Actually it's completely fine.

We're ok paying $50 / year for xbox live -- because it's a quality service, and is totally worth it. Microsoft works hard at keeping cheats, and people who use racist language and other such things away -- so the environment is awesome and games are fair. They upgrade the experience every 6 months and it just keeps getting better and better. 50 bucks a year for one of the best media experiences and *the* best gaming experience I've ever had? Absolute no-brainer.

Wireless built in? Like most people my xbox sits next to my TV and cable box / splitter / cable modem / router. So who needs wireless. Besides, latency over a wireless connection sucks when you're gaming online. The difference is earth-and-sky.

I cannot believe the replies here.

Kyle asked "why does MS still make 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows"?

In response, nobody thought to point out that the very machine in this article uses a 32-bit processor??

Choice, my friend, choice.

Why do Engadget's polls never have a 'see results' link?

I don't own an iphone.. I just wanna see the results of the poll.. if everyone in my situation voted "what's an iphone" to get to the results page, then the results get distorted and you have to do some quick math to get to the real answer..

Which is fine, math is no big deal for me, but why not save us the effort?

The article is wrong when it states that this won't affect anyone.

Typical HDDs today come with 8MB to 16MB caches that are capable of sustaining 3.0GBps transfers. Since it's a cache, this isn't a burst mode transfer -- rather something fairly ephemeral, but it's still a limitation nonetheless.

Not really -- there was nothing *new* in what Kim said..

Console life = 10 years (sounds about right). This doesn't preclude the introduction of a new console midway or a bit later (so maybe 6 years -- possibly 2011).

That's basically the period where your old console is in 'gravy train' mode and your new console is in 'loss leader' mode.

It has just a single SIM card slot. (from the specs page).

So in other words, you basically get to *choose* which US GSM carrier you want to give your business to (imagine that).

Nilay needs to pause for two seconds, read the specs, and think a little before making facetious comments about stuff.

Holy crap - if I could run Win7 on this I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

Even without Win7, it looks like a really attractive proposition -- just a basic browser and good font rendering, and the ability to play most media files would satisfy 95% of users.

The only reason I'd like having Win7 on it is that most of my work stuff requires Windows (and Office) and I'm often doing work stuff while lounging in front of the TV. Besides, Win7's touch capabilities are awesome.

I'd even buy Win7 seperately and install it on this, if there's a way of doing that. However, if the rumors of it having just a 4GB SSD are true, that's not really practical :(.. I guess for the installation to be possible, it just needs to have a regular BIOS (not EFI) and should have a USB port that it can boot from, or otherwise at least a PXE boot (network boot).

Is that Class 2 memory? (I assume the '2' inside the 'C' denotes class-2 aka 2 MBps memory?)

Well, about 10 days ago I bought Class 6 (6 MBps) SHDC memory (8GB) for $10 + $4 shipping. This is highway robbery!

Dude -- you can probably sell your PS3 and get a used 360 without having to pay anything out of pocket.. I say, go for it..

He's competing with Jobs -- and as they say, competition is a Good Thing :)