Xbox 360 Design: The Back Story

"A look into how the design of the Xbox 360 came to be."

*Warning*
Long-winded rant below:

It's a stupid design, they attempted (this being the keyword) to go for aesthetics, instead of being technically proficient, so they ended up failing on both fronts.

The main complaint with the Xbox was size, what does the 360 do? Deceive you. MS likes deception (MS points pricing is another example off the top of my head, not to mention the Core and the barebones Vista, it's all marketing), they bank on deception. There's no room inside the original Xbox, yet the HDD and power supply are internal. There's "plenty of space" inside the 360 further emphasizing the poor design of it, just compare both systems with the covers removed.

The 360 gives you a giant fucking powerbrick and a non-standard HDD, which has been reduced to a glorified memory card, with the illusion of choice (removing a core feature of your previous system is asinine, imagine if the GCN came out with only 2 controller ports). Although the HDD being external has paid off, so you can keep it when you have to send your system out to be repaired. Yet the main issue is that it's basically the same size and weight as the Xbox, not to mention having worse build quality and louder than any console should ever be, they completely ignored the REAL issues.

There's nothing elegant about it, it's big, loud, clunky and it barely looks better than the Xbox did. Being vertical looks nicer and sleeker, but I certainly don't trust the 360 when it's vertical, so that's kind of useless. When it's horizontal, it's awkward to grab as there's no space for your fingers to go underneath it. Don't get me wrong, I have fun with it (it's all about the games after all) and my 12k+ gamerscore backs that up, but I'll be damned if it's not the one of worst designed consoles out there and ironically it's modeled after a dead person, how fitting.


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