Yeah. When they’re done they’ll have a PC that works, something they can’t seem to achieve with Windows.

Yeah but call me when they make a game worth playing for the X-Box. 

Ring-a-ding-ding.

I said worth playing. 

Let me clarify my statement. X-Box’s biggest selling point to date is X-Box Live. I don’t like to play online so when they make a single player game that is worth playing to me then I’ll be interested.

Bah, that system sounds good enough for kid’s games. Check this out:

… four 2.5Ghz IBM G5 Custom cores, with 128KB of level 1 cache and a 512KB shared level 2 cache, while the graphics will be powered by a dual core ATI RN520 chipset, with 1MB of on-board eDRAM for the frame buffer.

That’s the Nintendo Revolution, due middle of next year. And the Playstation3 is supposed to be even better.

I eagerly await the PS3. I think the only way I would jump to XBox is if my favorite game series jumped ship.

Crazy Matt. Nintendo is for kids. If I had a kid, I’d probably buy a Nintendo, but since I’m all grown up my choice is between Xbox and PS2.

I’ve played all three (obviously not the new ones), and I have to say that I like the Xbox the best. Remember, this is a Macintosh user talking here; for me to say something that nice about a MS product is almost physically painful (okay, so I’m exagerating a bit).

The one thing that I’m hearing about the 360 that doesn’t make me happy, though, is that it might not be back-compatible with the current games. The one thing I’m hearing that makes me happiest is that the box will still have a hard drive; a lot of the speculation had MS dumping the hard drive.

Playstation has the best games and the biggest selection, but Xbox has almost everything I actually want to play. Halo, Soul Calibur, KOTOR and the sequel, good racing games. I’m a happy camper.

I’m not talking about the current crop of consoles, silly. Look at those stats! Four 2.5 GHz G5 processors (which are 64 bit, btw, don’t know about those chips in the Xbox) is just insane. Plus a dual-core ATI card? Nuts.

That said, if I was a hardcore gamer or had the time to become one in the next year I’d get both an Xbox and either a Nintendo or a PS3 (or maybe all three). That way you’d get almost a year of play on a next-gen machine before you get to use the next-and-a-half-gen box.

I’ve got a question, though. How do they manage to keep these under the 400 dollar price point? A dual 2.3 gig Mac (with a much crappier video card than the Nintendo) is currently selling for 2500. Probably the only thing the Mac has on the Nintendo is a bigger drive. Are these consoles really losing over two grand a sale or is Mac hardware that amazingly profitable (I know they’re overpriced, but if Jobs was making 2 grand a pop on the powermac he’d never sell something as cheap as an iPod)? Or am I just missing something?

You know with the success of the iPod I wonder why Apple hasn’t developed a gaming console of their own.

The Xbox processors are IBM, too, so they are at least related to the G5s that will be in the Nintendo box. I’m like you, though, I don’t really consider myself a hard core gamer and I don’t even have the time to play more than a few times a month as it is. If I had more free time, I’d probably get the Xbox and the Nintendo (home of all things Mario-related).

I’ve been wondering about the price point, too. I know that the consoles themselves are loss leaders. They make money on peripherals (which are all overpriced), the online services, and the licensing fees from every company that sells a game for their systems. But, even with all that money coming in, I have a hard time imagining that one of these things could lose that much money and still stay profitable in the larger sense.

I know that Apple doesn’t make 2000 on a new dual 2.3 gig Mac, but I’m not sure how much they do make.

All I know for certain is that if I do end up buying an Xbox 360 this year, it’s technical specs will mostly blow my desktop away.

And, Trench, I don’t think anyone would take an Apple branded console seriously. They just don’t have any pull at all in the gaming community.

Join the club, Trench. Why doesn’t Apple have a console/DVR/PDA/cell phone/tablet PC/whatever? I’m especially curious about the PDA. Did they get that burned by the Newton?

I’m guessing they haven’t built all these things because the hardware doesn’t make any money, but the iPod lets them sell songs for a buck a pop. And songs are different than console games in a lot of ways. Someone else writes them, records them, markets them, Apple just collects a few cents off the top. I don’t think they’d develop a console unless they wanted to go into game writing.

That’s right. What was I thinking? I completely forgot about Apple’s 3rd party aversions.

Yeah, is there a more tightly vertically integrated company today? And this is the age of vertical integration, what with teevee production studios owning both networks and local affliates. Obviously Jobs likes it that way, I think his first act when he returned as CEO was to quash the generic hardware deal that Korean company had.

There’s some more info here, including:

“Next-generation games must support at least 720p HDTV resolution, 5.1 multichannel sound, and full 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio (no letterboxing). Games must also have at least 2x antialiasing to improve image quality. According to Microsoft’s Peter Moore, “Jaggies need to be a thing of the past,’” (!!!)

Talk is the new Xbox will increase demand for HD.

So, do you guys have any bets on which of you will kiss a girl first?

Kiss a girl?

Ewwwwwwwww…

Andy’s just bitter due a bad experience with Halo 2.

Andy’s just bitter due a bad experience with Halo 2.

Yes, but sex with a real, live woman has more than compensated.

So all that sex with dead women wasn’t compensation enough?