I really hate to break it to anyone getting excited over the slim PS3, but it'll probably be more expensive than the phat, which will probably retain its current price to pay for the slim's higher manufacturing costs.

Why do people keep saying the slim will have higher manufacturing costs? Aren't the slim models made of less material and have smaller components/dye sizes, making them cheaper to produce?

The entire purpose of the Slim is that it uses less materials, and thus costs less to manufacture.

The Slim's smaller size doesn't effect yield rates significantly, thus the costs to manufacture will not rise.  It's simply cutting the fat, through the shrinking of processors (finally dropping to 45nm) and ridding the console of the large chassis etc. that was necessitated by the original 60gb model's excessive power consumption and heat dissipation.

When you say it it sounds so much prettier.

Basic logic would imply a higher price, looking at things like laptops vs dekstop PCs and whatnot.  It would be like cramming the ps3's internal architecture into something the size of the PSP.  Sure, it might be possible, but it would take a hell of a lot of R&D, and yield rates for whatever product they might come up with would be incrediblly low (just like initial yield rates on the 90nm Cells were low, hence Sony disabling the 8th SPU to increase the number of usable units).

With the ps3 Slim, however, they aren't trying to cram the ps3's components into an unnecessarily small space.  They're simply trimming the excess that remains from the original model. 

Edit:

A better comparison here would be comparing the latest 4mm thick Samsung LCDs to those they were selling 5 years ago.  5 years ago, their tvs were more expensive despite being much larger and in general of a far lesser quality.

Yeah, the motherboard went from rectangular to a rather square shape through its many revisions. The shape of the mobo now matches up quite well with the "leaked" pictures of the PS3 slim...hmmm.

Old motherboard (left) and new (right)

Leaked pic of PS3 Slim

They match up well, eh?

^^It does sorta match up, you're right.
Also, I smell a power brick coming along.
There's no way they'd be able to fit the HDD, BR drive and a power supply into that chassis from what I've seen and keep the heat down.
It's just too small.

Yeah it'll probably have a brick, but so what? You hide it behind the TV cabinet anyway, so it has no detrimental aesthetic effect.

I'm not bugged by a powerbrick at all, and if it saves weight and money I'm all for it.

Will be interesting to see the reactions of "some" though. Man they gave the 360 some stick for it if I remember correctly lol. (I refuse to list names)

I remember the ps2 slim had power brick but it's not that big.....hopefully ps3 slim doesn't have a HUGE power brick.