Tag Archives: electronics store

The imminent death of the Xbox 360

When the Xbox 360 came out, it was portrayed as something everyone wanted, the amazing new console that was selling out everywhere. Yet the next week, when I walked into Costco they had a pallet piled high with the things.

When the Wii was launched, it became the console that was really selling out everywhere. But by then, Microsoft had moved on to their new story, that the Xbox 360 was the biggest selling next-gen console.

Except that it isn’t.

If you read the small print on Microsoft’s announced sales figures, you find that they’re not actually lying; but they count a console as sold as soon as it leaves the factory. Sony and Nintendo do the same, but there’s a big difference in how that figure relates to the number of consoles actually sold to gamers.

If you walk into any electronics store, you’ll probably see several dozen Xbox 360s piled up in the main store. You won’t see anything like as many PS3s, and you probably still won’t see a Wii. Think about that. Also, think about the fact that electronics stores don’t actually like to pile expensive items up in the middle of the store inside their boxes; it usually indicates that they’ve got even more piles of the things in storage out back, and have run out of space and are trying desperately to shift them. Have you ever seen a big pile of digital cameras in their boxes in Best Buy? A stack of dozens of Denon receivers in Circuit City? Nope. But you’ve probably seen a big stack of $30 Chinese DVD players on clearance…

Someone has put these observations together with some hard sales data. It turns out that the channel is absolutely bloated with unwanted Xbox 360s. Not only that, the 360 was almost matched for sales by the PS2, except during Halo release month, which is clearly visible as a statistical anomaly. When the release of a single game skews your sales that much, that can’t be a good thing either, can it?

In fact, Xbox 360 sales peaked in 2006. And with the PS3 now having a solid library of good games, I don’t see it improving. Also interesting is the analysis of how the 360 is actually more expensive than the PS3, once you factor in the add-ons to make it equivalent in capability.

Dan: The Motion Picture

A weekend of ups and downs.

Most of Saturday was spent on Dan’s movie project. Everything outdoors got exposed well, but the indoor shots are grainy. One of the struts of the cheap tripod broke, so now it’s a bipod. It was free anyway, so I’m not too bothered, maybe I’ll buy a nice one now. It turns out that the mix mic input of the wireless unit doesn’t feed to the output, so I’ll need to get some parts from the electronics store and make a mix cable. Fortunately the lavalier mic worked fine, so the sound was OK.

Finished the first edit this afternoon, and worked out how to hack MPEG2 sequence headers inside the iDVD project to turn the video into 16:9 anamorphic. I shot the whole thing anamorphic this time, and it looks really nice widescreen.

I found out about the shuttle from Dan when we were having some mid-afternoon snack food during the shooting on Saturday. I immediately checked BBC News via the phone; I’m not sure what I hoped to read. Obviously it wasn’t a hoax or a misunderstanding. I don’t really have anything to say about it, I haven’t watched the video footage or looked at any pictures, and I don’t think I want to.

Sunday morning I thought about brunch, as Mark said he was planning on being there for once; however, sara and I were busy in bed until around 1:30.

Something is up with the code of the new screensaver project. It’s really frustrating how the code will work on one machine and silently fail on another. I check every return value and possible OpenGL error like you’re supposed to. I’ll look at it during the week, maybe it’s time to make a minimal test screensaver and release it as open source to try and track down what the hell is going on.