Nintendo is, of course, the king of revising their hardware and getting everyone to rebuy it (think NES, GB, SNES, GBA, and DS), but Sony's done pretty good with the PSone and slim PS2. Sega even revised the Genesis not once but twice, to the point where the Genesis 3 that I owned in college was only slightly bigger than the cartridges and just a bit heavier than a controller (of course, it also felt flimsy and cheap, but that's beside the point).

So why couldn't Microsoft revise the Xbox, which, as we all know, is the size of a couch? What was it that prevented them from utilizing economies of scale to turn enough of a profit on their technology to come out with new hardware? Was it their agreement with nVidia, or what?

Then microsoft would be pulling a sony. Copying other companies ideas. I dont care how fat or then a system is I care about the games it plays.

MS used off-the-shelf components.

First of all, I think "getting everyone to rebuy it" is far from true. Sometimes the second models of consoles lack certain features anyway, and people are usually not inclined to buy a new system unless their old one has stopped working.

The exception, of course, is a portable device redesign, where smaller size is much more important, and usually the screen and/or controls get upgraded.

Besides what chief Wiggum said, another reason they didn't do it was that there wasn't time. Console redesigns don't happen until at least a few years after the original is released. They had already conceded the market lead to Sony and moved on to the 360.

BTW, I still believe that the reason for Sony redesigning the PS2 was to get rid of the hard drive support, because the HD Loader software allowed for easy copying of games. While they were at it, they made it smaller to entice people to choose it over the original model.

The Xbox was the first ever console to have a built-in hard drive. That contributed to much of its "massive" size. To make a slim Xbox, they would probably have to cut out the hard drive, and I don't think that would be possible. A lot of the games use the hard drive for caching data, etc., so the hard drive is mandatory.

True, the hard drive does change things. But hard drives don't have to be big. It could have a smaller hard drive (gig-wise) with a smaller size. If Apple has multi-gig flash drives in iPod Nanos, surely a much larger traditional drive with moving parts wouldn't break the bank.

I'll admit, I like my electronics to be small and sexy, and I am willing to repurchase things. I own a PSone, PStwo, GBA SP, DS Lite, iPod, etc. Size is especially important for the portable systems, but it matters for consoles, too. If you're like me, you have many systems. If I had a smaller Xbox, I could literally fit three consoles in its place (it takes up about 70% of the shelf). Instead, some are in the closet. And if I'm going out of town on business or whatever, I'll usually toss my PStwo in my carry-on bag just in case. I could never pack my Xbox without calling U-Haul (ha ha, okay, I'll stop).

Plus, according to MS, they're still losing money on every XBOX sold still.

Hard drives are not big.

I remember they were planning to come out with one, talking about it right before I bought mine (in 2003). Glad I didn't wait for that one.

The main reasons would be the HDD (a laptop HDD would actually make a slim line box more expensive than the fat ass one) and the nvidea tech used by the xbox 1. Since they were both sueing each other over the original contract, then trying to negotiate an agreement to create a new slimline version of the nvidea components seems out of the question realistically.

The hard drive in the Xbox takes up quite a bit of room from all the pics I have seen of it.