Have said it before and will say it again. $500 launch price was always a year 1 price or less. MS chose to take higher profits at the start knowing that they would basically sell all units at the start so why launch at $400. Take the extra $400,000,000 in revenue from the launch period and invest it in the future. Thinking that an early lead for the PS4 is disaster is foolish at best.

Xbox One was profitable at launch and likely with the optical disc-less unit at $400 will still be profitable. Removing blu ray drive is a no brainer. Since launch we have used the drive once. We simply dont have a need for it. If you must have it then purchase the console with it. Kinect is far to important long term and would splinter the software while purchasing games via download does nothing to the software. Kinect 2.0 is also not as expensive as some seem to think. The first Kinect 1.0 was estimated to cost less the $60 to produce. Kinect 2.0 has better cameras and microphones, but no gears or motors. Since the cameras and microphones naturally got more advanced at likely the same cost, Kinect 2.0 probably costs the same or even less the Kinect 1.0 to produce.

Xbox historians trace the stone back to the ancient days of the PS2. Those stones hurt my forefathers pretty bad :P

I would be on a digital only Xbox like flies on an Ethiopian. I don't need the ODD for anything so if it means a smaller footprint then it's all good.

I would go for a cheaper xbox one with no disc drive had they kept their original plans for games being downloaded. But now i think i would rather keep a disc drive as games for downloading wont become cheaper.

lies! Nobody knew about the Xbox brand back in the PS2 days.

lies! Nobody knew about the Xbox brand back in the PS2 days.

Sony did both.  The cut stuff and they also revised the hardware.  Even with the slim they cut the price when they released the product which was a revision of the current hardware without any cut features.  The X1 is Kinect and if MS is not willing to part with it then they must have big things in store for the device.  So far there is no indication that MS is going a kinectless route.

I was talking about what they did year 1 in the panic to get the price down because no one was buying it, hardware revisions generally dont happen year 1 without drastic changes.

if it's a kinect less model then that's a good move, if it's digital only then in afraid it will flop

I predict kinect less model which will be good for me as I can pick one up

This doesn't bode well for MS - they're stuck between a rock (losing sales to Sony) and a hard place (potentially being forced to eat huge losses on HW). Personally though I think their faith is alternative revenue streams, particularly Xbone's ability to offer precisely targeted advertising space which may well be very profitable even on a smaller userbase

Whether that will be effective though is something I really don't know about however