Since the day the Xbox 360 Core was announced, I have ranted and raved about how bad selling an Xbox 360 without a hard drive really was. At the time of introduction, Microsoft was blasted for this SKU and its apparent technical limitations that it would impose on the system regardless of whether you had the missing hard drive. My long held belief about the marketing of the Core solely to raise profit margins for the company through means of deceptive packaging and playing on the ignorance of the consumer has been validated time and time again over the years. The ramifications of the Core would be seen in many ways including slower load times, more disk activity than should be necessary (hence the noisy system), lower game size restrictions and as we are seeing right now, limitations on standard software expansions to the Xbox dashboard.

The powers that be were so hell bent on turning a net profit on this system that they choose to do whatever was necessary to achieve it. Milking the customer and resorting to deceptive practices was something Microsoft knew about all too well. Have you ever wondered why Microsoft is now selling a bigger hard drive when the cost of both these capacities have cost nearly the same since the launch of the system? What about the bigger (but still tiny) memory card with a huge price tag? These are known as incremental upgrades and they happen for one reason only, to milk the consumer.

Unfortunately, the severity of the problems the Core introduced were so bad that it is guaranteed that the system will never fully recover from them. The Core was responsible for underlying many mandatory practices that must be followed in order to receive certification. Guidelines such as arcade games being limited to 50MB in size and that all games must be playable without a hard drive are all thanks to the Core.

As for the impending dashboard known as the New Xbox Experience, it requires at least 128MB of memory (a memory card or hard drive) to be connected to the system at all times in order to run. Don’t you just love retroactive solutions to bad business practices? The Core was intentionally packaged to be a near non-functional system in hopes of increasing the sales of ridiculously priced accessories (upgrades). To make the system functional, you would have needed to purchase a hard drive or at the very least, a memory card. If you have not gone out and purchased either, Microsoft would like to serve you an ultimatum to do so. Here is how it reads.

Go out and buy one of our exorbitantly priced memory cards or hard drives before November 19th or else you will not be able to use Xbox Live in any capacity until you meet our new requirements.

Sounds just dandy, don’t you think?

If you were so unfortunate to have bought a Core, still do not have a hard drive (do not buy a memory card as the primary storage device) and fortunate enough that your system is one of the handful of launch systems that still works, now it is your turn to fulfill these new requirements.

The good news is that regarding this situation Microsoft is doing what they have been doing a lot this generation, make amends with their customers. Although poorly implemented and advertised, Microsoft is offering customers of the Core a free 512MB memory card or a 20GB refurbished hard drive for $20. Aside from the two deals being offered exclusively to the customers of the Core, you can buy a 60GB hard drive for a hundred dollars and a 120GB drive for $150. Among these upgrade paths, the free 512MB memory card is the best deal since it will cost you nothing. However, the deal that makes the most sense for the average user is the 20GB hard drive offer. The bigger hard drives will enable you to purchase HD movies off the marketplace and allow you to stream games off your hard drive for faster loading times however, these features are hardly worth the price of the upgrade. One thing can be said for certain, if you have so far been running an Xbox on a memory card or less, you will enjoy the system a lot more once you add a hard drive.