The eject button held all the power on the original Xbox

The most important button on the original Xbox wasn’t the power button: it was the button to eject the disc tray.

Conceptually, this doesn’t make sense. Of course the power button should be the most important button — it turns on (and off) the whole console. But that attitude is steeped in our understanding of modern devices, where our games and apps are far more self-contained than they were during the original Xbox’s heyday.

The console’s design reflects the eject button’s priority. The disc eject button is bigger, higher up, and surrounded by an LED ring in the console’s iconic green glow, drawing even more attention to it.

The reasoning here is simple: the original Xbox (like its contemporaries and predecessors) was useless without...

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