I decided a while back to treat myself to a games console for Christmas and after some discussion, I settled on an Xbox 360. I would have bought a Wii except it doesn’t have a usable optical drive and we don’t have a DVD drive so I wanted the games console to double as a DVD drive.
I bought a Pro Console with wireless controllers to cut down on the cable clutter. I bought Viva Pinata and Pixar’s Cars which I could play with my three year old son Tomás (Cars is one of Tomás’ favourite movies).
He was very excited he was going to play these games as soon as his papa had set up the new Xbox on Christmas day.
Imagine the tears rolling down his disappointed little face when I had to tell him that he couldn’t play with his new games because the Xbox wouldn’t work with our TV (pdf).
I called Microsoft’s Support line and kudos to them for having it manned on Christmas day but the news wasn’t good. The staff there informed me that I needed to purchase a high def adaptor if I wanted my high definition games console to work on my high definition tv. Obviously.
And it is not that they wouldn’t work in high definition only, no they wouldn’t work in high def or regular.
And where could I get one of these? “At your nearest Xbox reseller” - yeah good luck finding one of those open on Christmas day.
This is completely ridiculous - this is a problem created by Microsoft. There is already a standard in place around high definition cabling. It is called HDMI. HD Ready TVs have a HDMI input, by definition. All Microsoft had to do was put a standard HDMI connector on their AV cable and their Xbox would work on every HD Ready TV out of the box.
But no, Microsoft go with their non-standard cable so they can gouge us for another 30 or 40 Euros.
In our house, Microsoft is not the Borg, Microsoft is the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Thanks a million Microsoft. Your cheapness destroyed my son’s Christmas.
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