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Intrinsic said:
SmileyAja said:
Haha, like the dock actually costs 90 dollars to produce, selling it without the dock and the wrist straps for the Joy-Cons would probably turn out 240 - 250 dollars. At that point most people would dismiss it as a handheld and wouldn't pay as much for that, because home consoles like PS4 and XBONE are available at the same price.

Not to mention they're trying to keep the 3DS alive as a budget - minded option with a huge backlog of games. So marketing and selling this as a handheld would kill off the potential 3DS sales and it wouldn't replace the Wii U which is the main failure they're trying to get rid of.

But as time goes on and the guts of the Switch get cheaper to produce Nintendo will lower prices to 250 - 270 dollars, and that should be fine, considering that by then it will have a big and developed library of games to play.

I don't even believe that the NS cost that much to make. At its heart its a 2013 chip shrunk from a 28nm process to a 14nm process.

I would be surprised if the NS has a BOM any higher than $180; and that including EVERYTHING in the box including what it costs to make the box itself. Including the paper.

If you're talking about the Eurogamer article, I'll quote this (from the article itself);

"There's an additional wrinkle to the story too, albeit one we should treat with caution as it is single-source in nature with a lot of additional speculation on our part. This relates to the idea that the Tegra X1 in the NX development hardware is apparently actively cooled, with audible fan noise. With that in mind, we can't help but wonder whether X1 is the final hardware we'll see in the NX. Could it actually be a placeholder for Tegra X2?"

"While we're confident that our reporting on Switch's clock-speeds is accurate, all of the questions we have concerning the leaked spec remain unanswered.... Performance at lower clocks could be boosted by a larger GPU (ie more CUDA cores), but this seems unlikely - even if Switch is using newer 16nm technology, actual transistor density isn't that different to Tegra X1's 20nm process - it's the FinFET '3D' transistors that make the difference. A larger GPU would result in a more expensive chip too, with only limited performance gains. And if Switch is using a more modern 16nm Tegra chip, we would expect Nintendo to follow Nvidia's lead in how the new process is utilised. However, the Tegra X2 features the same CUDA core count and apparently boosts GPU clocks by 50 per cent, the opposite direction taken by Nintendo."

They themselves question if the X1 is being used, and if they were to use the Venture Beat article as an example of this statement that would make less sense, since all the points they bring up about Maxwell being more efficent and cheaper than Pascal in the (Venture Beat) article are false. Die shrinking it makes no sense, since they could base the chip off the P1 and get better performance for cheaper and it will even decrease in price as time goes on. Besides we don't know how custom this chip is, it could be minor tweaks to a pre-existing chip or tailor made for the Switch. It's too early to jump the gun on saying that it's a rip-off based on the hardware which we don't know anything about.