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

[ArnoldRimmer]

The Xbox One has (or had, considering the recent pricecut) just the same problem that the PS3 initially had:
Consumers considered it to be overpriced and didn't buy it, either because they thought it wasn't worth the money or because they considered a rival's product to be the better deal.

One can easily argue that the Xbox One and the PS3 were not really overpriced, as even with the high initial pricetag, Sony for example was selling the PS3 at a huge loss, so from an economic point of view it was actually clearly underpriced.

But in both cases, the reason that customers considered the consoles too expensive and didn't buy them (despite manufacturing costs perfectly justifying their price tag) was that the companies were intentionally driving up manufacturing costs by forcing expensive features on the customers that the majority of these were not even interested in, for the sake of giving their console a unique feature and/or pushing other products from the same company. In the case of the PS3, that was BluRay-drives, in the case of Xbox One, it's Kinect and the TV-pass-through features.

Having a bigger case that requires more plastic, an external power supply etc. is nice I guess. But many gamers purchase a video game console simply for it's capability to play games and thus base their decision mainly on a console's price/gaming performance ratio.

There is no contradiction between "paying $100 more for weaker hardware" and "paying $100 more for more stuff in the box". So it's not either one or the other - some people will think "I want a video game console for gaming, not some media-center-like device that can also do gaming. So why should I pay $100 more for a console that currently delivers only about half the graphics throughput?" and buy a PS4. Others might think "For just $100 more, I get additional features that might turn out to be useful, and personally I don't see a huge difference in graphics anyway. In comparison to my Wii, anything looks nice, anyway.".

Both are perfectly valid opinions, there is no right or wrong here, we can only tell from sales numbers that more people think like the first group.