[bad soda]

This week there has been confirmation of an all new Xbox 360 dubbed the “Elite” from Microsoft. This should be good news for the masses because it will offer upgrades to the current 360’s, but it also upgrades the price to make it quite a rip off when you really look at the stats.

First the good. Thenew model is said to be a 3rd SKU sold in addition to the Core and Pro bundles, so as of right now it will not take away any choice that you have. It has an HDMI port which should not effect too many people now, but as HDTV’s become the standard will be a bigger deal, and a 120GB hard drive. These are all good things. Also it comes in a cool sleek “Black” color to mix things up and add more flavor to their color options.  

Now the bad. There is no build in WiFi which will cost you an extra $100 if you want to have that capability. Also HD-DVD will not be inside the box, so if you were looking forward to using that HDMI port to put high definition movies on your screen you are looking an an extra $200. In addition to the recent reports that Blu-ray is outselling HD-DVD so that may not be something you want to invest in if they won’t be making movies in HD-DVD in a year or so. To top all of that off, the Elite will cost you $479 according to most sources. So they are charging you 80 bucks more then the 360 Pro for a larger hard drive and the color black.

The reason this is such a big problem for me is twofold. First, Microsoft knows that they need to get a bigger hardrive out to consumers because of the movie and TV content they are going to start offering for download that will not be successful if people don’t feel like they have enough space to fit it all. I think gamers are going to pick their games over movies and TV when it comes to the 20GB of space that the Pro 360 comes with now. Gamer’s are not going to be filling that space up with movies, and so Microsoft won’t be selling those movies and the service will fail. So instead of just selling at the same price as a Pro 360, they are going to charge you more for storage space that they want you to have so you can pay them more money to fill it up with HD movies and TV.

 My second issue is with the lack of features. Go buy a Premium PS3 right now and you get an 60GB hard drive, built in WiFi, and and built in Blu-ray player with HDMI built in and ready to go. This is all going to cost you $599 at retail which is a lot, but not when you look at the features. Now take your “Elite” 360 at $479 add $200 for your HD-DVD player you are already at $679 then if you want the WiFi feature you add an extra $100 to that putting you at $779. Now that PS3 is not looking like all that bad of a deal. I am sure that a lot of Sony Executives are thanking Microsoft for this one.

Wrapping all this stuff up. In my opinion this is a clear case of Microsoft trying to pull an Apple on us. Don’t get me wrong I love macs and I am what you would consider a classic fanboy, but Apple is the only company I know that could only upgrade a product a little, change the color, and then sell it back to you for a lot more and have tons of fanboys go buy it on day one. I don’t think Microsoft has that following and I hope that the consumers can see through this huge rip off. I guess you can leave it to Microsoft to make a competators products look better and better.