2012-13 either or, they wouldn't be skipping persay... but launching a console that late if the other two were out would be dumb... but thats just my viewpoints and predictions

With downloads of full games they could support a higher end SKU easily and give people an incentive to download vs owning the full retail package.

Lets see:

Xbox 360 Hardware:

Xenos/Xenon combined on a single die with a clock speed bump of ~10-20% for each so the Xenos GPU would be running at ~600-650Mhz and the Xenon would be running at ~3.4-3.6Ghz. They could also add a few more ALUs to the GPU, bump the ED ram size and add another core as well.

For the ram switch to a 64bit interface with GDDR5 with say ~40% more system bandwidth and use 4 2Gbit chips to give a total of 1GB of ram.

If they switch to something like that they could achieve something like a 40% overall performance improvement cheaply and with other tweaks they could extend the life of the Xbox 360 by at least two years. Furthermore they could easily add several Xbox 360+ applications which wouldn't be possible on the Xbox 360, especially with the new Natal interface opening up some possibilities.

This is essentially like the PSP or DSi improvements, so please don't complain unless you've voiced complaints over the handheld hardware tweaks first. It would make for fewer accusations of being a hypocrite.

Great news. 360 has jumped massively in graphics over Gears 2 this E3 and it looks like M$ intend to get right behind Natal. Great news for 360 owners.

while they can do this even Sony mandated that games on the PSP has to run perfectly on the old specs so Microsoft would have to mandate the same terms for developers if they improve the hardware in the 360.

I just want to see something like the Blue-Ray in the xbox 360, I don't want to see the Gears of War 3 in a 8GBs DVD....

@heruamon

Any chance you could make more of an effort to separate your speculation from the articles you copy and paste? I thought your comments at the end were part of the original article until I clicked on it and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that would make such a mistake.

Got it...I'll modify the OP...I tried to do so with Italics, but I'll make it more explicit from my rambling to what was acutally stated by Kim and others at M$, thanks for point it out, and I certianly didn't mean to cause confusion.

The only thing about that  is I don't believe would seek to alienate current xbox 360 users, so they would have to ensure that developers make the games scalible to different console models.  I think we will see the same think with M$ using SD cards as well, since that gets around the DVD limitations of space, and also the transfer speeds associated with running games off brd.

sounds like MS answer to the PS3 Slim

I've said this every time Sony brings out the 10 year plan

A console's lifespan is not in any way, controlled by the manufacturer. The lifespan is decided by gamers, and game developers.