The more I have thought of this the more I think it could happen.

First off, the introductory price of $399 is almost a requirement now. So I believe having two SKUs will be a way to kinda cheat having to come in at that price while keeping the specs the same across both SKUs.

So what I am thinking is a $399 sku without a disc drive and then a $499 SKU with a disc drive and about double the storage space.

Doubling the storage space and adding a disc drive will add only like $45 to the BOM but they get to charge a extra $55 at retail. And they could also sell an external disc drive powered and connected via USB for like $99 as an option.

I believe both sony and MS would prefer to do away with discs but neither of them have the balls to outright cut it out from the entire arena of their next gen platform, so they will stealth delete it and make it optional.

What do you all think?

Isn't 1TB too little for next gen?

Wouldnt it make more sense for the system without the disk drive to have more storage?

Nope. 

it will be like it was at the start of this gen. 

We had 500GB hard drives with a usable space of around 400GB. Games averaged around 40GB before DLC and patches. People could pretty much install around 8 to 10 games before their console started returning errors.

Same situation with next gen just that everything is going to double with the added bonus of having more usable space out the gate. Games should average around 75GB before DLCs and patches and again gamers will be able to store around 10 games. 

This notion of the consoles needing to ship with as much as 2TB would be nice but its just that...... something nice and not a necessity.

Do mandatory installs require the full download amount? I thought it was like some Switch games where some is on the cart and the rest is downloaded.

Thats supposed to be the "budget" system. The one coming in at $399.

Companies do that all the time. The budget system will have the lowest margins for them' they may make only like $5-$10 off each unit sold. Then the premium system, the one that has more bells and whistles, will give them much higher margins. Unknown to the consumer the benefit of having twice the storage and a disc drive won't cost them more than an extra $40 on top the base console. But they get to charge them $100 for it.

Having a stand alone external disc drive that costs like $79 or something lends to the "added value" impression of the more expensive SKU. 

I get that, to me it just seemed like an all digital sku would benefit more from have the larger storage space.

But I see where you are coming from, a disk drive-less sku should also be slightly smaller/lighter which could help on shipping/packaging costs, right?

Gotcha, even though I have a PS4 I never realized that. I thought it was a situation where the disc can only hole a certain amount of data so whatever is left over needed to be downloaded.

Very good question. Guess we will find out how that goes when the disc driveless XB1 comes along next year.

Then again not having discs hasn't stopped PC hardware from selling. And brick and mortar retailers can always do shady shit like just having more of the disc drive sku in stock.

I doubt online retailers will have problem with it though. Who knows, retailers may even start purchasing game  download codes and selling those to consumers.

Nope. Mandatory installs. They just let you start playing the game from the disc while its stealth installing the entire disc to the console.

The disc drives in the consoles really do absolutely nothing at all besides act as a conduit for the game to get onto the internal HDD.

Exactly. 

Also using an M.2 interface will allow them even sell branded "playstation/XB" SSDs with some sort of extended warranty BS and guaranteed "stable" performance so some hapless sheeps wanting to upgrade their internal storage would end up paying more for the branded SSD.