device that is meant to control people's TV receivers. Basically, it would allow Microsoft to become THE TV audience measurement compary, being able to kick companies like Nielsen Media Research out of business in no time:
  - To save costs etc., traditional TV audience measurement boxes submit their data via telephone and only once per day. An internet-connected device on the other hand can report changing the TV channel within milliseconds, making it possible to analyze TV viewer behaviour in realtime
  - Traditional TV audience measurement boxes are only installed in a few thousand homes. They're still considered to give rather accurate results, but without a doubt the data would be even more accurate if millions of boxes were supplying data
  - Traditional TV audience measurement boxes are a little inconvient to use. For example, you always have to specify how many people are currently sitting in front of the TV. Kinect's capability to see and count viewers is the perfect solution to this problem - not only does it remove the inconvenience, it also prevents against human errors or people trying to provide wrong viewer numbers on purpose, for whatever reason
  - And the best of it all: Spreading the required hardware doesn't cost Microsoft a single penny - quite the contrary, they'd be  earning money even from the hardware!

I did answer the question though in my opinion some of the basic features of the XB one will require Kinect and will prompt the user when launching the said app or menu and same will go with some games....

the head count theory is a broken one.... I could easily turn the Kinect sensor toward a single person in my living room rendering the idea useless...
but lets admit this will be enforced why has it to be negative on the consumer... who is to say it won't be cheaper per head than a PPV ticket is today??? or it could be used for day 1 release of movies... and here too it could be cheaper to pay per head a 5 bucks ticket than go to the local theatre and pay 10 bucks per head (theoretical pricing here)...

the second point is not vailable either.... since your sample is not random it'd be a sample of gamer enthusiast only.... you have very little information through just the eye of Kinect beside physical features and head count, nothing on the household income, taste, type of housing etc.... Nielsen studies would be still vastly superior to anything MS with Xbox could ever come up with....
and once again why would it be bad ???? after all those studies are made to provide products and content that appeal always more to the customers.... I don't see how that would be bad to have better quality programing on TV based on what people are apparently enjoying the most.... ???

but in any case if they wanted to do that they would have to expressively let you know that they are collecting data for marketing purposes.... and lets imagine MS is the true evil here and doesn't tell you and does it completely illegally.... it wouldn't take me 10 second to realize the sham.... so enough with the conspiracy theories they are all more broken than the other....

Actually, it seems to be the problem because without it, you can have a $399 price point and also you can shut up the tin foil crowd.

double win.

Well, I agree that this patent alone cannot completely prevent customers from trying to trick the system. But obviously the Kinect developers did not consider the idea completely useless, otherwise they wouldn't have filed the patent. In practice, many people might think it's not worth the effort to try to trick the system, especially if the additional fee per additional person is rather low. Who wants to be the lonely Kinect fooler who has to stand in the corner of the room?

But anyway, I don't expect that we will see this particular concept at Xbone launch anyway. It was just an example of a possible reason why Kinect must be connected that is rather in Microsoft's interest than the customer's, an idea that we know the Kinect/Xbox developers definitely considered.

That would be Microsoft's smallest problem. Give anyone who agrees to provide the necessary information two months of Xbox Live Gold, and a lot of people would already agree. Give them constantly free XBL, and most people probably would.

That's a good question indeed: Why are you looking for something that can only be considered bad?

I'm not even sure they'd necessarily have to (considering that many recent internet-connected Smart TVs are already doing something very similar, without asking for the owner's permission), but I agree that Microsoft probably wouldn't just silently implement such a feature without notifying the user.