Estimate is 228 USD. Kind of interesting, the thing really isn't cheap to make per their estimate, wonder how much the Nextbox and PS4 will be if they also come with similar add-on included like motion tracking camera etc.

it looks like nintendo biggest investment in making the console, is making it efficient and small, the parts seem really cheap, apart from the game pad.

Wii U can be between PS4 and last gen. but it is nothing to sneez about. It is a unique piece of tech, but not as hard to program as the Cell architecture.

That's still pretty cheap. However I think the controller itself is a bit too expensive and is not worth the price.

I guess it depends on how much Nintendo spent in R&D and Marketing. Theres plenty of room for them to cut the system $50, but if they cut it $50 it has to make sense in long term parts costs and how many new games would be sold.

Wait a second.

"While a totally of 3 million Wii U's were sold by 2012, sales slowed in January to less than 100k..."

The first part is the number of consoles shipped globally, but where the fuck did he get that <100k number for 2013? It's not even that low in the US alone.

OT: Assuming the estimate is accurate, I also wonder what else could be contributing to those costs-per-unit. Apart from the cost of the parts themselves, assembly and shipping, what other built-in costs do the hardware makers have to deal with?

It is that low in US. But I have no idea why he said the global sales for 2012, then went ahead and used US only sales for January 2013.

it's really not though, far from it, it would need gpu with aleast 700-800 gflops, and and much better ram speed, atleast comparable to 720.

Probably to make it seem like as big a drop as possible.  Sensationalism sales.

I'm kind of confused about how Nintendo is losing money per console, though.  I don't think they'd tie R&D costs to manufacturing on a per-console basis.  Seems like that would be a departmental cost applied to the entire life-cycle.  I assumed that things like shipping, manufacturing, and exchange rates would contribute to the loss on an individual console.

There is also other costs such as logistics (Shipping), packaging, various labor costs that go on top of that.

I agree with all of this. The assessment seems off, unless shipping, manufacturing, and exchange rates are killing the price. Nintendo originally said it needed to sell 1 game to make a profit, but redacted that later on. So it's safe to assume it's at least 2 games to crack a profit. I just can't see these additional costs from just making/moving the units. We're talking an additional $100+ per unit from their analysis of parts just making and moving them.