Visceral Responce

                                            Visceral Responce

This Xbox 360 when released was the bee's knees, the end all for a home entertainment system; HD, ipod player, games, camera docking, keyboard support etc. I bought it on day 1 of the release. It was a truely amazing console design.

It's subtle lines and shapes pushing in, the grated holes for ventilation  the smooth platinum embossing of the DVD tray. The light matted white almost stucko form which held just a slight amount of reflection, this thing was just so cool for its day. There were a few drawbacks however; it would break within 3 years almost guaranteed and every part of that console would degrade from a nice artic white to the "old telephone"dusty beige-yellow. I sent this thing back and forth to an official Xbox repair site in Kentucky, it was no longer the thing of beauty I saw before. I had a cringe reaction to the white ones as a ticking timebomb to the point of not even considering purchase of one at a pawn shop for one third of the price retail. My roommate currently has a white one that hasnt died yet, in the back of my head I still think to myself..."someday"...

   So what happened? Well, the designers were more concerned about form than function, they wanted a powerhouse of heat and processing, but in a tiny white plastic case with only tiny, tiny holes for ventilation.

This was the older Xbox, an exact opposite of the original 360`

                          Then came the redesign, called the slim, priced at 200$. After a full 2 years without videogames I finally ponied up the dough and bought this one. Smaller, black, touch activated and best of all a thundering powerhouse of durability. It was estimated that Microsoft's Xbox 360 division lost around 4-5 billion dollars behind the poor design of the original Xbox 360, no more of that. As you may notice these large black grates provide proper ventilation for the console which were missing in the older design which had terrible force (tiny holes will never ventilate better than large grates). They finally went back to their roots and just "did whats right". No more function trumping form.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bN_3w75zoE

In the video they explain the design as compared to the older xbox to the more smooth, white, concave and well, refined modern Xbox 360.

The realization was that similar products were white in Japan and sold better, most notably the newer Playstation 2 redesign and the Nintendo gaming consoles. The Japanese designs would have white/silver products sitting around the living room and then here sat a big bulky black American Xbox console.
Having not sold well, they decided to make the newer Xbox 360 White in hopes of finally acquiring that highly desired Japanese market.
After a few years they finally switched back to the tried and true black in the default slim model. I bought myself a black Xbox 360 last year and now.....

  Yep, right on back to this beauty, which almost make me want my newer xbox to die in able to justify buying this "iPhone Xbox". Sleek, glossy, modern. It does the exact same thing my console from 2005 could do, yet it looks prettier doing so.