It does give me a wry smile when I see comments like this. What would a 2TB drive have done to the price tag of Xbox One at launch?
I didn't mean that 2TB drives needed to be standard at launch, rather that 500GB was inadequate and that a more common sense standard would have been 1TB. Given the cost differential between 500GB and 1TB drives in the retail channel hasn't been more than about $30 for the past 3-4 yrs I'm certain that 1TB drives purchased in high volume for a console release in 2012-13 wouldn't have cost more than an additional $15 or so per unit.
I realize every dollar counts when trying to justify design choices and projected profits to the bean counters and the CFO (especially with bloated cost of production due to forced Kinect). But that small cost differential is arguably insignificant when balanced against consumer experience/satisfaction. 500GB was simply inadequate even in 2013 and one didn't need to be Nostradamus to understand that with the install sizes of games increasing exponentially over last gen it was going to become a problem real quick for gamers who like to keep large game collections, especially with the gradual move to digital, formerly optional HDD installs becoming mandatory, and MS stubbornly (stupidly) making their drives non-replaceable.
At least Sony had the good sense to understand that if they were going to skimp on HDD size at launch, they should make it easy to replace 'em with larger capacity drives (external drives are fine for many, but not acceptable to many others). It's all water under the bridge now, but it was just one more thing MS did wrong with the Xbone launch that helped dig a huge hole they've been climbing out of ever since. A few bucks less profit per console while offering double the standard HDD size may have helped sway some people who went with PS4. Hard to say, but it couldn't have hurt to have at least one spec advantage and that would have been an easy one to implement.
