axt113 said:
HappySqurriel said:
axt113 said:
Yes the GCN was powerful, but when it came down to the Wii, they were not able to stay in the graphics arms race while still offering an affordable system, so there is a good chance they will end up not delivering a high power system this time
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It isn't that they "couldn't" provide a more powerful system, it was that they choose not to ...
Hypothetically speaking, Nintendo could have easily paired up a PowerPC 970MP @ 2.0 GHz with a Radeon X600/X800 and sold it for $300 without taking a large loss; and the system would have potentially been very small and energy efficient as well.
Why they didn't do this is something only Nintendo knows, but I suspect it was because they were uncertain of the success of the Wii and didn't want to expend the hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D and licencing fees to make it happen.
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$300 wouldn't have been as market friendly as they were looking for, and they probably couldn't have done it while having a pack in game at the $300 price point.
The unknown success of the Wii was a potential possibility for their decisions, but that still involves releasing the system at a market friendly price to make its chance of success greater
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Why?
The per-unit price of packed in software is almost nothing, with how well the Wii sold initially I highly doubt $50 would have been a deal-breaker, and the hardware I'm suggesting is very similar to what Apple used in their Mac Mini which was small, energy efficient, (reasonably) inexpensive, and sold at Apple's insanely high margins.
