Are Xbox One buyers REALLY paying $100 more for weaker hardware?

[Dr.Henry_Killinger]

crissindahouse said:

People just have to compare the costs for Sony and Microsoft and if the costs are also higher for Microsoft. If they think the PS4 price is fair then they also have to think that the Xbox One price is fair if Microsoft has higher costs.  Weaker hardware or not, higher production costs means that the price will be probably also higher at retail. Microsoft will maybe make more money per console as Sony does but probably not more than maybe 20 bucks or so...

Like you already said, if people like Kinect or not but it isn't deniable that it simply costs a lot. This time probably even more since Microsoft had to develop Kinect 2 alone, with Kinect 1 they got something already developed by another company.

Most think that Kinect isn't necessary for them but as long as it is sold with the console I think the price for this package is fair. Well, if we look at what Sony and Microsoft did last gen we could argue that both, PS4 and Xbox One could be cheaper and that these companies could take a bigger loss since they did it last gen but that was probably not really a great idea for them and this time they act more like a "normal" company with the price of their product,

Irrelevant. The concern what of console sales is the userbase it creates, not the profit margins made of it. Especially since all but Nintendo follows the loss leader strategy.
However, if we we're concerned with profit here's what it would look like.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/29/the-deanbeat-the-xbox-one-cost-471-to-make-the-ps4-costs-381-and-why-this-matters-in-the-long-run/

Each XB1 sold is 28$

Each PS4 sold is 18$

Disregarding, shipping, manufacturing, and the retailers cut lets assume that both companies see the maximum profit, which they don't, but its useful to see how pointless the profit from a console sale alone is.

In order for the PS4 to profit as much as the XB1 it needs to sell an additional 1.8 million consoles more than it.

Right now, the Gap is 2.2 million consoles.

So there is a lot more profit on PS4s than XB1 right now. Not to mention that shipping, manufacturing, retailers as well as r and d, suck up all that profit one would be seeing from the console sale.

However, the gap in userbase will give every game on the ps4 more addressable consumers. So the Software makes up for it.