I was listening to a thewiire.com podcast. Number 65 (and it was truly a dreadful podcast), but an interesting tid-bit came out of it.

The guy who runs the site said that one of his aquantances who works for MS stated that MS had no intentions of making the 360 Elite until they got a "great" deal on external HDs. Because of this, they opted to create a new sku of the 360...one with a 120 GB hard drive.

I guess there is no way of proving this and it doesn't really matter cause it is out. I found it interesting and thought it was an easy way for MS to make more money.

Its possible.....

I wonder though, if that was the case they "just" got a great deal on 120gb HDDs, why not just lower the prices, and offer 120gb HDDs as an upgrade, or something to the premiums, and just make a black normal Prem/Core?

Either way, certainly possible. M$ loves a deal they can make a bit of extra gold on.

I'd say the driving force behing the elite was the need for the 360 to have an HDMI output. The hard drive size increase is just bonus, and is...of course... available separatly.

Is that your "looking for positive things" act that you were talking about in the other forum? :P

The only issue with the Elite + HDMI argument, is the fact that even the H3 360 will have HDMI, and probably at a much lower price.

It could of, however, been a test bed for hardware fixes (all should have the reworked heatsink), and the demand for HDMI, for the future X360s.

Maybe they created the elite because theirs a market for it.

Rumor: why was this thread created?

 For sh*t's and giggles...

 And I thought people on this website like to talk about videogames and their respective consoles. And the videogame industry and all of its business aspects. For instance, why was the 80 GB PS3 created? For Sony to save money by taking out a chip and replacing it with emulation.

 Oh Rumors!!! People love rumors. 

MS could have easily released a larger GB hard drive sold separately for the 360 owners who are into downloading their HD movies and such without releasing a new sku. Instead they release an "Elite" system which doesn't cost much more to manufacture than the Premium (does HDMI and black plastic cost a lot?) and sell it for $80 more.

My guess is that this was also a way to trickle in HDMI and see it move onto their other systems like their Halo 360 and possibly beyond.

@mrstickball
Yeah I'm not sure if they got all the kinks out of the Elite. Brian at Kotaku just had his Elite crap out. Although it wasn't the RROD...just a broken disc reader.

I'm sorry if nobody else found the topic interesting. I am easily amused...Oh look a nickel.