512 MB of Wii U's RAM "reserved for the OS. What's the total?

[drkohler]

Lusche said:

I thought they solder it not because of the costs or failure rate, but for a more compact design. I also think its cheaper to solder it directly on the board

Every piece of plastic, every single hole in your board costs money. It is by far the cheapest solution to solder everything directly onto the board. Since a console is a fixed architecture, you do not need any slots at all, the user has no choice to change things. The expensive stuff like cpu and gpu might be in a socket if the designer thinks harvesting parts might be an option should the console fail for some reason.