Kurt Shintaku's Blog

IGN.com has published a list of Top 10 reasons to buy an XBox360:

 

As for how to get one… here’s a few things to consider:

 

CE Buys has a summary of who has what available.  They also have as purported $39 service that notifies you when they’ve discovered a batch of consoles available in your area.  (They apparently do daily call downs to the stores)

 

Additionally, we are getting 300,000 more consoles out (in the US & Europe) during this week leading up to Christmas.  This would virtually double the number already sold out there.

 

A friend asked, "Why didn’t Microsoft preproduce more consoles?"  There are a lot of factors to consider but here’s a few good reasons.

1)  The firmware shipped only 2 weeks before the console was to be launched.  This meant that the that 700,000 consoles that were shipped worldwide (Europe, Japan, US) had to be produced in essentially 2 weeks.  I’m sure that the other parts and labor were all pre-installed about up until the firmware was required, however 2 weeks is a short period of time to crank out nearly a 1,000,000 consoles.  To put this into perspective, a single Mac truck filled with XBox360 consoles only contains 1000 units. 

2)  The XBox360’s release to manufacturing date slipped by 2 weeks.   This very likely ate into our pre-production time making the product that less available.

3) It’s well documented that IBM/ATI hasn’t been able to crank out the number of processors and or GPUs that we need.  They are very likely the bottleneck at this point in time.