The problem with that approach (launching 3 versions) is that it not only can confuse your customer but also makes it harder for developers to use those extra features, because they don't know how many people have them. That's why neither Kinect nor Move have had much support from 3rd parties and the reason why Nintendo made the Wiimote and now the Gamepad the de-facto controllers.

And about that Xbox lite (casual), the rumor said is that it would be a "low cost alternative to its Xbox console". To me that implies it having less power than the true nextbox. Think more of a Xbox360 + Kinect focused on playing media while being able to play most of the Live games, but not the retail ones.

The thing about subscription is that they have only tried it in the US (which is their biggest and primary market). They don't know if that model will work in Europe (Japan doesn't care).

I think giving options is better than worse. How many DS' were released?? Still sold like oxygen. Subscription will do well. How can it not? My phone im paying $29 a month for is worth more than any current gen or the WiiU console. Even more expensive then any combination of 2.

I wonder how powerfull it will be compared to the WiiU? Could be slightly weaker an ship with Kinect 2.0 and be the same or just under the same (launch) price.

I imagine the Wii U somewhere between PS360 and PS720, and hopefully strong enough to get good ports from all major 3rd parties!

I think both of MS and Sony are smart enough to understand that they can't have "weak" consoles like Wii U, because that would mean that they share the same 3rd party games, and what it comes down to then is 1st party support. And we all know who's the big dog when it comes to 1st party games...

And considering that both PS# and xbox360 is quite equel in power it wouldn't be a long shot to think that PS4 and x3ox will be the same...

Yes, I think I agree. Sony could actually make a weaker console and get away with it, because PS1 and PS2 weren't the strongest systems of their days. MS on the other side have always had powerful consoles, so there's no turning back for them. Besides, they've got the money to make it so.

I'm not saying that options aren't good. I'm saying that too many options aren't good. You mention the DS, but fail to mention that not all its models were available at the same time. The first DS, the fat one, was discontinued when the DSi was launched and the DSLite that replaced the fat one was almost discontinued when the DSi XL hit the stores. You can say that only 2 DS models were available at the same time.

And I only mentioned that the subscription model has only been tested in the USA. A console is not a phone, and what works in the USA doesn't have to work in the rest of the world.

No, the numbers were fine, I got them =) You said that you should "scrap that" later, that's what confused me :p But I agree with what you're saying that Wii U probably will be a mid to low PC and PS720 will be at the high end of that scale. And that's one of the reasons why I think Wii U might win next gen. It should at least be a tough gen, with the 3 consoles going neck to neck in the charts ;)

Actually I would put the Wii U at a 6, PS3 at a 5.5 and Xbox 360 as a 5 and the XB3 as a 35 and PS4 as a 32.

Do you really believe that the nest consoles will be 6x/7x more powerful than the PS3/Xbox360?

Why wouldn't they be? The Xbox 360 only has 430M transistors CGPU + 100M transistors ED-RAM. On 28nm you can pack in a lot of transistors, ~1.4B per 100mm^2. There have been very strong rumours for 5GB of RAM available to games for the Xbox 3, 3GB for OS, they make sense given the availability of DDR4 next year and advanced chip stacking techniques which yield incredibly high bandwidth.

Edit: A lot can change in 8 years. The Xbox 360 is ancient by comparison now, they won't have to release a 200W console to be 8x more powerful, they could do it with 120W. If they release a 200W console again it'll be more like 12x more powerful but I think that is unlikely.

The main thing preventing that is cost. Sure, they could launch a console with 12x the power, but the cost for that would be too big to make it a viable option. And 8 times more powerful but using only 120W. At what speeds would the CPU and GPU need to operate to get the consumption that low? Wouldn't it be counterproductive?

Side note: Do you think that DDR4 will be used? If, as you say, they make it available in 2013 then it will be much more expensive than DDR3. Maybe even more expensive than GDDR5. And while the bandwidth sees a very high increment, so is the latency that almost doubles going from CAS7 to CAS13.