Im easily seeing 100k plus, the model might even sell out, depending on how they ADVERTISE.

$399 is a much more friendly price.  It is $100 cheaper than the original 20Gb PS3 released last year and discontinued earlier this year.  Wifi certainly is more essential to the PS3 than the card readers.  And 2 USB ports are more than enough TBH.  Who needs 4?  Also, they will probably release a cheap USB card reader if you need one...you can pick them up for around $10-$15 anyway.  Because the new unit uses less power and the lack of extra ports for CF, SD, MS and USB's state to me that the new PS3 will be a smaller unit.  It may not be quite a PS3Slim, but it should be smaller, which will be more attractive to the Japanese market as well.  PS2 backwards compatibility is very important though, but I'm pretty sure this can be done with software emulation alone anyway, whether the new 80Gb models still need a hardware emulation chip even after the EE has been removed, we are unsure about.  But I reckon this will be essential in the future, also when they start the downloading of classic PS2 games from the online store as well as the PS1 games.

I reckon once this unit is released, they will stick to 2 versions from next year onwards.  An entry level machine (40Gb, no card readers, 2 usb's) and the premium machine (80gb+, card readers, 4 usb's, HDMI cables and packaged games).

But in the end, you cannot complain about a $399 PS3 with 40Gb drive a free Spiderman 3 on Blu-Ray...a great deal. 

No but it matters to me, who doesn't own a PS3 yet ;) Waiting for which version to buy for which price tag and its making me confused. I still hear nothing about the 65nm chip for instance...

I can understand that it's annoying that there just isn't the one model and thats it...but the problem is that they cannot reduce the cost of the 60Gb significantly at the moment.  And they don't neccessarily want it to look like they are desperately reducing the cost of their PS3 to gets sales...so hence the new 40Gb model.  You never know, the new 40Gb model may include the new 65nm chip.

A fourth SKU in less than 1 year, and dropping one of the most popular features (Backwards Compatibility), to put the system at a price which is still too high for most gamers seems like a very desperate move to me ... Any coverage of this in non-PS3 dedicated media will likely include a discussion about how the PS3 has sold poorly since launch and this is a (desperate) effort to improve sales.

I could be wrong but I suspect that after the initial release of a SKU like this sales would not become much higher than they currently are because the release of this SKU should send up warning flags to everyone interested in the PS3.

Just to keep things in perspective - Sony need to sell around 8.5m units between October '07 .. March '08 to make their fiscal projections.

That's 6 months, or close to 1.5m / month on average. Or an average of around 100k/week in *every* territory from now to then.

Even if you factor in 3m sales WW in December (Xmas), that's still 5.5 in 5 months (with Xmas sales taken care of). Which is still 1.1m/month for the remaining 5 months.

The only console capable (and currently) pulling these figures is the Wii IMO.

The PS3 is currently pulling 70k-80k/week, and would need sales to triple/quadruple - and stay consistently tripled/quad'd for 6 months - to make the projections.

That's the point - they offer to people something different. Noone is deprive of anything. Ability to chose is always a positive thing. Especially it's not a gimped model in any way - all main features are the same. Simply people can decide what is important for them. I have had no such comfort so I percieve this as a step in the right direction. I would definitely buy a 40 gb sku right now because I don't care about BC so much and 40 gb is much more than enough as for a console. 

Wait, is it confirmed 'officially' that a new PS3 is coming out that won't have PS2 BC, I'm sorry but this really sounds a bit too iffy to be true.

It'd be suicide for a new SKU.

It needs to have the GS chip. The EE is emulated through software, the GS chip is still on the board. I suppose there is a slim chance the GS could be emulated or they could leave it on the board. I can't read Italian.

http://www.bitpower.it/oscom/catalog/playstation340gb-p-2168.html