My friend at work came to me and said “Y’know, I was really disappointed that there were no hardware announcements yesterday [at the Microsoft E3 Press Conference]. I really hoped to hear something about the new 60 gig 360, that they’d ironed out the hardware problems or that they were using a smaller die or something.”

Just some background… a while back he had to send his 360 in for repairs. He got really hooked on GTA4 earlier this summer/spring, and was playing it like mad. Then he started to get lockups. 2 red lights. Now he’s afraid to play his 360 because he doesn’t want to totally break it and lose access to all his saved data.

He, like me, would be willing to go out and spend the $350 on a new XBox 360 if he had some sign that the new hardware was more reliable than what he has. He wants to keep his current system running until such time as he can get a new, reliable 360 so he can transfer data from one drive to the other (which he isn’t sure how to do).

But Microsoft has given no indication that the 60 gig 360 is anything more than the old crap-pile 360 hardware with a new, bigger, hard drive.

Hell, I’d buy an Elite if I knew it was going to be more reliable… Microsoft is winning this gaming generation but man, their hardware so far is just garbage. It gets to be a hassle (and expensive, if you’re not blessed with a RROD) sending these things back for repair all the time.