360
Topic: Games
A search on Ebay ranked from highest price to lowest price shows that the Xbox 360 Premium system is already selling for nearly 2 grand. It may be higher by the time you read this, but I'm writing this on Thanksgiving morning at 05:40, and 2 grand is the highest listed price. It's got no bids on it yet, mind you.

The highest actual bid for a system is $19,420.69 and I think it's more for the fact it comes with a T-shirt than anything else.

The lowest asking price I've seen only wants a penny. That's right; .01 of a dollar. It's a core system with no extra controllers or anything. Not even a T-shirt. It'll probably go for at least 600 dollars.

When I started this entry, there were 25,270 entries for Xbox 360. Granted, not all of them are for an actual system itself; some of them are for peripherals, games, or items tangentially associated with the console. But most of them are for the console itself. Narrowing the search to just the console comes up with 17,196 results.

Shipping is free on a lot of them. Some people, though, are going to not only profiteer the thing for all they can, they're also going to make the buyer pay for shipping. On the one hand, that seems pretty damned petty and cheap. On the other hand, if the person's willing to pay 2 grand for a game console that retails for a fifth of that, the extra thirty bucks for UPS Ground is hard to notice.

So let's see... it's got a proprietary operating system, self-contained non-modifiable hardware configuration, no ability to write to anything but a memory card, built-in interet capability, and will only interface with software written specifically for it. I approve of this. It has no keyboard, and no mouse, but I'm sure there's going to be an add-on for those peripherals. It's almost identical to another established home entertainment and productivity console.

Basically, it's a Mac. Give it iTunes, and you're there.

Sorry, Joe. I couldn't resist.