Why PS4 won't be cutting edge, and neither will Xbox3 - or Why Nintendo might win next gen

[JEMC]

HappySqurriel said:
Two things that are not being taken into consideration by most people are energy consumption and cost ...

The Wii U draws over twice as much power as the Wii did while running New Super Mario U and may draw more power than that on graphically demanding games; and the Wii U sells for $350 while taking a small loss while the Wii sold for $250 while turning a modest profit. While the Wii U controller costs more than a Wiimote + Nunchuck, it is reasonable to assume that the Wii U system probably costs about 50% more to manufacture than the Wii system.

There are usually diminishing returns in increasing cost and energy consumption to increase processing power, so to maintain their processing power advantage you would expect greater relative increases in energy consumption and cost on the PS4 and XBox 720. Although I could be wrong, I would expect to maintain the same relative processing power advantage Sony and Microsoft would need to launch $500+ systems that used more than 300 Watts ... something I doubt would be popular

The Xbox360 was launched for $299/$399 and was a beast. Sure they took heavy losses, but they can afford them. What's stopping them to do something similar this time?

About power consumption, many people don't know how much power does their console use, and many more don't even care. The only problem with the power consumption is the related heat, that's the biggest problem .. for the manufacturers.

Oh, and WiiU uses twice as much power as Wii, but it's about the same that the actual Xbox360 and PS3 while being more powerful than those. Msoft and Sony could go with a 200W console and be a lot more powerful than WiiU, if the cooling is enough for that task it shouldn't be a problem.