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Aielyn on 14 January 2013
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The prices sound very much in line with what I suspect will happen in terms of the two.

I've mentioned before my prediction that Sony's next console will be modest, just a moderate power improvement over the Wii U, while MS's next console would be more powerful.

Remember, Sony's in a financially unstable situation. They can't afford to significantly take a hit with every system sold, and thus the cost to manufacture won't be too much higher than the system price. Assuming that Sony doesn't try to directly mimic the Wii U's main controller, and instead focuses more on Move and Eye, and assuming that the loss per console isn't noticeably bigger than Nintendo's, you can expect their system to be maybe twice the power of the Wii U, at most, likely with much of that going to the CPU relative to the Wii U.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is in a much more solid position, financially. At the same system price, they can afford to take a much larger loss per console - especially given that part of their motivation is to keep gaming on Windows. Their system, I expect, will be more powerful, perhaps 4x as powerful as Sony's, perhaps even more. I expect them to drop their interest in tablet integration with the 360, and shift it all onto the new console, where tablet integration will be one of the major selling points. While Kinect will likely be included, it will be made as cheaply as possible, I suspect, as MS will want to create as much parity with PCs as they can, and people aren't going to use Kinect with their PC as they would with their console. The result will be the ability of MS to focus a lot more of the money on raw power.


You will notice that the article was focused a lot more strongly on Microsoft - talking about Kinect, "Intel Chips in the case of Xbox", integration with Windows 8, etc. I think this is because they're judging a lot of what they expect about "next-gen" based on Microsoft. And I suspect that this is why Sony's just being assumed as "same as MS", when their financial position means that Sony cannot afford to risk 4 years of net annual loss from their gaming division as happened with the PS3.