Hi Sean,
The 360 slim isn’t about attracting “new customers.” They’re just saying that because they need to prove to investors (who want MS to drop its consumer entertainment division entirely) that they’re going to take over Nintendo’s market. The reality is that it’s about stopping the 360 from bankrupting them. The Xbox 360 is a very, very poorly designed piece of kit. Have you seen the motherboard? It’s disorganized, and there are so many capacitors and inductors that I suspect they had some serious problems figuring out how to keep the voltage steady. The PS3 and Wii were both much more professionally designed–you can tell Microsoft isn’t a hardware company. The main problem with the 360 was heat transfer–the interior of the case was so cluttered, they couldn’t effectively pump air across the heat sinks to keep things cool. Everyone knows the red ring problems are related to heat, and every patched-up version they released failed to fix things. Well, this version has the CPU and GPU on a single, much smaller chipset, so it won’t generate as much heat, and allow the guts to be completely redesigned. If they did their jobs, you won’t hear much about red rings any more. It’s really nothing more than that. The jazzy new case and OMG KINECT READY is something someone in marketing thought up, but the real story is to just get the thing to stop breaking all the time.
Very interesting info. Thanks for sending it in.
Yeah, I believe the idea of Kinect began with the video Casamassina had of video camera boxing at GDC 2007. Casamassina goes to Reggie and says, “zOMG!! Do you know about this? It is so amazing!” And Reggie laughs and says, “We know about it.” At that time, there were people who thought it was ‘amazing’ and would ‘replace the Wii-mote. Apparently Microsoft marketers saw this and bit.
Microsoft isn’t a hardware company but isn’t a software company either. Microsoft is a marketing company. Their crazy E3 really should cement that.
So you think Xbox 360 Slim is nothing more than ‘Xbox 360 version that doesn’t break’? Someone emailed me asking about whether this new slim would be covered by Microsoft’s warranty of the Red Ring of Death. I haven’t heard anything about that with the Slim so perhaps Microsoft thinks it has phased out the problem.
Be damn funny if another hardware problem pops up for the slim. Tee hee hee.