A soul that the market doesn't like enough?
Xbox One Slim
- Thread starter dobwal
- Start date
Its liked more than XBOX 360.
Silence! Like your Xbox One. :3
Far far away. Fastest I've seen in the product docs was 3733.
Is it those unque points that people are buying XB1 for, or is that 'soul' misplaced? If the market doesn't value those features, removing them to make a cheaper, thus more desirable, product makes sense. Only if removing those features caused interest to drop would it be a bad move.
Cutting those features would essentially make it a slower performing PS4 without the ability to play PS4 exclusives. I'm sure there is a price point which the current hardware design that would be more desirable but at what cost to profits? Personally if they can't drop the price while making it smaller & keeping the same features in less than year, then I'd rather them go for XB1.5 in mid 2017 with faster cpu & graphics while keeping forward compatibility for existing XB1 owners.
Tommy McClain
Games consoles are inanimate objects. They don't have souls. If they did have souls, however, it would be games and the userbase that fostered unique or premier gaming experiences. None of which would be harmed by making XBone less uncompetitive that it is.
"XBone Phats" could retain everything they have now. People who care about it would keep it. If there's a market for it (there probably isn't one left) MS could choose to keep making DDR3 Xbox "phats" for them. People who don't want the things they've pretty much unanimously demonstrated they don't want, wouldn't have to buy an over-encumbered and bloated machine that they don't see enough value in. You might feel the original XB1 experience is special and precious and should be preserved at the expense of the health of the platform and the brand, but I don't.
And all the Xbox 360 owners switching to PS4 presumably don't either.
Kinect is selling like voluntary plague. Its most used features are voice ones that would also work with just a mic or headset or phone app. MS are even dropping the fucking gestures!! In PAL territories, the machine can't match 50 hz tv signals with 60 hz games, and the machine is also comatose.
Offering a smaller, more attractive, more cost competitive version of the platform is going to do far more for the platform than continuing to offer the thing people don't want.
Even just increasing margins by cutting the chaff would give MS some room to pitch a NextBox to shareholders. The current "half a billion units TVTVTVSports" box is now a bad corporate memory, like that time someone from upstairs microwaved a human turd in our halls microwave.
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For most console gamers, that's what it already is, hence its sales relative to the PS4.
Unfortunately, it's also unnecessarily expensive to make because of stuff the market has already demonstrated that it doesn't want.
Exclusive games and being cost competitive are the only weapons left for MS to use. That HDMI input that didn't sway the market when the machine was new? It's not going to sway the market now either, and especially not with no-one buying Kinect to control the not-attached device either ... but it is going to continue to add cost.
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Samsung announced they'd begun mass production of it in September last year.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9610/samsung-announces-12gb-lpddr4-dram-for-mobile-devices
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...unces-new-12gb-lpddr4-dram-clocked-at-4266mhz
When it'll actually land in device you can read B3D on the toilet with I don't know, but given that GDDR5X at BOSSTITS mHz and reduced voltage is supposed to be landing this year I'm guessing the faster LPDDR4 is going to be in devices this year too.
The items you suggested to axe: Removing snap apps & going to 6gb of system RAM, would effect original XB1 owners, not just new slim owners. The others would eventually effect original XB1 since there would no longer any incentive to continue support for Kinect, HDMI in/TV. The removal of Kinect from the main SKU has already led to removing infrared emitters in the controllers, so now the ability to swap controllers & keeping track of users is no longer supported. If I didn't want those features I'd just buy a PS4.
Tommy McClain
Tommy McClain
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You don't know either. Microsoft could be making a tidy profit. Plus, the market hasn't demonstrated they don't want those features. They have only demonstrated they don't want the features at a higher premium. Like I said get the price low enough they might prefer those features.
Tommy McClain
Just as an FYI - here is some relevant color from AMD's earnings report:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/382...-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single
http://seekingalpha.com/article/382...-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single
Its a general rule not the exception.
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Its exactly cheaper for apple TV than the iPhone and iPad. Apple reduced the rate to 15% for the apple TV from the customary 30% to drive acceptance. Apple controls the in app purchase policy around its devices. You could distribute an app and use a go around like having your interested parties sign up through your website but if you wanted to allow easy sign ups through the app, apple would be owed a cut.
I imagine since MS and Sony have a healthy userbase of devices where users make heavy use of streaming services, they have the leverage to employ similar policies.
The sad truth is though that those features are dead and not coming back. You'd right, losing them will mean they are longer going to be supported on your box as you hoped. However, they aren't really being supported anyway. So rather than encumber the platform with redundant features, it makes sense to trim them.
Note this opinion is based on vernacular heresay of the state of Kinect and HDMI. If there's actually more use than I know, there may be a decent counter argument.
D
Deleted member 13524
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That card uses GDDR3.
DDR3/4 offers 16bit width per-chip, whereas GDDR3/5 chips have a 32bit width.
So AFAIK if that card used DDR3, it would need twice the number of memory chips (at least 8?) to achieve 128bit.
The way I see it, DDR3/4's 16bit limitation isn't a problem for the market of memory modules, where a single module usually has 8 or more chips anyway, tied to a mux (or something similar, I don't know what's used nowadays) to pass it with a resulting 64bit width.
But for custom designs that try to be small, I can't see DDRx being great. GDDR5 and LPDDR3/4 can do the same width with half the chips. LPDDR4 could do 100GB/s with as little as 8 chips (4 on each side of the PCB).
I understand Microsoft went with DDR3 for price/density and a safer bet to reach 8GB of RAM, but damn has that decision come to bite them in the ass.
Now they're stuck with a memory that will be technically very difficult to replace because of its low latency and also gets in the way of making a smaller PCB for the console.
Perhaps they could use riser cards for the VRAM?
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Regardless of whether MS are making a tidy profit currently, if they can sell cheaper and make the same profit margin they'll make more money overall.
Kinect is still supported on the 360 in the sense that everything you had still works despite the sales stopping years ago, no reason for it to be any different on the XB1. Your Kinect Skype and HDMI input would continue to work fine, it's just snap-app development might dry up. But it might do that anyway.
MS have dropped gesture support from the dash because their data said almost no-body was using it, and voice commands and Cortana are being supported on mic / headset too.
And dropping to 6GB would still given them an enormous 1GB for system stuff. On 360 they got by with 32 MB, I'm sure 1GB (enough to run a Win10 laptop or two entry level Windows phone 10 devices) gives them room to do plenty of cool stuff.
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