$500 is tolerable and that is what Series X is expected to cost. 

Also, just because mid-range products sell the best doesn't mean that low and high end don't sell well also. Look at PC gaming for instance. According to the latest Steam hardware survey, while mid-range GPU's from the last 2 GPU generations account for about 26.42% of all PC GPU's, if you add up all of the low and high end AMD and Nvidia GPU's from the latest 2 GPU generations, you come up with 22% which isn't far behind.

Yes PSP Go was full of praise in VGC, except it wasn't.

Totally agree. If the ps5 will launch at $399 and the Series X is $499, I for one would get me the Series X if it's really that more powerful and MS has the games to showcase the power gap. I'm sure that many would do the same. However, if it's $399 vs $599 or more, it would be a different story. But would anyone really buy a 4Tflops Series S, that they will be gaming on for 7 years, instead of a ps5 just to save 100 bucks? That's the price of 1 extra controller lol. 

The sweetspot will be $399 -$499, which be probably be exactly what the ps5 will cost. MS would have two consoles that sit completely outside the expected and tolerable price point. It just wouldn't make sense lol.

I'd say that the weaker GPU will save them about $100 on the AMD chipset. No disc drive saves them about $15. I think I read somewhere that Lockhart will have 2-4 GB less GDDR6 RAM than Series X because it won't need to store high res "4k textures" since it is a 1080p console, so that should save them another $20 I'd imagine. They can maybe save $10 with a cheaper cooler since a chipset with a 4 tflop GPU will be producing a good bit less heat than a chipset with 12 tflop GPU. Might be able to get away with a slightly slower SSD as well, since they won't need to feed higher res "4K textures" from storage to the RAM, so maybe they can save another $10-20 on the SSD. All in all I'd reckon that they can produce Series S/Lockhart for $150-160 less than Series X, the rest of the difference they will just eat the loss on, knowing that they'll make it back between Gamepass and Gold subs, accessory sales, and the higher profit margin on digital sales. 

Who dictated the sweet spot starts at $399? Says who? The lower end Xbox 360 costed $299. The Wii costed $250. You act like a next gen machine that plays 1080p games is a bad sell at $300... that’s some nice mental gymnastics you pulling. 

Cant comment on Series X price, but $499 isn’t out of the question. 

The ps4 launched at $399 and got a standing ovation for it during the reveal. When they announced the ps3 at $599 people were in outrage, though. The Xbox 360 also launched for $399, while the Xone also got some serious backlash when they revealed the $499 launch price. So yeah, most people will expect it to be $399 or $499 max. But nobody wants it to be too cheap and feel like they're buying some half ass next gen console that's just a slight upgrade from what they've been playing on for the last 7 years. 

That's a great comparison, hardware released when digital sales were much less popular. A big problem with PSP as well was the digital store lacked many notable titles.

Games get delisted on modern platforms, but a vast majority of the library should stay in the store.

I doubt there will be a discless PS5, but Sony did go the discless route at one point and it was too early. 8th gen was a good time to try X1SAD because every game (virtually) gets added digitally.

I'd say it's more than a slight upgrade over last gen base hardware. Let's compare it to PS4, since both are designed to be 1080p consoles.

GPU: PS4 has a 1.8 tflop GCN GPU. Xbox Series X is expected to have a 4 tflop RDNA 2 GPU, which is expected to be at least equivalent to a 6 tflop GCN GPU in terms of real world performance, possibly more. But for the purposes of illustration, we'll say that the 4 tflop RDNA 2 is exactly equivalent to a 6 tflop GCN GPU. 6 divided by 1.8 = 3.33, so we're looking at a 3.3x graphical improvement over PS4 at least.

RAM: At least 4 more GB of RAM available to developers than base PS4, and more than double the RAM speed.

CPU: We have double the thread count (from 8 to 16), double the clockrate (from 1.6ghz to 3.2 ghz or more), and a pretty significant boost in IPC (instructions per clock), so we're looking at a 4-5x CPU improvement over PS4.

Storage Speed: 5400 RPM hard drive in PS4 has a read/write speed of about 50 MB/s I believe, rumor is the Phison SSD that MS is using in Series X is 3.7 GB/s read, 3 GB/s write, or about 74x faster in read speed and 60x faster in write speed than PS4 (we don't know for sure if Series S will be using the same SSD as Series X, but I would imagine we are looking at a 30x improvement in storage speed at least for Series S).

All in all, we're looking at a pretty significant increase over last gen base hardware for Series S. 

I think they can make S cost $200 less than X, because I bet the 4K Blu-Ray drive alone costs about $50 and 4 Tflops vs 12 Tflops GPU should cost at least $100 less to make.

He is trying to push a hypocritical slant based on hypothetical future scenario.

I gave the evidence of what already happened. PSP Go wasn't praised for being fully digital, nor was Xbox 1 DRM scheme.

People may like the option for full digital, still X1SAD isn't that hot.

So I don't see how that would change if Sony made it.