Shamster

D,

Your enthusiastic comment elaborating on the details makes me want to say you work for Apple. Whether you work for Apple or not, I'm going to spill my thoughts.

If people think AT&T got suckered into it, that's nothing compared to how we consumers are getting ripped off. Traditionally, phones are sold by carriers at a loss and the money is made from the service over a period of time. Hence, the locked phones, etc. In this case, the consumers pay Apple approx 55% over the cost of goods of the phone. I agree that you need to take R&D, marketing, etc into account, but even after all that, Apple is making a substantial profit on each iPhone sold. If that wasn't enough, Apple wants to screw AT&T and the consumers over.

No, I don't work for AT&T. I'm also a big fan of Apple products, but after iPhone, I think Apple as a company _stinks_ of greed. Sad that we all thought Microsoft was a monopoly...

I'm disgusted with this. What we are seeing here is a duopoly between Apple and AT&T. A lot of people want an iPhone. So, Apple decides to sell it at 55% profit of COGs + it's raking in the cash from the subscriptions. All you fanboys giving a WOOT to Apple... this is a step backwards towards a free wireless industry. The internet today is so awesome, because of it's free nature. You can buy any PC, Mac or device that talks TCP/IP and get onto the internet through various access points and access any of the multitude of services being offered for free or for a price. What Apple has done here by partnering with AT&T, is controlling how you decide to pay for wireless services. Tomorrow, if T-Mobile were to offer you a much better talk time deal (one that fits you a lot better), you might be forced into paying a lot more just to use the iPhone. Ever wonder why iChat is cleverly absent from the suite of iPhone apps? Because, they want you to use SMS and pay for that. In my opinion, Apple is and has always been the opposite of it's 1984 Mac ad. It is the person on the screen, with the fanboys being the audience. All the fanboys dance to the tunes of Steve Jobs whose goals are to milk them as much as he can by placing a lock on their user experience with technology.

You guys might think of me as an anti-Apple guy... Maybe I am, maybe not, but I do think the Apple UI experience is one of the best and their products are top notch, as experieced with the iPod and the iPhone. The problem I have is that they want you to think that they are the good guys, when in actual they are just another avaricial corporation hungry to make revenue off consumers in ways that are not necessarily beneficial to consumers in the long run.

If you guys hated Microsoft for making moolah and dominating the market with a fairly open platform (works on a variety of hardware and also is open for non MS software development) and called it a monopoly, wait till you see an actual monopoly unfold when Apple takes over.

It's nice to see some good news for SONY finally. From all the articles on I have read on this, everyone seems to say that the game looks stunning and absolutely jaw-dropping. However, most of them also seem to say that the graphics fall behind GoW :( I'm going to hold back my judgement until I actually see it play at a smooth 30 or 60 with the animations, etc. I sure hope SONY have more games to counter the MS assault. After last night's announcements, I've decided to buy a 360 also. Just waiting to see if MS will get the price lowered at some point soon.

This is a very smart move from Microsoft. Now they can too call themselves capable of 1080p. However, I do appreciate that they are upfront about the truth about 1080p, which is...

- Most HDTVs out there do not support this. So there is not much point in developers to budget CPU/GPU power to support this crazy resolution when all that could be spent to deliver better effects and gameplay.

- There are TVs and monitors that support 1080p through VGA, etc (non-HDMI) and the 360 will merely upscale the content to work on these. Also, they are clear on what content will be upscaled and using which method. If you note their comments, they have said that they will not support HDMI currently. i.e. There are no plans AS OF NOW. I read this as, the 360's AV connector is modular enough to allow them to market an HDMI cable later should there be a demand.

So, in my opinion... Kudos to MS for not promising us 1080p and still delivering it to those who care and being honest about what they are giving us.

I agree with you #37.
When you are playing a game, you are not going to be complaining unless the game experience is inconsistent with choppy framerates, etc.
From my sources, I know that the whole OS running in the background was added to ease the developers' burden. Even though, the first XBox had XBox Live, it was a pain for developers to hook up all the features for Live. That's the reason we ended up seeing most games being Live aware (not fully Live compatible). The games that went the whole nine yards of really using Live were the ones published by Microsoft. This time around, with the OS taking care of most of the painful stuff for Live, making a live compatible game is a lot easier. SONY has an easier task considering that Microsoft has already proved the model. All they need to do is to pick out the things that worked best and implement those.

BTW, the reason SONY requires games to give up 1 SPU at any time is because the PS3 is planned to double up as a DVR. If you happen to be playing a game when your show comes on, the PS3 needs to be able to record in the background. Encoding in realtime is CPU hungry and the SPUs are better suited for that job. Regardless, recording will affect more like the IO system, etc and I would be interested in knowing restrictions for that.

Whoops... typo in the above comment...nnThe ending should read...

However, if they miss holiday 06, I personally think that they would have missed the boat. Holiday 06 is when the 360 will boast a good library of games, the shops will be blessed with abdundant supplies of the 360 and Microsoft is definite to announce some sweet appealing deals and bundles.

I find it funny how you fanboys start to get emotionally defensive about these sort of things. Just to be clear, I have a 360 and am getting my PS3 on launch day and hope it's sooner with something that compares to the 360 if not better.

Unfortunately, to me it seems like SONY and Kutaragi have been such loud mouths trying to dissuade the public from buying into the 360 hype. Despite all of the loud remarks, it's a fact that the 360 IS a next-generation console, adds wonderful media experience and has the best online service. Had SONY not made all the "360 = XBox 1.5" noise and how SONY will be releasing 6 months after 360, a lot of the gamers might have impatiently given in to buying a 360. In their best interest SONY dangled this carrot before us only to move it away when you thought you were getting at it. SONY promised playable demos much to be shown at TG05 and when it came to show the games, they just dodged the bullet with a lame excuse that they wanted the first Japanese PS3 showing to have an amazing impact and playable demos would ruin it. My opinion, they are having more problems with putting together the system than they anticipated. Add the dependancy on the BluRay to that and it starts to sound like there is no way they are going to release the PS3 before late summer. Then there's the whole issue of games being ready. They could push the system out of the door by then, but if there are no stellar launch titles or if the launch titles stink, it would be a big letdown for all the SONY fanboys. All that 1.5 XBox talk would blow up in their face. That could be a fiasco considering the 360 would have a good library of games and would be easily available. Therefore, I think they will wait it out till holiday 06 to get the game quality and also nail the hardware. Hell, that might even buy them enough time to come up with a compelling online service. However, if they miss holiday 06, I personally don't think they would have missed the boat because Holiday 06 is when the 360 will boast a good library of games and the shops will be blessed with abdundant supplies and Microsoft is definite to announce some sweet appealing deals and bundles. i.e. I think if SONY misses Holiday 06, 360 would have reached a 10 million+ installed based by the end of the year and I think that's the point of no return for any platform.

Once again, I would love to see the SONY PS3 sooner, but from what I see, I don't see SONY delivering on time and that concerns me.

While a lot of you over here will disagree, the fight over the next gen DVD format is pretty important for the format creators. Microsoft's support for the HD-DVD camp comes from the following 2 reasons mainly: DVD-interactivity software and managed copying. The first reason is obvious. Microsoft wants to cement it's own interactive format and not promote (Sun's) Java. The second is more interesting. Last year has been an extremely successful year for the Media Center Edition of Windows and extrapolating along the same lines we are going to be seeing a lot more media center hype and adoption. As far as the HD story goes it's cruicial for Microsoft to allow for the best HD experiences on these. Hence the announcement of the HD digital cable receivers for the media center PCs and now the HD-DVD which allows people to make "managed" copies (essentially a legal rip) of the HD-DVD onto their hard drive. As far as the managed copying goes, I am completely siding with Microsoft on this. I would love to be able to rip all my HD-DVDs onto my hard drive and put the disc away and not worry about getting them damaged or having disc reading errors when watching a movie.

On the XBox front, it is pretty important for Microsoft to have a high-def movie player to compete with the PS3. Until we know what the price of the PS3 is, I don't think I can comment either way on whether the external HD-DVD is a value add for the 360 or not. However, I do know that this is a smart move. This will allow Microsoft to create upto 4 possible bundles for the 360 later; Basic, Basic + HD-DVD, Premium, Premium + HD-DVD. I'm sure the pricing will be along the same lines of the premium bundle. i.e. you will get a lot more along with the drive. The beauty of this will be that the consumer will be able to pick and choose what he/she likes.

As far as games using the HD-DVD is concerned, I think Microsoft is doing the right thing by sticking to having the HD-DVD only used for movies. It would suck for a 360 user to be not able to play a game because it's only available in HD-DVD.

I'm no fanboy, but I will tell this. I'm a little uncomfortable with the copyprotection schemes that could show up in BluRay. After what happened with the copy protected CDs and how SONY reacted to it, I just find it hard to trust SONY to give us a reliable and trustworthy DVD format. That being said, I'm not going to let that stop me from getting my PS3 on day 1 if possible.