Honestly, I think Nintendo should partner with a tech company to create a device that's able to add more ram and specs to the Wii U. Not on the Wii U ,but the PS4 and 720 as well. Consoles are already seen as cheap gaming PCs, eventually its going to happen and I think Microsoft is going to tackle this idea first as Sony and Nintendo follow. For consoles, there could be two settings, standard settings and high settings.

I may not be the biggest Nintendo fan ,but I don't want to see Nintendo go out of the console buisness, because it'll be very bad for the industry. I want all three consoles to succeed, I find it mean spirited to see people wanted a company to fail for their enjoyment. Remember folks, its fun to have little petty flame wars from time to time ,but don't forget ,there are actually people working at these companies who jobs can be one the line at these difficult times.

That would pretty much take the entire philosophy of having a standard set of hardware to design, program and optimize a game for and throw it into the bin.

Little use really, people who want that already have the pc route.

how many people actually had the 4MB Ram extension on the N64? :P

Wasn't it required to play Majora's mask?

I guess the same like the Wii motion plus thing. Around 30%?

hmmm that's not too bad actually....

With 8GB, MSony have more than enough for the generation.

WiiU is the only one who is likely going to feel the hurt due to RAM. However, any change like that would just limit the possible game sales as it would be tied to a segmented userbase. So, not a good idea.

Realistically, Nintendo should of went with 4GB and not killed the bandwidth. Still would have kept costs down and allowed them to be far closer to their competition. Being off by a few GB probably could be overlooked due to compression techniques. But being off by about 6GB is going to hurt them. Especially when you combine that with the bandwidth being a drastic difference.

lol people's jobs are on the line. Always have been always will be.

with 8Gb GDDR5 I don't think the Ps4 will need more ram, also the ram on the wii u is so slow adding more of slow ram won't change much

Yup this would split the userbase and most of the games would be created with the lower specs in mind, so you're barely gaining anything from that move.

There would have been no point for the Wii U to have 4GB of RAM, here are the reasons:

1.) More heat generation.

2.) Hardware not designed to take advantage of 4GB DDR3 since a lot of it would be based off how the eDRAM on the GPU die would work with it.

3.) TBH I don't think the hardware has enough power to take advantage of that much RAM based on it's design philisophy anyways.

4.) Pure speculation, but I expect them to open more RAM up from the other 1GB pool once OS optimization is done much like the 3DS, but I don't think it'd improve performance much at all.

5.) From where I'm looking at, the Wii U was made to be a 720p machine, adding more DDR3 RAM wouldn't help with this resolution.

Just remember that RAM can be a bottleneck, but it's not going to magically make a system run faster once a good balance has been reached, and I think Nintendo was going for that balance.