To prevent people from copying games on to cds probably. The PSP and Dreamcast has fallen victim to this

It's because the only people that would give a shit are people like us on forums bickering over which console has the best specs. The third party developers that make the games I believe get much more info about the infrastructure of the consoles than we do, and only they really require that knowledge to begin with.

I thought MS and Sony console specs were available? The only reason Nintendo hasn't is because they don't want to show how much weaker Wii is, comparatively.

They always do reveal the specs AFAIK. I remember reading system specs for each system well before they were launched.

I imagine its so rivals cant gain any advantage and because no one really cares. Third party dev's probably have the info but are not likely to be allowed to plaster it over the INTERNET.

Because most of the specs of systems is protected by component manufacturers. I'm sure IBM/Intel/Nvidia/AMD/etc. would be happy about potentially expensive IP information leaking out through PR people.

I suspect it's about not letting the competition know anything about your system.

If system X says they have a 1 ghz processor and say 512 megs of ram, then a competitor can just come along and say "well, we have 1.5 ghz and 1 gig of ram, so we're better" in an attempt to sway the customers

Not that they don't try to make those sorts of comparisons anyway, but actually having the specs publically available might make a system more susceptible to this imo.

1.- You are talking about Nintendo here right? Because Sony and Microsoft have all of the specs flying around since months before launch.

2.- This would be highly subjective Soriku. Game can be scaled or downgrade. Also, sometimes hardware can't be directly compared. For example the 360's GPU is better than PS3's, while in the CPUs is the opposite.

3.- The ones that revealed specs (Sony and MS) already did PR spins, by giving max theoretical numbers under optimal conditions never achieved in games and/or giving certain number (ie: FLOPS) under a different calculation that inflates the number in comparison to other hardware. They are not lying, but it's good for the press.