You mean Xbox-certified console-size PCs from other manufacturers. Maybe you'll see a Sony Xbox!

You still don't get it. That new console price is based on that hardware design selling 80 million units over it's lifetime. Now you want to cut that in thirds. Most people will indeed not upgrade every time, the parts of the world with lower income are even less likely to go along with this. But lets be generous and say each hardware sku still has the potential to sell 30 million, which will be at a higher initial price because of lower lifetime sale expectations.

Version 1 already had it's $100 price drop, MS should be focusing on making a cheaper to produce slim version to get the majority to jump in. However that means competing with themselves, and the new premium version is likely to sell slower and thus needs to be priced higher not to be loss leading. It's only a percentage of the hardcore that will go for this new premium version. The big majority that eventually makes those low launch prices possible will not.

I understand you want MS to provide you with a top of the line PC in a nice box every 3 years for $400. It's not going to happen. Either the price goes up or you get less bang for your buck. Sony tried the higher price last gen with the ps3, adult oriented machine, blu-ray, linux, full BC, didn't go so well. Nintendo is going the other way, smaller cycles, less cutting edge tech. We'll see if the nx can do what the WiiU couldn't. Valve went with the upgrade-able entertainment center pc, which is indeed a lot more expensive. It's not selling. Yet somehow MS can avoid market reality and launch a profitable cutting edge box every 3 years for the same price?

Already been done

MSX was a platform developed by Microsoft to enter the console space in the 80's.
It never caught on in the US, the masses chose the cheaper NES.

Im not saying its not going to work, but the beauty of consoles is that you don't need to think about a lot of complexity.

Every game you buy is going to look exactly how it looks on every other clone of the console. No need to worry about 'hmm if I buy this game will it only look kinda sorta like the high end advertised graphics'

But surely if MS are designing smaller steps in power increase as opposed to a big step end of gen, the costs of the parts involved would be cheaper? If they made a version 2 say for release Xmas this year or sometime next year they could have an increase of say 4gb extra ram, not the best gpu out, but say a gpu 2 generations up from the existing one. The CPU could even remain the same just at a higher clockspeed and better cache. Something like theoretical performance of say 2.2-2.4 teraflops overall. Surely in 2016-2017 that could be done at a price to sell for $400. Then perhaps in 2019-2020 a 3rd version with another smaller bump. 16gb ram, 2 x generation gpu leap again, and this time maybe the next gen of the CPU as it would already be around and cheaper.

Is that not doable? It doesn't have to be the top pc components that pc gamers will use at initial monster prices. Just enough for 2-3x more power each time. as opposed to waiting a whole gen then designing a console with current parts to be 10x more powerful than previous gen like Xbox one - 360.

Except Windows 10 isn't a gaming platform, it's an Operating System. Something everyone is going to have to have anyway (unless you like being unproductive). 

No. No it isn't doable. It's not a matter of simply swaping out the RAM chips in your Xbox factory for another and telling developers to have fun with it. They'd still have to retool the factory, develop and create new dev kits - costing millions of dollars. Then, you have convince developers to buy hundreds of extra dev kits at thousands of dollars a piece after they just bought hundreds of dev kits 3 years ago, and then, spend more time developing specifically for the better hardware and practically double the cost of QA for every single Xbox game they make for what is for all intents and purposes, a new, but super easy to develop for platform, costing developers millions of dollars in extra development costs.

That's a really really hard sell, and you still have to deal with the pissed off fanbase who now has to worry about their Xbox not getting treated as well as their neighbors better xbox, if new games will even run on them.

Kinda a hard sell, don't you think?

Following the Nintendo model by staying behind the curve, yes then they can keep the $400 price tag, ie if people still buy it the same.

But it will be quite behind the ps5 when that comes out, which will be based on 8 to 10 years of sales. You get a situation where the incremental box is a step behind at launch, equals or slightly surpasses it 3 years into the gen (yet the competitor already had several price cuts), is noticeably ahead 6 years in (against a now much cheaper slim model),  gets passed up 1 or 2 years later when the next gen starts, while the incremental box releases a weaker console at the competitor's launch or after. Don't worry it will catch up again later and games will still incrementally get better. They look a bit poor compared to the competitor going all out with a big jump in fidelity with all shiny new custom made graphics engines for the same price.

Meanwhile you've been spending 3 times as much to have better graphics half of the gen. Why not spend 1 third to have better graphics the other half of the gen and never worry when certain new games won't support your system anymore in case you stop upgrading. Ofcourse you can flip flop, ideally MS and Sony would not come out at the same time yet 4 years apart. That would be best for consumers, affordable state of the art 8 year plan console every 4 years, with an affordable slim model every 4 years as well. Although that would suck for multi platform developers. And of course MS and Sony do not want to share their user base in such a way.

Regardless of how it pans out, it's exciting stuff. Very Sega-ish. Maybe thats why I gravitate more towards the Xbox side of things the last two gens, they seem to innovate more with hardware and UI imho, I was always a big Sega fanboy. They always brought something unique to the table.

I have said this entire gen that the consoles are weak and I hope the gen didn't last long. Looks like Papa Phil is gonna take care of me. If the Xbox brand crashes and burns, oh fucking well. I have gaming computers and Sony/Nintendo consoles.

Hopefully this means steam availability of some sort. This way I can convince kids once and for all we can just keep our chromebooks and ditch the only remaining PC in the house. Its nearly useless at this point anyways.