Damn... Good to get some fresh information.

I would like more though. Day one for sure.

A couple of people at Sony had confirmed that the 8 GB change was a last minute decision.  

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-09-sony-boss-talks-of-sleepless-nights-when-trying-to-balance-ps4-capabilities-and-price

Even still that last minute decision was decided by now for PS4.  Even if that decision was made February 20th on the dot, 9 months before the launch was a last minute decision.  Unless you aren't expecting the PS5 until nearly December, everything needs to be locked down by now.  They need to start manufacturing consoles and shipping them out by the masses.  Not to mention setting up the manufacturing lines in the first place. All of that takes months of time to get set up.  

What kind of flops are we talking about though, it's been so muddied over the last gen, nor does it mean much of anything by itself anymore.

Anyway, making it more than $500 would be suicide, so $500 it is.

Btw wasn't VRS a bad thing, or was that something else from NVidia, DSR? No clue, just gimme CPU, RAM, clock and bus speeds, that still means something.

Maybe not with a low spec unit mixed in.  

Unless it's been cancelled.

The whole low spec unit at the start isn't a very smart thing to do imo. Early adopters are eager to get their hands on the best tech, so settling for second best while still paying launch prices, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't pay $600 US either since that would be CAD 900 (with tax) for a console...

The two tiered approach raises questions. With as little time there is to get launch games ready, supporting multiple specs is only going to get less out of the top tier machine. There are already 4 SKUs to support at launch, xbox one, xbox one s, xbox one x, xbox series x.

The way I'm understanding it is that you can leave multiple games open to jump back in instantly. You play some Halo, you get tired and switch to Minecraft without losing the option to jump back into Halo right where you were.

It would be cool if it could keep me logged in, so I can play a different game while waiting for a race or match to start. Atm any suspend action has the server kick you.

I very much doubt that will change. Servers are generating costs, so they'll definitely want to prevent a scenario in which tons of idle clients are using up server time.

Being able to have multiple games open at the same time will be nice. Though, I would rarely use the feature. I generally like to finish one game before moving onto the next. 

It seems to me MS is heading towards consoles being less like traditional consoles and instead being more like a specific spec PC.  

I think chances are good that they'll drop the Xbox One + S in a couple years and have the Xbox One X + Lockhart as the new lower spec and Xbox Series X as the upper spec.  

They've been getting ready for next gen for a couple years now.