Xbox.com can't seem to get its story straight. After holding
a post from going public for over an hour (in order to check and double-check the facts concerning the 360's
standard AV cables), I finally went ahead and complained about
the lack of HD AV cables for the 360 Core system
around 6:00 PM ET yesterday. Of course, the real story was that the very same page linked at the bottom of that
post was in the midst of some rather odd turmoil that I did not report on, attributing it to some messy site
administration by the webmasters. As of this moment, however, it looks like
Microsoft's official Xbox site is claiming that
HD AV cables will come standard with both Xbox 360 packages this fall. Again. (See the screen capture to the
right.) Or maybe not, if you believe the other pages on the very same site. Confusing, isn't it?
Update: According to Major Nelson, a big-time Xbox Live guy at Microsoft (he filled us in on the details of J's extreme injury), the Xbox 360 "Console" will come with the HD AV component/composite cable (which also includes a Toslink-style optical output for digital audio), and the Xbox 360 Core system will come with an S-Video AV cable standard. Wow, that's one more contradictory report to manage, unless, of course, S-Video is standard and bundled with composite (which I may have read somewhere quite a while back). [Thanks, Catalin, it looks like they're bundled!] On the other hand, David Reid, Director of Xbox Marketing for Microsoft, told TeamXbox yesterday afternoon that the Core "Edition" Xbox 360 will only come with "a standard AV cable," whatever that means. Also, as of 10:00 AM ET, that picture above is still current. More to come. [Thanks, Morgon!]
Update #2: The AV cable listed for the 360 Core system on the Console & Accessories page has been updated once more (sometime between 11:00 AM and noon ET), this time to an S-Video cable, in line with Major Nelson's comments and S-Video/composite-bundling info. Look's like you can put a fork in it: this post is done. Thanks to all the contributors!
Update #3: Sometime between noon and 12:15 ET, the Console & Accessories page was updated once more (ha!), changing from S-Video back to regular composite AV cables. The (S-Video?) line about "RGB-quality gaming" remains intact, however. So, in the end, no hybrid, no nothing. Well, just when you think you've got it figured out. Oh, and the major's changed his mind as well, though his site appears to currently be inaccessible. Will wonders never cease. [Thanks for the latest update there, Morgon!]
Update #4: The major's "unofficial" blog has returned to life, and we have now received word directly from Microsoft that the Core system will only come with composite AV cables; no S-Video, VGA, or component cables — just the composite RCA alone. Shucks, sometimes it hurts to be right.
What actually happened was that sometime prior to 5:00 PM ET,
Wednesday, the Consoles and Accessories page, starting off with “The Future of Entertainment,” listed VGA (HD) AV
cables as the standard for the Core system, and S-Video as well as VGA cables for the $399 one (hence the talk of
VGA adaptors in my previous post). That’s some crazy talk there, which is why I delayed my post as long as I did;
it appeared to be eventually correctly by 5:00 PM. (The display of a portion of that page’s HTML is depicted to
the right.) But it doesn’t end there: the site then had the audacity to exchange the then-corrected page with yet
another slightly redesigned, but incorrect(?) one later that evening, well after my 6:00 PM entry went live. After
kicking myself for not taking a screen capture of the original VGA-laden page (I also couldn’t find it in my
browser cache), I decided to start keeping some visual records. Click on the picture above to the right, and
you’ll be treated to the latest HD AV cable mix-up taken around 4:00 AM ET today. (Any time-stamped files linked
may be an hour off because they match my Central Time Zone. Any files purportedly from the 17th that are dated the
18th may have been inadvertently modified due to copying and/or renaming for clarity.)
Of course, you can’t have a contradiction without another page on the same site stating something completely different. Check out the Xbox 360: Your Choice link (off of the same Leipzig Games Convention mini-site on Xbox.com where I found all the “official” news through yesterday), and you’ll discover each system’s included accessory lists clearly split between the component HD AV cable and the standard AV one (which is expressly supposed to hook up quickly to “any TV or VCR with Audio/Video inputs”). If this weren’t clear enough, you can visit the FAQ linked at the bottom of this post, which makes it quite apparent that the Core system won’t be coming with HDTV cables standard. So why keep changing the lists from right to wrong (or wrong to right) on the Console and Accessories page (aka “The Future of Entertainment”)? Who knows. Maybe someone in Redmond wants a standard HD cable for the Core system as much as I do. One can only hope. But yeah, I fully expect MS to fix the future of entertainment any day now… but most likely after I finish this post.
[To knowledgeable Joystiq visitors, if you could suggest some free public file-hosting services somewhere, I might be able to link to a few archived HTML files that show the different HD-HD and HD-standard permutations from the past twelve hours. I would use the services I’m currently aware of, but they don’t like files that aren’t images, and I don’t want these files to require a specific client app to download and install. Yeah, I could take screen captures of those broken web pages, too, to meet the image requirements of said services, but that would eat up a bit too much bandwidth for my free tastes. I’ll work on posting files on Joystiq’s servers later today, but it would be nice to have something up in the meantime.
Update: Not to worry, I’ll post any relevant changes to pages here as screen captures from now on. Thanks for all the suggestions, though.]
