One of the rumors that came out of the major leaks this week was that MS are working on a cheaper console with no disc drive. At first, I thought it was strange that MS would be thinking about a hardware revision so early in to this generation, but it might make sense to at least start planning for a release and price drop in the holiday season. What makes MS look bad is that the info was leaked so early.
A lot of the griping I'm seeing on the internet has to do with the fact that the hardware revision is a disc-less, 1 TB system instead of a Kinect-less SKU. Personally, I thought a disc-less system is what they should have had ready for launch if they wanted to go with their original DRM schemes, though, I get why they didn't go that route. 1 TB is nice, and with the Xbone's automatic file-management(which I admit I have no first-hand account of) it is what the original system should have. Dead Rising auto-downloading 13 GB patches, and taking up ~50 GB to begin with shows just how fast 500 GB can get eaten up.
If these rumors turn out to be true, what kind of price point are we talking? Blu-ray drives aren't exactly expensive, and I'm sure the license fee per console doesn't amount to much. Would MS be able to come in at a lower price point than the PS4? And wouldn't Sony just be able to undercut them again(if they even need to at that point)? I was on Best Buy's website trying to score a PS4(I got one in my cart, and by the time I got through the PayPal interface, they told me it was unavailable), and I didn't even bother checking out the Xbone stock. Why would I buy an Xbone now with the potential of a cheaper SKU in the near future? It'll be interesting to see if the rumor gains any traction, and to see if it has any impact on Xbone sales.