Demand is still higher than supply? There has been ample supply since the end of Februray.

They really are banking everything on GTAIV. What happens if the ps3 comes close to or even beats them in April? What will be their excuse then?

This is retarded, we had MS sitting with 1.7mil consoles at retail at the end of december, on boxing day there were between 60-100 xbox's sitting at any Future shop or Best buy store in NA. I was just at Future shop today and they had 12 elites and 8 arcades.

The only logical answer to any shortage is that MS had made a 360 with a built in HD-DVD and they had to kill it due to the death of the format.

Lol, it's BS from MS.

They were probably gonna bring an SKU w/ an integrated HD-DVD drive to market, to try to stem the hemorrhaging of money the HD-DVD camp was going to suffer if it lost to Sony's Blu-Ray (there's the obvious royalty loss for Toshiba, while MS would fail in its bid Trojan-horse its codecs into people's living rooms - something Sun, Apple, HP, IBM, Sony, and others all wanted to stop). 

But, HD-DVD was put in its grave too early by the several-industry-wide Blu-Ray Disc Association, and MS was caught with its pants down.  Ass toward the Blu-Ray Disc Association and the PS3.

Light-hearted theory concludes: the shortage of 360s is the delay in salvaging/reconfiguring the units into normal Premiums, Elites, whatever.

At any rate and in all seriousness, a terrible blunder for MS *IF* there actually was a significant shortage and it cost them sales. 

^^Post and username reported :)

 EPIC WIN

Loud Hot, I highly doubt the probability of such a thing. Either way, though, the most likely reason for the shortage of Pros and Elites was to eliminate stock of Arcades and Halo versions. They made way too many of both, and they are having too hard of a time trying to get rid of them with the competition the other models present. Plus, with pricecuts looming, they really didn't want those two models to be highly in stock. The Halo model was surely not part of their price-cut plans (though they should, just to get rid of them) and the Arcade/Core might not be part of their plans anymore at all.

 True.  The blunder is probably as you say, not as I joked.

If you want to see negatives in the supply issues, you will. But companies base their production number 4-6 months in advance based on previous data and what expectations were. 360 is selling more consoles than they did previously in the winter months, and they didn't have any huge releases planned that would spike sales until GTA, they hope. So when they planned production, they were aiming for increased production in March and April to prepare.

You can't afford to produce units on what you HOPE to sell, only what you can sell. And sure, the replacements ate into their production for replacements and for parts for refurbs. Put the two together and add in some possible miscalculation for which SKU's people are looking for, and you run short in some geographies from time to time.

Even Nintendo who's rolling in money from their hardware declined to add factories for Wii production because the long-term costs are so high for a possible short term gain. It's not as easy as snapping your fingers and magically producing units. Microsoft is finally turning profit from the Xbox division - they aren't going to just blow all the cash gambling on demand, especially when the North American economy (where all their customers are) is going in the tank.