The system inside the Elite is no different than the Core/Arcade/Pro (now), the paint job and the hard drive are the only difference. When the Elite debuted, the only difference (besides the obvious) was the "Zephyr" motherboard, which introduced HDMI, the HANA scaler chip, and Hitachi 79K DVD-ROMs (harder to mod, a soldered-on "passkey" is required) the rest was the same crap in every other console. All 360's have had HDMI, for a several months now, the Falcons have only been rolling out to stores in the past 2 months or so, and there are several Zephyr systems still out there.