I don't know why I didn't think of this earlier...

Remember about a month or two ago when Bill Gates said the 360 will be the most reliable console ever? I bet what they did is improve there QA standards.

If they required every console to go though a burn in phase, I could see this causing two things to happen. One is it would take longer to make one console (as they have more steps in the process), and two is it would reduce the yield.  If in the real world 20% of 360's break (just a guess), and MS employs good QA standards, those 20% would never leave the factory.

I bet that's what it is. 

what ive been wondering is:

how come there wasnt a shortage for shippingg consoles around halo 3 and christmas time.

and wii and ps3 are shipping with no probs

I doubt it, otherwise they would be publicizing that as the reason for the shortages. Either they are full of shit or stockpiling for GTAIV.

Or, because they stuffed the retail channel in Xmas 2006, they had to shut down their production a bit in the first half of 2007, and then underestimated how much they would need to Xmas 2007, and now are behind in getting production back up again.

Ding-ding-ding, logic wins again. That makes the tally on this board:

Logic: 147,292

Fanboys: 2 

 I wouldn't say that Wii is shipping with no problems. Supply goes from 200K to 50K to 200K to 70K and then probably back to 200K+. There are obviously some issues.

I find this hard to believe with the SKU changes.

Fanboys: 3 :p 

i seriously believe the best theory behind this whole thing is that they were moving towards an internal HD DVD drive and got caught completely off guard by WB.

The retail chain was still stuffed this christmas. We had them sitting with about 1.7mil consoles at retail.