360 Arcade, Elite, Premium, and Pro discontinued on Amazon (New SKU at GDC?!)

NONE OF IT, explains the reason for shortages.

I have yet to see the first piece of factual evidence provided by you that explains why the 360 has been facing shortages.

The closest you've come so far is to make the inference that its easier and cheaper to manufacture the Wii (which we all know is technologically a last generation console) than it is to manufacture the 360.

But that point looses relevance the first time you ask yourself 'why would any manufacturer get in bed with a first generation console'.

The answer is obviously that profit margins are higher.

So again... There's no answer to the question.

We're talking about 360 shortages here. That has NOTHING to do with other consoles, unless you can PROVE a link that shows that MS manufacturing capabilities for the 360 have been negatively effected by the success of the other consoles.
 
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This is absurd to the point of requiring clowns juggling in the corner in order to distract from the reality of the statement.
[modhat]Okay, peeps, we're not going to discuss PR spin. That's OT for this board and hopefully FutureCTO appreciates that now, along with the miscommunications he's had, so we can all move along. I'll clean up your post to keep out the personals and set us back on topic and let's make sure it stays that way.[/modhat]

NONE OF IT, explains the reason for shortages.
...
I have yet to see the first piece of factual evidence provided by you that explains why the 360 has been facing shortages.
Buried in FutureCTO's post was a link that led to a link that led to a report he mentioned, DigiTimes :

Wistron is reported to have phased out of Xbox 360 production and has ended its six year cooperation with Microsoft, according to market sources.With Microsoft dropping its selling price of the Xbox 360 console earlier this year, it tried to push the profit pressure onto its three OEMs, Wistron (who accounted for 40% of shipments), Flextronics (40%) and Celestica (20%), by asking them to lower their OEM prices.
Wistron decided to stop taking Xbox 360 orders at the end of the third quarter after trying to negotiate with Microsoft over a quarter long period.
So we do have evidence of a hardware company withdrawing from XB360 manufacturing in Nov '07, who were 40% of supply. That's gotta have an impact! FutureCTO just needs work on structuring his posts, and staying on the relevant subjects!

One aspect of FutureCTO's hardware case doesn't tally though
FutureCTO said:
Coincidentally, notice that the always out of stock Wii console jumped by nearly 800,000 units in sales during that time. Wistron was making 1 Million Xbox360's a month. So this is just a guess.
If Wistron was making 1 million units a month of XB360s, and they were 40%, then the total XB360 manufacturing rate was 2.5 million per month. That's a lot of consoles! There's no way MS could have been ordering that many units, at any point in XB's life to date. It would also account for a 40% drop in hardware from November, which should not have impacted the Christmas stocks by a huge amount if prior stockpiling was sensible.

It's probably fair to say that current shortages are caused by reduced manufacturing capacity with another company having to step in to increase products. The reasons for this hardware change FutureCTO has tried to go into depth over and gotten lost on the way, but in this thread, we plain just don't care! Suffice to say Wistron quit and MS need to get more boxes made.
 
Didn't see this mentioned but is it possible that MS underestimated the need for replacement parts and not sales?

I think a more likely explanation to all this is that there is a probably a % of RROD consoles that are 'beyond repair', therefore requiring a full mainboard replacement. When you're talking about console production in this thread, for all intents and purposes, mainboards ARE consoles.

So what may have happened is that the amount of consoles requiring mainboard replacement, as well as the # of people 'in the know' RROD'ing their older units on purpose, put them behind the 8 ball wrt this critical component.

Think about it this way, a 10%-15% miscalculation in this regard could have easily amounted to a few hundred thousand units, that if available, would have mitigated the shortage and put their holiday sales numbers in a solid year over year growth.
 
If Wistron was making 1 million units a month of XB360s, and they were 40%, then the total XB360 manufacturing rate was 2.5 million per month. That's a lot of consoles! There's no way MS could have been ordering that many units, at any point in XB's life to date. It would also account for a 40% drop in hardware from November, which should not have impacted the Christmas stocks by a huge amount if prior stockpiling was sensible.

Some more miscommunication.
You agreed that what I wrote included supporting evidence. Then turn around on news mentioned by quoting wording that portrays it as my hardware case? In reality you are disagreeing with facts used by Digitimes and various news outlets. But I will accept that this issue has been assigned to me by you.

To recap. You agree the news links in my post support that Wistron dumped Microsoft, because it was growing less profitable, do to pressures, and penalties involving the RROD. However you did something excellent, math on total volume of units. Less excellent is that it was recognized as an issue I did not address. Rather than doubts towards the information given by the various news outlets.

News from Joystiq and many other online forums polling its members about all pre-hdmi and a good percentage of pre Falcon systems. Show that despite what's in the news, user defect rates are much higher than known to the mass media. That would reduce the capacity to produce new units, by the capacity to repair or replace old units.

The other part of this MAY BE a mis-interpretation of the numbers as total production, not total capacity. i.e. They could do 1 Million Xbox360 units a month but how many companies work at full capacity? Also from the news linked in my posts, these companies were being slowed down by more stringent repair requirements taking much more time, than some of the shortcuts defeating digital rights management, that they were taking to expedite getting defective units back to consumers.

*TOO MUCH INFORMATION!*

*Fine on your argument regards manufacturing, but now you start to go totally off topic. We all know the failure rate is extremely high. We've had lots of discussion on this point elsewhere in the forum, including our own polls and our own analysis of the results. You don't need to write a huge missive stating what's already accepted as fact, especially referencing dubious sources in support. 'This senior member at this forum says...' isn't a strong reference! 'My mate had a disk scratch' isn't useful for determining scope of damages! You only need to reference the numerous articles on the failure rate to cover that point.*

The EBGames conferance call of 30% to 33% represents times following the HDMI equipped units.
Using the math of Shifty Geezer, 2.5 million a month and thinking from Expletive we apply 33% loss to replacements.
That would be 1.6 Million of 2.5 million units for new customers a each month.

What goes un-mentioned about the future of defective Xbox360's or unknown to most is that the RROD doesn't even exist anymore.
With Falcon units and forward the error code is a green ring of death.
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/128467.html

*What has that got to do with the subject? Do you not see how you're totally meandering off topic? The colour of the hardware fault is totally irrelevant to the failure rate and its impact on hardware availability!*

[huge snip wearing out 3 pairs of scissors]

*And all this lot can go. It's all off topic talking about failure rates. We know it has high failure rates! You seem to be forgetting we've been here discussing every aspect of the consoles for years, and know this. We don't need a thesis to show XB360's die a lot.*

*You're whole argument and post could have been presented in a few on-topic lines*

The concise version of FutureCTO's post as rewritten by Shifty :

Well that million console figure comes from a news report, but I don't have it to hand (or you could change this to embed the link to the exact article). It could be a misreporting by them. Regardless, if we go with 40% capacity from Wistron being lost, that's going to be a sizeable impact. And also don't forget the impact of the high failure rate needing replacements. The combined effect is the amount of new hardware available for stores is going to be diminished due to less production or high replacements.

Add a concluding remark, either...

MS knew they'd be short on numbers but were helpless to do anything about it. It's the result of the choices they have made, both in product with a high failure rate and in losing one of their suppliers, but should be recovered over time.

...or...

MS must have known that the pressure they were levelling on Wistron would cause them to reconsider their contract. In effect MS scared away 40% of their production capacity, and they were pretty stupid to go ahead with it!

...or something else.

*And for a last piece of advice, the fact an article states something doesn't make it true! All sources have to be considered for validity. Bunk reporting is something this board runs into fairly regularly because modern journalism sucks.*
 
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Some more miscommunication.
You agreed that what I wrote included supporting evidence. Then turn around on news mentioned by quoting wording that portrays it as my hardware case? In reality you are disagreeing with facts used by Digitimes and various news outlets.

What is in evidence, 1 million units that came from the news, not from the sentence you chose to quote.
Okay, so where's that quote? Are you expecting me to look over all your last posts trying to find it when you could just link to it and quote it here?
 
Okay, so where's that quote? Are you expecting me to look over all your last posts trying to find it when you could just link to it and quote it here?

I'm still cleaning up. Quoting you drops the quote of you quoting me, two posts up. :p
I also just sent you an pm. In about 15 minutes I hope to have cleaned it up enough.

I guess I am done. Just some bold highlighting to do later on. Thank you.
 
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