Print

[rasmithuk]

Ok, I know that Scobler isn't 100% reliable but he's got a better chance that most of the people bouncing around ideas.

He outlines 3 reasons in his post:
1) That both sides are being generous with what their devices will do (a lot of 'smoke and mirrors' on both sides).
2) That they haven't yet decided which drive would be used in the 360.

And the last and the most likely:
3) They couldn't get the volume of drives needed for a Christmas launch.

He does say however (and it's not clear whether this is him guessing or something he's been told by the 360 team) that an add-on drive is easy to do.
I'm guessing they could release it as a USB device with a USB hub in it to keep/increase the number of ports on the 360.

Here's the full post: http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/10/07.html#a11391

[LowProfileWurm]

How about the fact that the drives are bloody expensive when not everyone wants to use one?  MS is all about business... and business is all about money.  Everything every company ever does is to maximize profit, and a standard HDD just wouldn't cut it.

[Bogus8]

Word, I agree... I just wish they would spread that wealth more evenly... who the hell needs a million a year to live?  "but sorry your job just got sent to china where we will pay slave wages to maximize my bonus... and does it really matter we weren't paying you squat anyway... again I got to send my kid to Harvard and I'm not concerned if they turned of the heating at your house this winter"  If it wasn't for that attitude I would have NO problem with business's being so profit driven but this imbalance in wealth is just rediculous.... now you done got me on a rant at 9 in the morning when I should still be a sleep

[EverestX]

QUOTE(LowProfileWurm @ Oct 7 2005, 09:40 AM)

How about the fact that the drives are bloody expensive when not everyone wants to use one?  MS is all about business... and business is all about money.  Everything every company ever does is to maximize profit, and a standard HDD just wouldn't cut it.

AMEN.


--MS. wants to save money on making the console so they can spend more money on other thngs.  Bill is the man, he's got the master plan.

[twistedsymphony]

to the initial poster:

1. Yes that's true... but what does that have to do with the hard drive?

2. Not true. they've known exactly what make and model they were going to go with long before the 2 SKU announcement, and even longer before production started.

3. Not true again, the drives have been in production longer than the rest of the console and have been in production for use in devices other than the 360. No to mention the hard drive will be available as a stand alone item. All said and done there will be more hard drives than 360s come launch time.

Could it be that MS was actually telling the truth when they said that they wanted to offer variety to it's consumers, and a lower price point console that could still play games without the bells and whistles. Not everything is a conspiracy theory.

MS has been planning this for much longer than most people think... remember WAY BACK WHEN while the 360 was just a twinkle in J.Allard's eye, he mentioned how Cell phones were perfectly capable of delivering all sorts of services and features without a hard drive like storage device... Go back and look at some of the REALLY old 360 and you'll see MS has been telling us this for a very very long time.

[rasmithuk]

To twistedsymphony, I think most of my/your confusion is that this post is about the optical drive choice, not the HDD (sorry, probably me using the wrong termanology for it).

None of these are my ideas, they're from Scobler (who if people don't know works for MS and is part of the channel 9 team that goes around interviewing people inside MS), I'm just repeating them here because I thought that people might find them interesting.

As I just said, they guy works for MS and talks to the Xbox dev team so either he's got the wrong end of the stick or he knows something we don't. He should also have a video appearing on channel 9 at some point in the near-ish future with interviews with the dev team (it's usually less PR based, just him and his camera, and the techies usually give tech details).

[LowProfileWurm]

Ah, yes.  HD drive is a HARD DISK drive.  Optical drives (I'll assume you meant HDDVD) are a different bag of wurms with the same motivation: Money.  You can apply what I said before to this.  Too expensive.  Achem's Razor my friend.

[twistedsymphony]

QUOTE(rasmithuk @ Oct 7 2005, 12:06 PM)

To twistedsymphony, I think most of my/your confusion is that this post is about the optical drive choice, not the HDD (sorry, probably me using the wrong termanology for it)....

Ahh ok  :popcorn:

In that case

1. Yes

2. Yes
and
3. YES absolutely

 :lol:

in terms of the Disc Drive it's as simple as this: MS wanted to release THIS YEAR, it wasn't technically of financially possible to include a Blue Laser disc format and release the console before the end of the year...

MS would rather launch this year without a Blue Laser disc format than next year with one, therefore no blue laser disc format.  :popcorn: