Neo Geo cartridges were like 200$.

You can bash pachter how much you want, maybe he deserves it, but you won't change the fact that you'll wait years for games that can beat "Halo 4" or "The Last of Us" on the wiiU in terms of graphics. That pretty much defines "old gen technology", in a broad sense at least.

We'll talk about specs when we have all the specs, including those of the next microsoft and sony consoles.

I seeeeeeee.  You're insight is invaluable, Rol.

Cool. And now if I ask you about it you'll pull out of nowhere an american price threshold which "casually" will cater to your interests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_CD    Read the first paragraph.

Neo Geo CD game prices were low at $50, in contrast to Neo Geo AES game cartridges, which cost as much as $300. The system can also play Audio CDs. All three versions of the system have no region-lock.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_(console) Read second paragraph in "History".

"Other games were priced at about $200 (and up). With these "premium" prices, though, most gamers weren't able to afford the system, so the console was only accessible to a niche market."

Everybody knows the Neo Geo cartdriges were expensive, anybody knows cartdriges are expensive.

"Pachter suggested that Nintendo should license its IPs to mobile game developers and put GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games on cell phones where it would reach hundreds of millions of people and possibly create a new target group to sell Nintendo hardware to"

Actually this is nearly imposible.

Nintendo's cartridges were expensive but NeoGeo's took it to whole new tax bracket.

The SNES cart sized ranged from 2 Mbit to 48 Mbit. NeoGeo's ranged from 100 Mbit to 716 Mbit.
Even the N64 carts were only 32 Mbit to 512 Mbit (only 2 games were that big and they came out 10 years after the Neo Geo launched).

Of course I know cartridges are expensive.

What I'm saying is that you'll draw a pretty imaginary line (at 150$ for example, we have to make sure that those N64 cartridges that were 110 euros in european countries fit in the desired category). Those consoles with their games below that price can achive the outstanding "real competition" status and can be used in comparisons, while the others can't.

Still a silly argument because price doesn't prevent a Mercedes C-Class to compete with a Saab 9-3 in the compact executive segment (thanks for the car comparison idea, Oprah!).

And the "it wasn't expected to win" argument isn't much better either.

"Other games were priced at about $200 (and up). With these "premium" prices, though, most gamers weren't able to afford the system, so the console was only accessible to a niche market."

So you want a niche console to compete againts mass market consoles like SNES and Genesis.

Wii U is powerful enough to make really nice looking Nintendo games, so I'm excited to see the jump for Nintendo devs, even if it's only moderately more powerful than 360/PS3.