Perspective: Xbox sales versus iPhone sales

I’m excited about today’s reveal but let’s keep this in perspective. The Xbox 360 was released in 2005 and has sales of around 77m units. The iPhone has been available since 2007 and has sales of about 320m units. At the same time, the Xbox has high end hardware and (at least initially) was sold at a breakeven point. The iPhone is selling with large profit margins. This is despite the fact that the price point is similar. Because of this the Xbox has to rely a lot more heavily on its ecosystem and game sales to be profitable but Apple is killing it in this category as well. So yes, today is a huge reveal. And yes, I am getting whatever the hell is on stage the day it comes out. There’s still money to be made but if they want to be king of the hill Microsoft needs to approach this in a new way that really takes advantage of the ecosystem and future sales and they need a new base model in the low end price point (since the hardware isn’t profitable any way). But in the end, how many more generations of consoles does the industry have in it?