Rumour: “New SKU design” planned for 360

I wonder if they’ll put the ring of lights on it…

What color this time? Blue?

No wai… a slim model… not a souped up new 360? No-one saw that coming, surely?

Oh wait, it’s exactly what everyone with half a brain cell was saying rather than what 1up were making out to be the case.

Leave the ring of lights out, put a klaxon in it.

They were never going to change the specs in any kind of significant way.

Re-design and bundled Natal at a good price puts them in a good place for next year though if the software delivers.

I’d probably buy a slim 360 in a heartbeat.
kinda miss mine, ever since I sold it after finishing Mass Effect.

PT –

I love the ListenUp podcast lot, I do, but sometimes they really do need a /Joey

/Joeys 1up

It’s so incredibly bloody obvious that fracturing the market with an incremental upgrade to the bast hardware specs would be a VERY bad idea.

New design has sense. Frabication process evolves…that’s the normal way

pirotic on EG seemed to confirm all of this

“People who wouldn’t have considered buying a regular 360.

They are going to have a 360 (in a different form factor/case) alongside the Natal, as it’s own package with it’s own (console) name. They’ll advertise it as if it were a new console aimed at attracting the casual market the Wii is making so much money out of. The mums and dads will think it’s a new console, it’ll look much better than the Wii, it’ll be really cheap due to it being based on ’360 tech which costs Microsoft very little thesedays, and everybody wins.

At the same time they’ll release the Natal add-on for the regular 360 for people who already own the system. They can play the same games etc. The same way anybody with the natal console could go out and buy a ’360 pad and play all the other games. I suspect they’ll subsidized the cost of the natal itself with the casual hardware bundle, and probably rip off the people buying it as a standalone for the ’360.

The existing dashboard will change depending on if you have a natal plugged in or not, so again, if they unplug it and whack in a ’360 pad it’ll be exactly the same as a ’360 other than the form factor and (maybe) the media format it uses.”

Bundle it with Natal and game(s), design it aesthetically, price it sensibly and reaffirm the 3 year warranty scheme for it and you’ve got yourself a deal Microsoft

“Bundle it with Natal and game(s), design it aesthetically, price it sensibly and reaffirm the 3 year warranty scheme for it and you’ve got yourself a deal Microsoft”

That I can see happening, a Xbox Natal like before but without hardware changes, just to the look of it really.

Bundle a 360, Natal plus 1 or 2 Natal compatable games and the warranty and your set.

does this 3d thing mean HDTV’s will be meaningless in a couple of years?

I reckon a major factor involved here is the popularity of the Wii, and whether people want something different, or they are ready for it.

By that I mean, if the Wii is waning next fall, there will be space in the market for a new ‘innovator’ as the correct business term goes. It may also work as a penetratively, as it’s cheaper than the Wii.

But the questions are, whether people are willing to adopt the Xbox brand – on this new casual basis, whether the Wii is still popular, and the rest if luck, down to word of mouth.

so i should wait to get one then?

Depends how much you want one.

If the rumour is true… and if they manage to come up with a much better design in terms of reliability, then I certainly would.

They already came out with a much better design in terms of reliability, though. A ‘slimline’ would effectively be ‘back to the drawing board’ – it could be worse again!

If they haven’t learned from the problems of rushing the first design by now, then they never will!

tbh, at the moment, the temperature in my living room is dictated by my 360.

I have to keep it as cool as possible, because I’m convinced that the thing could ‘melt’ at any moment, with the recent hot weather.

I’d love to be able to not have to care about that like I can with most other tech hardware I’ve ever had…

“I have to keep it as cool as possible, because I’m convinced that the thing could ‘melt’ at any moment, with the recent hot weather.”

It really doesn’t come down to something as simple as overheating, it’s the constant hot / cold cycles causing thermal expansion / contraction that kill it. Ironically you’d be more likely to keep it alive if you kept it on 24×7.

How old is your 360 though, G1GA? My ‘late last year’ model just about reaches ‘slightly warm’ after a 2-3 hour play session.

@ PT:
Cool! Thanks for the info. I suppose I’ll just have to try and keep it at a constant temperature.

@ Blerk:
It’s only a couple of monthe old…

I have two. I also have another Elite sitting in a drawer that stopped working, giving me 2 red lights after a couple of minutes use (over heating) even after I turn it on from stone cold. I only meant to get my current one while the old one was getting fixed and then sell one of them, but I haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

Well that’s weird. I never play anything from disc, only from the hard drive. I guess that could maybe make a difference if you don’t install your games?

@Blerk: The difference would be pretty small, in the realms of a degree or two maximum. It’s more likely that his 360 has a different model of fans to yours.

I’ve only got Midnight Club LA installed atm. Have no idea if that would make a difference or not though…

I’m pretty sure that my first Elite is a Falcon.

I can only assume that my newest one is a Jasper… Haven’t checked though, so it could be a Falcon too. Can’t be 100%, but as it’s only 2-3 months old I’d guess at Jasper…

Mine’s definitely a Falcon.

@GHz: Or it could be a Zephyr. Life is full of surprises.

Could be I suppose… I’ll probably check tonight.

Just found a pretty useful page here

got a Falcon 360 last year. man, I paranoidically have checked all the requirements for it when buying mine.

If a new SKU with a new appearance is in the works its unlikely to be too different in size from current Xbox otherwise it would break accessories like the HD.

Maybe integrated power supply so it loses the external power brick.

@rainer: It wouldn’t really make a difference. They could just switch to the PS3 way of handling the HDD without too many problems. They’d just need to change the packaging on the old hard drives to say “Not compatible with 360-X”.