hsrob on 03 August 2009
I know nothing of hardware manufacturing so perhaps someone else can shed light on this but my understanding was that part of the reason the Wii's components were relatively more expensive than what might be expected (given that it is derived from establised GC hardware) was because they were designed to run cooler and more efficiently than the GC parts.
I remember reading somewhere that Nintendo is supposed to have spent a significant amount of R+D on achieving this design goal, so it may not just be a matter of costing the GC parts and assuming that because the Wii is not significantly more powerful than the GC that it's component's cost approximately the same amount to manufacture.
