All of that to get to a square box? I mean it might have some bevels and a bit of design, but its just a square... how hard is that to come up with?

a smoke alarm... a hand-held radio from the 80s... a muscle car blower... a few routers... a ps4 WAIT A MINUTE!!!

A big pile of junk to make a black box.... Awesome!

All of them looked like crap. Should have made an X shaped console instead.

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one. Stop being jerks.

"I have to ask though, what was the one designer thinking with that bizarre cube within a cube on the left side of the above image?"

If it's the one I think it is, he was thinking the same thing I was; "No matter what it costs, I would buy that if it played games and had lights".

Ooh, I like that one, in the front and to the right, under that grey thing.

A nice idea, but it would be better if all the prototypes had their own picture so we could make accurate comparisons.

so it took them all that work too end up with a glossy 360 shaped closer to a rectangular prism instead of a hourglass shaped one? wow....talk about 'business'

so Micro$$oft is posting pictures of their storage shed now lol? Seriously though, many of those especially the front middle look better than the design they ultimately went with

A little birdie informed me that my company built the injection machines for some of this stuff (I think the controllers?). It was all very top secret in our testing lab. Pretty cool though!

Some of them look like NES boxes. I think the look the Xbox one has now is great.

I don't know why people hate XBOX one's design so much. It's the coolest design for XBOX so far because it's just a box. The way an XBOX should be. I'd also like to know what the heck peoples' expectations were for it's design. The 360 was just a slightly curved box, and everyone was fine with that, but take the curves away and, "gasp! It looks like a box! I am so offended!"

They should have thrown out the Kinect with with the rest of the prototypes...

They tried making a companion cube!? @_@

I find it amazing that they had to make 200 prototypes for a controller that is largely identical to what is already on the Xbox 360. Microsoft must be really good at squandering money these days.

Meanwhile, Nintendo spent very little money and designed and crafted the Wii U GamePad, which is technologically more advanced, and has more built into it than the XBO controller. No wonder Nintendo can be profitable year after year while Microsoft will spend the next 2-4 years making no profit on the XBO.

This design philosophy is part of why I think the way MS and Sony are doing things is not going to last. This next generation may well prove to be the last for one of them for "traditional" game consoles. Then again, the XBO isn't really a game console anyway, but a set-top box with a game console built in. The point is, these devices aren't really offering anything different from what your computer delivers these days, while Nintendo makes it a POINT to do something differently, that can only be offered by them.

There's a scenario here where I can visualize a future where, outside of Nintendo, console gaming no longer exists. Sounds odd, right? But look at Nintendo's history, and the history of the other guys. While they've been moving more toward "living room all-in-one dominance," Nintendo has stayed a course of delivering video game consoles, where the newer ones "have a few other entertainment bells and whistles."

We're a small step from merely having a PC that doubles as a set-top "all-in-one" living room device, at which point, something like the PS4 and especially the XBO, would be pointless. These two consoles already share almost all their games with PC's.

all the prototypes looked weird but there final design isnt the best either lol

And in the end they chose that weird box? really?

I like the one to the left of the final build.

Never understood why Microsoft didn't make it green and black. Green is the Xbox's color, so why not try and implement it into the design. Frankly I think both the Xbox1 and PS4's solid black design is just ugly. But I don't buy for design, I buy for what they can do.