Yamauchi was also a ruthless negotiator too, I'm not sure if you could strong-arm vendors like this anymore ...
He forced the NES component makers to renegotiate their component prices right before the system launched, they protested wildly but were effectively blackmailed into accepting Nintendo's terms because they needed the contract, lol.
The SGI deal for the N64 was already a remarkably cheap deal for hardware of that performance, Tom Kalinske at Sega wanted the chip badly but Sega's Japan division was already working on the (disastrous) Sega Saturn so he was overruled. But even there Yamauchi forced them to bring down the price on it before launch so they could sell it $199.99 instead of the previously agreed upon launch price of $250 (granted some of this had to do with a delay).
The original GBA screen was supposed to be a lot brighter, but Nintendo switched to a cheaper darker screen at the last minute. As a result though the system was virtually unplayable in anything other than direct light. Konami's Castlevania game especially was problematic for being too dark, but Konami had designed the game on the brighter dev kit screen that they assumed would be in the final version. This all led to many people modding their GBAs with lights. It was quite a nice cottage industry until Nintendo finally released the backlit GBA SP.
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