amirnetz said: Squilliam said: The real question is what they do with the Arcade in the future! I can see 3 good choices. 1. Do nothing, it works why change it? 2. Put an SD card slot. You can grab a 4gb SD card for like $10, but they lose the HDD upgrades. They could do this if they intend to drop the price of the Premium but not the Arcade, otherwise it wont make sense. 3. Install a small flash HDD like Nintendo does, possibly a combination with 2. It doesn't have to be much, but 4gb would allow people to say download Live Arcade games and stream netflix which should help them sell Live content and Live Gold subscriptions. I vote for (1). Microsoft is comfortable with the Arcade as a "starter system". They want to see customers buying accessories or electing to buy the Pro for more features. Upgrading the Arcade might just takes sales away from they other higher margins SKUs without any revenue increase. The Arcade is doing its job perfectly.

If they want to cut the price again. Speccing up the Arcade system makes more sense than trying to reduce the price too far too quickly thats all I was saying. For example the current Arcade may not work at $180/200 vs $250 between the Arcade and Premium but if they improve the specifications on the Arcade it might. Theres also the cost/benifit of selling content/netflix to Arcade users vs the minimal cost of a few GBs of Flash.

Squilliam said: amirnetz said: Squilliam said: The real question is what they do with the Arcade in the future! I can see 3 good choices. 1. Do nothing, it works why change it? 2. Put an SD card slot. You can grab a 4gb SD card for like $10, but they lose the HDD upgrades. They could do this if they intend to drop the price of the Premium but not the Arcade, otherwise it wont make sense. 3. Install a small flash HDD like Nintendo does, possibly a combination with 2. It doesn't have to be much, but 4gb would allow people to say download Live Arcade games and stream netflix which should help them sell Live content and Live Gold subscriptions. I vote for (1). Microsoft is comfortable with the Arcade as a "starter system". They want to see customers buying accessories or electing to buy the Pro for more features. Upgrading the Arcade might just takes sales away from they other higher margins SKUs without any revenue increase. The Arcade is doing its job perfectly.   If they want to cut the price again. Speccing up the Arcade system makes more sense than trying to reduce the price too far too quickly thats all I was saying. For example the current Arcade may not work at $180/200 vs $250 between the Arcade and Premium but if they improve the specifications on the Arcade it might. Theres also the cost/benifit of selling content/netflix to Arcade users vs the minimal cost of a few GBs of Flash.

The memory card that comes with the Arcade model is more than enough to do Netflix (only 3 megs needed) and to save games of Madden and NBA Live XX

Correct. It is surprising that so many people don't realize that you get the full experience with the Arcade model. It is just that the storage space for downloads is much smaller. But for Netflix streaming it is working fine.

Microsoft won't let the HDD go. That's the tool they use to split the SKU's.

In fact, I'm willing to bet the slim X360 will have a hole in either the top or bottom plate to hold the HDD and it's case since the slim profile wouldn't allow for side-mounting as they do now.

I'd be glad if the slim had a SDHC slot they'd let us use as the "internal" X360 HDD but it won't happen, it would cost them millions in revenue.

 I wonder about that. How much money does Mircosoft really make of the sales of the HDD? I know they have fat margins on it but are the sold HDD accessory quantities large enough to be worthy of protection?

I believe Microsoft makes most of its profit on game royalties and Live subscriptions. They more units sold, as long as they are not sold at a lost, the greater their on-going revenue stream.

It's hard to gauge even to them... previously the Arcade barely sold and there was no real incentive to go for a bigger capacity.

I guess in the following months they'll get some numbers...