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Originally Posted by Philip Colmer
Does anyone else feel that if the drive was going to have HDMI and support copy-protected output, MS would have something to say about that in order to end all of the speculation? After all, this is potentially something that they can laud over Sony.
The fact that they are keeping very quiet about this, and pricing, suggests to me that they haven't (yet) got anything good to say about either point.
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Or, it could be that there is no *need* for them to say anything because there is no *mandated* need for HDMI output in the HD-DVD spec anymore. It was dropped over a month ago. What they are providing is all that is needed in the market today.
Currently-shipping HD-DVD players are supposed to output full-res HD video over component, which is why the XBOX drive is going to be dirt cheap.
The rumor-mill suggests $99-129 starting in September.
(http://www.oxm.co.uk/articles/news/hardware/pre-e3_rumour_explosion!)
Some of the items in the note at xbox360news.com about this look dubious, but they actually nailed the GTA4 exclusives, so... <shrug>
Anyway, the whole blue-laser drive thing is mostly spec-manship at this point in time. Unless the movies themselves come down in price *a lot*, it really isn't going to impact the purchasing decision of all that many people: the fanboys will buy the brand they favor regardless of the price (Sony is right as far as *that* goes), dedicated gamers will end up buying one of each anyway, and the casual gamers, mom-n-pop buyers... Well, *those* folks tend to be price-sensitive and while they tend to go with what the kids want, they do not profile as early adopters anyway. So if they are buying this year, they're more likely to go with the cheapest box they can get which will be the 360 Core (especially after the price cut) or the Wii.
Sony is simply packing too much weight onto the PS3 (it has to sell games, downloadable music, and BD-ROMs, all against some pretty fierce opposition--MS, Toshiba/NEC, Apple, Disney, Fox, MTV, etc) and they may have just simply overloaded the hardware. And some of the choices on the gimp-model look odd... No memory card slot at all? *That* is going to hurt...
As much as I would *love* to have seen the 360 come out with a digital video port and a bigger HD (to say nothing of PC-less media center functions), I do understand that adding those features has a price on both the hardware and the back-end investment, as well as the retail price. MS chose not to push the envelope Sony is pushing.
Eventually, we'll see who got it right.