Do you buy a Media Centre PC, or an Xbox 360?
MICROSOFT'S DECISION to make its Xbox 360 box available for the Yule season is likely to put pressure on PC OEMs, distributors and dealers attempting to sell full blown Media Centre PCs.
Because the Xbox 360 is so highly specced, and so cheap and cheerful compared to Microsoft Media Centre PCs, many households contemplating buying a PC could switch to the console instead.
Those households are, in the words of CPU manufacturers, "CPU agnostic". They don't care if it's an AMD CPU nor do they care if it's Intel Inside. The question they will ask is, is it cheap? Can I run my videos on it? Will it be noisy? Will it be, er, cheap?
Unlike a Media Centre PC, an Xbox 360 won't set your household back an absolute fortune and if the machine performs according to the specifications Microsoft heralded yesterday, what need for a full blown Media Centre PC anyway?
