It almost didn’t happen, actually – as 9pm loomed on the horizon like a gross, bleak harbinger of certain disappointment, Microsoft’s guys seemed to be doing everything except telling everybody what they really wanted to hear (besides all that Gears of War 3 stuff, obviously). But with three minutes to go, someone over at HQ wired in to remind Don Mattrick that there was, like, that new Xbox 360 SKU to show off, and give to every single person attending the conference.
Yes. Every single person in the audience got one of those glossy black beauties to take home. Commence hatred.
So it’s significantly smaller, much shinier, and totally blacker. It’s also packing built-in IEEE 802.11N 300mbps wi-fi, a 250 GB HDD, and a 45nm combo CPU/GPU. The really important question, however, is – what about that RRoD thing?
The twin fans from current models have been chucked in favour of one massive fan, resulting in “whisper-quiet” operation, and a much-needed improvement over what sounds more or less exactly like an aircraft hangar in my TV room. Moreover, the entire console is now pretty much a bunch of vents glued together. Cooling, therefore, seems to have been something of a major priority over at the tech department, so here’s to those dreaded red lights being a thing of the unhappy past.
Interestingly, it looks like current HDDs will be entirely incompatible with this new SKU, although the recent addition of flash disk functionality should mitigate the transfer process somewhat. Not altogether unexpectedly, the now all but obsolete MUs are not supported, with the new Xbox swapping out these slots with an additional two USB ports.
Microsoft has announced that all production of current Xbox 360 SKUs has terminated, with the new model shipping out right now in America, and next month in Europe. Accordingly, the Xbox Elite and Arcade SKUs are seeing an immediate $50 price cut, with the new Xbox moving in at the Elite’s previous RRP of $299. Local pricing has yet to be confirmed.
E3: Xbox 360 Slim revealed << discuss in the forum
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