Lately a lot of people have been saying "Drop the price to $350 and throw out kinect,"  and "Why doesn't MS just take a loss on a $400 console, they have tons of money!"   MS will not do this in 2013, and will only possibly do it in late 2014 as a desperate attempt to save the brand for the following reasons:

-MS invested countless millions into making Kinect 2.0 the powerhouse it is to the point that they allowed the PS4 to be stronger AND cheaper.  They did this because they felt everyone would buy a console that has both Wii and Halo/Gears appeal.  That is the soul of the console and what it is designed to be!

-They simply cannot afford to throw away all of that R&D and sell the console at a $100 loss because it would bring the Xbox debt past 5 Billion dollars once again for no reason other than to say they sold more!  

-MS created the Xbox division to get into the living room and eventully keep it there as a successful long-term brand.   However it is the third generation of Xbox and MS is still hemorging money to keep this brand afloat.  If the Xbox One, the actual incarnation of what Xbox was always supposed to be; fails to make the profit they have always wanted: then Xbox fails and it will be done (In the current form it is in).  There is no point in bleeding money to make a "Me-Too" product like the Zune was.

Agreed 100%. However, X360 made money on its own and its very likely Xbone will make money on its own.

Therefore over time the Xbox division will show profit as it moves past the initial Xbox horror story. I doubt MS will go anywere, unless I'm completely wrong and Xbone does die out sub-30m.

the brand won't need saving... even if it actually sales half as much as the PS4 they won't be losing money this....
one great example is apple... they don't dominate any market anymore and yet are way profitable....

there is no desperation at MS... the only desperate people are fans like us that care about sales ranking over profit margin and net profit at the end of the fiscal year....

the XB will follow a usual price decrease as production becomes cheaper....

even if the xb1 sells shit ms isn't gonna go anywhere, i assume they would have stopped after the first xbox if that was the case

In short, they know the Kinect 2.0 wont sell if its sold separately.

Or because they've already sold a bunch of Kinect-based ads. Maybe both.

That is just garbage. Kinect is around 25 million in sales, MS have the knowledge, experience and resources to back that up and sell Kinect 2 just as well.

...and your point its? You're justifying the longevity of casual use  item in the public eye because.....? Kinect 2 is being bundled to protect the investment, period. If they felt they could sell it without you would see a $400 Xbox One. Its called protecting an investment.

Yep, also, they sold the Kinect not only in high GB bundles but also in arcade bundles. People gobbled up the arcade bundles. That was when the fad was at its height during the holiday season. Kinect arcade bundles saved the Xbox 360's lead on Sony from 2010-2012. That crowd is diminished unless there is a new fad that is created to get the non-gamers to join in once more. If people think they created a stable crowd with casual items, its pretty sad. This is why I was kind of pissed at Nintendo for not allowing the Wii U to primarily be a Wii HD, they just had to confuse the casuals and make things more complicated for them.

Though I think Kinect 2.0 would sell, and perhaps sell moderately well, I don't think we'd see anything like the jump we had with the original Kinect.  After all, those sales fell off a cliff after several months.  As with the Wii, part of the user base were casuals who probably wouldn't return for round 2.

Relative to that, if Microsoft sold the XO without Kinect 2.0, we'd see the same thing that happened with the Kinect after the boom was over, which was that developers started ignoring it.  Microsoft also wants everything to be "better with Kinect," so they're making sure developers won't feel that adding Kinect features is a waste of time.  The only way to do that is to bake it into the base product itself.  Really, they're probably doing the smart thing for the long run, otherwise they'd have a split user base and they'd be the only ones bothering to fund Kinect projects.