Xbox was first released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and on March 14, 2002 in Europe.
The Xbox 360 is the successor to Microsoft's Xbox video game console, developed in cooperation with IBM, ATI, Samsung and SiS.
Due to its early launch, the Xbox 360 has a one-year lead on both of its competitors, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii.
Businessweek magazine compiled a report that estimates the total cost of components in the Xbox 360 premium bundle at US$525 at launch,[16] sans manufacturing costs, meaning that Microsoft initially lost money on every Xbox 360 system sold.
Xbox Live supports voice communication along with video communication, a feature possible with the Xbox Live Vision.
Xbox Live Gold has the same features as Silver, plus online game playing capabilities.
Dashboard version 2.0.4532.0 allows the Xbox 360 to output video at 1080p and installs support for Zune and the external HD DVD drive attachment.
John Carmack stated at QuakeCon 2005 that the Xbox 360 has "the best development environment I've seen on a console".
E3 2006 was the first large-scale show after the console's launch and there, the first trailer for Halo 3, the third game in the flagship Xbox series of shooters, was premiered. Fable 2, a sequel to the Xbox's best-selling RPG, was also shown, along with Alan Wake, Mass Effect and Too Human. Bill Gates spoke of plans to integrate several Microsoft services into one entity with Live Anywhere.
The Xbox 360 takes a new approach to hardware compared to its predecessor. The CPU, named Xenon-CPU (or XCPU) at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core PowerPC-based design by IBM.
