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

[JEMC]

HappySqurriel said:

What I was suggesting is that they would have to take significantly larger losses to preserve their price point ...

Nintendo is not incompetent and it is unlikely that Sony or Microsoft could produce a dramatically more powerful system than they could for the same price using the same amount of energy. So, if Nintendo is spending 50% more to manufacturer the system (excluding the controller) and it is using twice the electricity it is moderately safe to assume that Sony and Microsoft would need to increase their manufacturing cost by at least 50% and use at least twice as much electricity to maintain their processing power advantage. Suppose Microsoft los $100 per XBox 360 at $300/$400 meaning their manufacturing cost was $400/$500, if it costs 50% more to maintain their processing power advantage the manufacturing cost increases to $600/$750 and Microsoft loses $300/$350 per system sold; even by Microsoft standards that is insane.

I see, but I disagree.

You are taking those numbers taking the WiiU as your baseline and while you can do that, you should also take into consideration how Nintendo works. Nintendo focus on low power consumption and that bring extra costs that the competition don't have. For example they said that they went with the MCM to save energy and space and that goingthat route was more expensive. Msoft and Sony will launch with 2 chips and will only try to get them fit into 1 later in the lifetime of their consoles.

And let's look at it from another point of view. Microsoft. When they launched the 360 it was based on high spec'ed parts. They went for the best they could manage (cost, heat, etc) and went for it and that made them lose those $100 per unit. Now they won't be able to do that because the high spec'ed components of nowadays are out of the reach for a console, mainly because of heat. So they will have to deal with, at best, the second tiers for each category. Add that to the fact that Nintendo made their hardware decisions in 2008 (hence why the rumors of and HD4000 based GPU) while the other have made their decisions in 2010 or 2011 and you end in an scenario were their console can be much more powerful while not being astronomically expensive.

Or to put it in another way, WiiU costs $180 to make losing only a few dollars. Msoft could make a console for twice the cost and sell it for $300 losing only the same hundred dollars that last gen.

HappySqurriel said:

Now, you're right that people don't care about the power consumption directly but they do care about the size, noise and failure rate of their systems which are all indirectly impacted by energy consumption. The PS3 was dramatically bigger than the PS2 at launch and if the PS4 was a 400 watt monster it is likely that you would see a proportionate increase in the size of the PS4 compared to the PS3; and you would likely have a very large fan on at all times that was quite loud to keep the console from over-heating.

True, that's why I said if cooling is enough for that task. Let's face it, most consoles are still made with looks first and cooling after.