...while Microsoft had always intended Kinect to sell for $150, "dumbing down" the camera would have meant that Microsoft wouldn't be losing as much money on each unit sold, an important point should Kinect prove to be a failure. So dumb it down they did, reducing the camera's resolution (which in turn reduced the number of appendages it'd have to track) and placing the burden for some of the device's processing on the console and not Kinect's own hardware