With the exception of the Xbox's 8GB of memory to the PlayStation's 4GB of memory, the two should be on par performance and cost wise.

Any price difference wouldn't be significant.  So to believe that Kinect 2 would significantly add to the cost of the next console is just ridiculous.

The only thing including Kinect 2 in the next Xbox will do is possibly push off how soon Microsoft can drop the price, but even still I'm guessing Kinect 2 probably costs $50.  If not less.

Not really. Leaked specs but PS4s graphics roughly 50% better on paper.

I don't see Microsoft just giving Kinect away. It will bring up the cost no matter how you look at it. The money Microsoft spend on Kinect R&D could have been used to make a more powerful console or just to make sure they are price below the PS4. 

I'm done here. I've made my point and I'm not going to repeat myself over and over.

I like Microsoft's service oriented console design. They will surely take the next home console evolutionary steps in that area.

Where Microsoft continue's to fail me personally is in the lack of original games.

They need to be about the game software just as much as they are about the Game Hardware and Services.

Yes, but what you don't see in those specs are the performance benefits of the Move engines.

Except for the fact that Kinect actually offers a feature that no other company can duplicate to the Xbox's feature set.  It offers a controller-less means of interfacing with the user interface.  It offers a means for consumers/gamers to use voice activation and it offers a means for consumers/gamers to use motion controls.  Neither Sony nor Nintendo have that capability.  With either you have to have some controller to interact with the UI.  This capability, along with the future capabilities that Microsoft are working on will give the next Xbox an advantage over the next PlayStation and Wii U. 

The companies Microsoft bought are were long paid for.  The expenses long recovered.  The cost of the original Kinect already recovered. 

The cost of the actual parts for Kinect were estimated to be $50.  Kinect initially sold for $150, but then dropped to $100.  So if Microsoft sold 24 million units at $50 profit, then it means Microsoft made $1.2 billion dollars in profit.  Depending on how many of the 24m units were sold with $100 profit that would have obviously only increased the amount Microsoft made.

1.2B - $35m (3DV acquisition) - $70m (Canesta acquisition) = $15m 

Clearly, the cost of Kinect has been long paid for. 

The cost of Kinect 2 is hardly significant.  The technology was bought when Microsoft bought the two companies.  Likewise, Microsoft is a company that engages in research and design.  The fact that Kinect 2 had any cost of development was a cost of doing business.   It would have been budgeted in long before it began.  The costs for Kinect were born in the purchase of the two companies Microsoft bought and in development of the Kinect itself.  Kinect 2 doesn't have those expenses.  That dramatically alters the cost of the product. 

So no, I don't think Microsoft's price nor the hardware capabilities of the next Xbox will be impacted by Kinect 2.

Please got read the Digital Foundry comparison article. Those Move engines aren't some sort of "Special sauce". They wont' make up for the weaker GPU and the lower RAM bandwidth.

Motion Control and Voice are both features PS4 will be able to replicate. Navigating the UI via Kinect might sound cool...but who would want to do that? Isn't that what voice control is for? The controller is called a CONTROLLER for a reason....the way I see it, it's just another gimmick. It's not a selling point for me.

The whole second part of your argument falls apart when you see that Microsoft is throwing the Kinect together with each Xbox 720. THERE WILL BE NO $50-$100 PROFITS THIS TIME UNLESS THEY SERIOUSLY BUMP UP THE PRICE OF THE WHOLE PACKAGE. How on earth you can overlook something so obvious is beyond me.

Did you?  "So does the GPU difference translate into as large an advantage as it sounds? VGleaks' Orbis spec...suggests that four of these CUs are reserved for Compute functions, conceivably bringing the PlayStation's raw advantage down from 50 per cent to just over 16."

The fact that DF doesn't quite know how the Move engines will be utilized or benefit the console means their benefit in performance is far from measured.  And no, the Move engines aren't going to make up for the lower bandwidth available for RAM, but the 32MB of ESRAM does; "This little cache of memory can run in parallel with the DDR3, and combined bandwidth then rises back up to around 170GB/s - a number close to the throughput of the GDDR5 in Orbis."

The performance difference between the next Xbox and the next PlayStation will not be significant.  So for the price Sony is paying, they're not actually buying a heck of a lot in performance advantage.

Now back to the price situation.  The more you manufacture a component, the less expensive it gets.  24 million Kinects are more expensive than 76 million Kinects.  So, if Microsoft includes Kinect, initially it may mean taking a bite on the cost, but down the road the greater amount of production will reduce the cost significantly.  Easily it may start out costing $50 but within a short time-frame drop down to half that or less.  I would dare say that the current Kinect cost much more than $25.00 because it doesn't take long for the costs to drop when the production units are in the millions.

I fully expect Microsoft to run in the red to begin with on the next Xbox.  But here's what they're going to do at E3.  They're going to show the next Xbox with Kinect 2.0 and how much better it works over Kinect.  Then, towards the end, they'll show what consumers/gamers can expect with Xbox in 2014 and that's when they'll demonstrate Illumiroom and Fortaleza.  Illumiroom creating the larger gaming space with a full-room display and Fortaleza offering augmented reality.  The buzz with gamers, consumers, and the media with Illumiroom and Fortaleza will make people want to buy the Xbox, lowering the cost of manufacturing, and increasing the profit on the console.

You're ignoring the fact that 3 of those 8 gigs of DDR3 are reserved for the OS. So no, the ESRAM doesn't make up for the lower bandwidth. Even if MS managed to make to bring the bandwidth up to par with the 4gig GDDR5, the PS4 would still have the advantage as this is a unified RAM pool. PS$ is easier to develop for and pretty straightforward at least in terms of RAM. Xbox 720 is the opposite. Microsoft has a huge bandwitdth disadvantage and they have resorted to using super expensive ESRAM to try and compensate.

So whatever money MS saved using the cheaper DDR3 RAM, its negated by the more expensive ESRAM they were forced to include. Again, this is all for the sake of Kinect and some RAM-eating features they have.(Which could be some kind of DVR feature or maybe Windows-based OS) They chose quantity over qualitly(in this case, speed). this is where Microsoft has made mistakes with the Xbox 720 design IMO. I doubt we'll see any big differences in multiplats, at least not for a few years. Where I expect things to really show is with exclusives.

I'm not ignoring anything.  You however are ignoring the very article you cited.  In it, they say that the ESRAM does essentially make up for the lower bandwidth of the GDDR3 memory.  It doesn't equate to a 1:1 relationship, but we're talking a difference of about 14 GBps.  A negligible performance difference.

The ESRAM however doesn't do anything for Kinect.  The purpose of ESRAM is to provide faster memory for portions of code where performance is necessary.  Again, in the article you cited, a programmer from an actually game studio, goes on to explain that the majority of game code doesn't require the high speed memory.  The game doesn't benefit from having access to it.  Only in some specific instances does high speed memory benefit the code.  And it's actually more difficult to put a 4GB bank of GDDR5 memory together than it is to put an 8GB GDDR3 memory bank together.  As explained in the article you cited, GDDR5 memory only comes in 512MB banks, so getting anything more than 4GBs in a single memory configuration is painfully difficult.  Again, read the article you cited.

Sony loads up the PS4 with extremely high-speed memory, but the majority of code that'll access it won't be able to take advantage of it.  The next Xbox includes 8GB of slower memory, but includes 32MB of EDRAM.    What you don't quite fathom is it becomes 6 of 1 and a half-dozen of another.  If the PS4 has a performance gain it's negligible.  It won't amount to a hill of beans. 

The only way exclusives could be better is if they offer 4K resolution, which I doubt they will.  Sony and it's 1st party developers may decide to present 4K games to the public, but I doubt they'll actually release any. 

This was the whole reason why I made the thread about what was valid reason to buy a PS4.  The two consoles will be about even in terms of performance, the majority of games, the same.  The only difference will be the "hook" each brings to the market to get consumers/gamers hyped on buying the console.  A new Dual Shock gamepad doesn't quite do it. 

I don't want in this dumb and pointless argument you and VGking are in, but what you wrote in the bold just irks me like no other.   Why would someone want to buy a ps4?  Oh, I don't know maybe because they want to and like the exclusives that are out for it.  Me personally am not gonna look at a peripheral that comes with the console and be like well the nexbox comes with a gimmicky kinect 2.0 that is it's main selling point and ps4 doesn't, so I'll buy that.  I'm buying a VIDEO GAME CONSOLE not an effing PC and I'm gonna look at the exclusives that come with each one and choose based on that.  That's all I want is GAMES.  And, also your asking the same question that can apply to all the consoles for each generation.  The ps360 are close in performance and the majority of the games look and play the same.  I'm gonna probably get both the ps4 and nexbox, so no I'm not a fanboy of sony.  It just makes no sense why you would ask that about just the ps4 and not the nexbox too.  

But, whatever.  That's just my rant over a pretty dumb question.

*edit* You have the right to ask what you want and I'm not attacking you.  This is just something that irks me a lot.  I could have put this in your thread, but it was more convenient to put it here.

Because, I'm a hardware guy and I like hardware. 

Despite why you bought the PS3, there are several key features that Sony has sold the PS3 on.  Unique exclusives are but one of those, other features were the motion controls of the  SixAxis controller, included Wi-Fi, included Blu-Ray ODD, Bluetooth, the Cell processor, Linux capabilities, etc, etc.  A few others were added later on as selling features, such as Move and 3D.

There had been, and still is, a lot of information about what Microsoft has planned for the future Xbox.  There isn't a heck of a lot for the PlayStation.  So the interest, especially in the face of so many people saying that they were interested in purchasing the PS4 simply based on the preliminary specs, is what was there that people would buy the PS4 for?

The only, and I repeat only, answer I can still appreciate is the very one you mentioned, exclusive games.  However, I would challenge you those exclusive games are generally only of significant interest to those who have already played the series.  That is, enough to inspire an early  purchase (i.e. not one after a price drop).

As for I didn't do one for the Wii/Wii U, well it's already out.  As for the next Xbox, it isn't a question for me to answer.  I already have formed an opinion as to whether I believe the next Xbox offers something of value for my purchase consideration. 

Trust me, I'm looking forward to the 20th to find out what Sony has planned.

So, I'm more interested in hardware and what companies have planned with it than with games.  Games I like and want to play will come along, that's a given, but hardware is the what I find cool.