Interestingly, that's how I feel about the Series S.  When my options are a PS4 on the low-end, or a PS5/Series X on the high ground, the Series S *IS* the middle ground surely?  And, especially if we don't end up with Pro consoles this gen, the extended cross-gen period, plus game subscription services that include lots of PS4/Xbox One games, and game streaming, I expect last-gen consoles to remain surprisingly relevant through this-gen.  And that will effectively keep the Series S the mid-range option throughout.

Me three.  I would potentially be interested in a home console version of the Switch.  No screen, two cartridge ports, more internal storage, and sell it for around the same cost as the Switch Lite.  They could sell that sucker at a profit, I suspect, because the screen is probably a pretty big chunk of the system's cost.

I think they should have also released a "Switch Pro" a few years back that was powerful enough to offer docked performance in handheld mode.  But that's not enough of an upgrade now, so releasing that now wouldn't make sense.

No worries.  :)  I don't share all of Spencer's assumptions, no.  But I shared his perspective as an FYI.

It's impossible to know what to make of the PS5 (optical drive edition) being profitable after a year or so, because we don't know how much of a loss they were taking up-front.  It's a big difference if it goes from costing $525 to make down to $475, than if it goes from $600 to $400, for example.  We don't know enough to draw strong conclusions from that.

I remain curious why you think Microsoft made the wrong call, when this is the strongest start to a generation Microsoft has had yet.  Seems like the market is embracing their decision.  It's entirely possible that Sony and Microsoft *each* made the right call, as perhaps each of them made the right decision for their respective market segments and brands, in fact.  COVID was a double-edged sword, increasing demand but reducing supply, so I'm not sure it had a huge net effect.

As for long-term pricing, time will tell.  Perhaps in several years one of us can come back to this thread and comment.  However, I don't see why a PS5 slim would drop as low as $250, yet you think the Series S is only likely to drop down to $200?  Can you explain why such a small delta between them?

I'm skeptical of any PS5 variant dropping as low as $250.  Heck, the PS4 slim's MSRP is still $299.99, and it's been over 9 years.

Some Ryzen 6000 mobile chips are definitely better than the Series S on the CPU front already.

The 6980HX based on Zen 3+, 3.3Ghz-5Ghz, 16MB L3 cache kinda makes the Series S 3.4-3.6Ghz Zen 2, 8MB L3 seem whimpy by comparison.
Plus the move from Zen 2 to Zen 3 had 19% more performance at the same clock...

Series S has a 20CU/1280 Shader GPU @1.565Ghz fed by 224GB/s of memory bandwidth... Which places it in the same rough ballpark as a GPU sitting just below the Radeon RX 6500XT. (Mostly thanks to Infinity cache and 1ghz higher core clock that is.)

None of AMD's APU's in the PC space have a GPU with the memory bandwidth that can match the Series S... So in order to get "competitive" results you need to cut back on features that gobble up fillrate/memory bandwidth and push up effects that suck up compute time instead.

The Series S is a very low-end device by PC standards... Heck the Xbox Series X/Playstation 5 is mid-range... But that also doesn't say much as the PC high-end has climbed a few tiers (and cost) over the past decade... Does mean we will need mid-cycle refreshes to keep consoles competitive with mid-range PC gaming.

There won't be a ps6. Cloud streaming is the future. Google was too early with the idea and had bad price structures.

If that's the future, I'll gladly continue playing retro games and not care about those.

I don't think that the bandwidth is as much of an advantage. I mean, the 1050Ti has about twice the Bandwidth yet is only similar to the performance of the 680m in the 6800H. And while it's a bit limiting on the APU, it's also the reason why there's only 12CU, and why the Phoenix APUs coming in March are also limited to 12CU (and why AMD stuck so long with Vega 8). The 7040 series APUs will also come with 32MiB of L3 cache vs 16 on the 6000 series, which will certainly also alleviate the bottleneck to some degree.

Phoenix will also have more Bandwidth than the 6000 series, which was limited to DDR5-4800 or LPDDR5 of the same speed (linking the 7735 as it's basically a 6900HS refresh, resulting in about 40GB/s). The 7040 will go up to DDR5-5600 or LPDD5-7500 (45GB/s and 60GB/s respectively), reducing the bottleneck, especially with the latter option. Additionally, the GPU clock can go up to 3000 Mhz, though probably not sustainable at that speed.

With all these improvements, I expect the performance improvement of the 780m over the 680m to be ~15-20% with DDR5 and up to 35% (limited by the TDP) for the LPDDR5 variant, which should make it compete with the 1650 or even 1060 - despite them having 2-4 times the bandwidth.

Newer GPU's can do more with less memory bandwidth... Things like compression, culling, buffering are all a thing, so it's only natural that over time you can do more with less... Which is why IGP's can compete with low-end GPU's over time.

Also... The number of CU's is only part of the story... Remember, AMD actually started out with Vega 11 APU's in it's mobile chips, but eventually downgraded to Vega 8... Which actually offered more performance. - How? Clockspeeds, bandwidth.

I prefer not to make assumption on hardwares capabilities when they haven't released yet.

However, keep in mind the age of the 1060 which released in 2016... It turns 7 years old this year, it's only natural that integrated graphics would eventually catch up.