Question for everyone: what should the Wi U retail price be on a long term basis ( I only include the premium Wii U - I don t really count the other model as there is no reason to buy it)

IMO The Wii U should be $275 unless both XB1 and PS4 come in much higher than anticipated

for the record I bought a Wii U for my son at launch-

I would expect that Nintendo will want to be $100 less than their competition, so that they could praise its value compared with Sony or Microsoft.  So unless Sony or Microsoft come in cheap (which I doubt will happen), I don't expect Nintendo to change their pricing.  If anything, they may start including more games with the console.

guess it depends on the PS4 eye being bundled mandatory. Because while not as techy as Kinect, it will drive up costs none the less.

In the end, MS will be more price competitive, because they can, and 360 is a bigger profit then PS3 is for Sony, thus nice offsetting.

Yeah, stuff like this will make the actual prices seem too high and people will moan and groan and then go pay $700 for an iPad. :-|

lol more than 20 comments and nobody explained why the BOM is high for Xbone than PS4.

Patcher is right about the differnce between BOM and prices but I can't say the values are these he is claming.

...........

Now I will try to explain the difference between the PS4's APU and Xbone's APU.

PS4's APU

* 8-core Jaguar CPU
* 18 CUs GPU
* Memory controller
* 3 billion transistors
* < 300 mm² in 28nm

Xbone's APU

* 8-core Jaguar CPU
* 12 CUs GPU
* Memory controller
* 32MB eSRAM
* Fixed units: Data Moves, etc
* 5 billion transasistors
* > 400 mm² in 28nm

What define the cost and the complexity of chip? The size and how many differente parts the chip have inside it. So the Xbone's chip is huge (billion transistors > 400mm²5) and have a lot of differnt part inside it (eSRAM, Data Move, etc).

So Sony have the advantage...

In a 300mm Wafer you can produce 150 chips of the 300mm² size.. in the same 300mm Wafer you can produce only 100 chips of the 400mm² size (not real numbers... just for comparison... I used the 40nm processo... in 28nm you can produce more chips too). The cost of a Wafer is fixed... so paying the same Sony can have more chips per Wafer than Microsoft... the cost of the PS4 APU is cheaper than Xbone APU.

That not end here... you have a percentage of chips that pass in the tests for real use... so a simple and good production of chips have a margin close to 90% of the chips are GOOD... a complex and bad production (issues) have a margin below 50% of the chips are GOOD.

So using the same cost for the Wafer... I will use $10,000... and using the 80% good chips for PS4 and 50% good chips for Xbone... I can estimate these costs...

PS4: $10,000 / 120 (80% of the 150 chips are good) = $83 per APU
Xbone: $10,000 / 50 (50% of the 100 chips are good) = $200 per APU

I don't how the cost of the Wafer used to produce the chips... I can guess a value from $5,000 to $8,000 (these are the cost I remember from the 40nm process)... and I don't know the percentage of GOOD chips or the real die-size of the Xbone or PS4 APUs.

But I can say for sure... the Xbone's APU is more complex to produce end and at least 40% more expensive than the PS4's APU.

MS will never catch PS4 in APU costs in this generation... the difference is simple:

PS4: small (3 billion transistors) and simple (CPU, GPU and memory controller)
Xbone: big (5 billion transistors) and complex (CPU, GPU, memory controller, eSRAM, DataMove, etc)

The percentage of the GOOD chips per Wafer for PS4 will be always better than Xbone too.

I dont know seems low to me.

Look at the WiiU, Nintendo claimed it was sold at a loss. Surely if those prices are accurate Nintendo would have beefed up their specs to match a bit closer to (ie 4gb of ram at least and an APU like the other two). Or was that controller REALLY that expensive for them?

No... the controller is not that expensive.

And Nintendo issue with cost lies in the Pad... not the console itself...  I guess without the Pad Nintendo can sell the Wii U at $200 without loss... I guess over $150 of the cost come from the Pad.

PS4 eye is two simple rgb cameras, 1200*800, and a few mics. Would surprise me if it costs more than $15 to manufacture. the biggest unknown is the tof camera in the Kinect2, rumoured to be 500*400 pixels.

A few years ago, a 160*120 tof camera was in the $5000 range, a 320*240 tof camera was in the $10000 range. Things have changed in the last few years (more manufacturers entering the market, and old manufacturing lines (probably in the 100micron region) may have become available to tof camera manufacturers. We don't know the specs of the Kinect2 tof camera, but this could easily be a major money sink.

Currentl I'd guess a crude BOM breakdown looks more like

$150 APU, $90 gddr5 ram, $20 blu-ray, $30 hd, $25 ps, $25 case stuff, $35 controller, $20 mainboard, $30 rest on mainboard = $425 PS4

$200 APU, $10 dram, $20 blu-ray, $30 hd, $20 ps, $20 case stuff, $150(?) controller, $20 mainboard, $30 rest on mainboard = $500 XBox One

by controller I mean the gamepad. That thing as cool as it is to play of screen looks like it was a huge trade of for them on what they could put in the console itself. oh well, looks like it will be a multi console gen for me again haha. PS4, Wii U and maybe XBOX one when more is know. TBH PC gaming to me is starting to look more and more attractive but some of the best franchises are on console only lol.

Was already confirmed the APU's will only cost $60 - $100 per chip by AMD.