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Nevery

Could it be? Xbox 360 turns whore to "put out" more

posted by Nevery on January 5, 2007 12:33 PM in Games, Rant

Endgadget has posted an interesting picture of what's supposedly Xbox 360 v2.0. This new 360, codenamed Zephyr, shows a shiny new HDMI port. Now, if this is real, what the hell was so hard about doing this to begin with? I can understand the HD-DVD player wasn't in the system because the tech wasn't complete, but HDMI was around and waiting for us to show off our 1080p goodness and was left off. The other addition, 120gb HDD! As long as I can purchase that seperately I'll be ok, but I can't magically install HDMI. So Microsoft, what do you plan on doing for us lovely people who bought the premature release of your system? Especially since I was one of those people who had to deal with a horrid customer service experience due to faulty hardware on release day.

Read More: Hard Drive , HDMI , Xbox , Xbox 360 , Zephyr

comments (1) | permalink

Sitnalta says:

posted January 5, 2007 1:35 PM

The issue was simply cost. HDMI isn't like tacking on an analog port like S-Video or component (Y/Pb/Pr.) It's a complex subsystem of video and audio processing. If it were cheap it'd be on everything.

The Xbox 360 was rushed to market. Thus they had to chisel off features for it to be "reasonably" priced. Dollars to donuts the HD-DVD drive and HDMI port were the most expensive and superfluous features.

You also have to consider the extra space, power and heat consumed and produced by the HDMI circuitry. The 360 was always on the bleeding edge of excess on all three fronts. With the 360 going to 65nm architecture in v2, there's a lot more breathing room for more features to be added.

On a side note: buying electronics on release date is always a gamble. Customers are always the final test of any design. Defects or poorly designed components are almost certain. Though their customer service was inexcusably bad in the beginning, they are at least making an effort to improve.

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