2 points:

1. The PS3 was designed by sony to first win the format war for Blu ray and then to propel is usage. I think that Sony made the PS3 as cheap as it could and still make the console good enough to be a good Blu ray player, games console, etc. I reallly dont think that they went overboard at all, considering that they were putting in some new technology and have gotten the cost down to the level that they have.

2. I think that the pricing for the PS4 will probably be anywhere from $3-$500. Sony has floated the idea of making the next console an evolutionary - nonradical-- step up, to the developers supporting the playstation brand, which in recessionary times is probably a wise idea.

Add free porn to it and it will sell an extreme amount just on that and the sad thing is I'm being serious...

Uh no. 299$ for a gaming console 14 years ago was no way acceptable for non hardcore, if you want an example I would say mega CDX.

Yes your right with your inflation quota, but still 299$ for a gaming console 14 years ago is more than only the inflation. Only hardcore gamer would purchase at that price by then.

Yes? That was the point I was trying to make.

Well, money does loose its 'vallue' over time, consider the fact that in 1950, if you had 1 million USD, you was as rich as a person could get. It was hard to come to make such amount of money, ant it could buy so many things...now, 1 million USD is NOTHING compared to what some people, PEOPLE!!, can made nowadays.... so back in the 90's a $299,00 PS1 want cheap. It was affordable, but not cheap.

OT: I dont see Sony going all new tech on PS4. I do see evolution, as in evolved/upgraded CELL, obviously new GPU, more VRAM and such.  SS HD, if they do become cheaper and have more space (wich they will) by the time it lauches. These king of specs will made game developing easier, for the PS3 developers wont see so much difference in doing it, only more 'space' to play. A win win for Sony, since it hit them hard this gen, both price and development wise. Faster BD is obvious as well, since Holographic discs will still be to spensive, and BDs with hundreds of Gigs will be cheaper by then.

So, evolution will be the word to the next gen, wich in  itself isnt a bad thing, IMO.

Yeah, it was still in answer for the other guy saying 299$ was the same and blah blah blah, was a reinforcement. Sorry for the misunderstandment.

You may think he is kidding but if Moore's usual law is to be followed for Intel CPUs as well as the CBE, Then in 4 years time, a 16-32 core CBE is highly likely. 8 GB ram is quite normal right now... a lot of people have that on their PCs and a great many already have Graphic cards at 1GB Ram. 1TB HDD is common aswell... ~250GB SSD is already in production. The 400GB blu-ray is already in the working prototype stage so in all likelyhood, you should be able get content on those. The PS4 will probably have a much higher reading speed than they do now... 

Moreover, XBox-Tri will come out in 2012.

There is a problem I that might occur with that ammount of RAM and that's addressing it properly; sure they could rework the OS but it might lead to stability problems with backwards compatability.

But with those specs there shouldn't be a problem with an PS3 emulation mode, or even PS3 virtualisation in theory

groovy

Retail availability: November 2013

Cpu: Cell with either 32 or 64 SPEs and 4 or 8 PPE (IBM is going to unveil a 32 spe, 4 PPE improved cell cpu in 2010), fully compatible with latest opencl / GPGPU standards.

Ram: 8 - 16 GB. 

GPU: A multi-core cGpu that can do GPGPU programming with relative ease. It will be a monster of a GPU, capable of 10+ teraflops (in 2011 both AMD and Nvidia will have launched cGPUs capable of 5-7 teraflops), considering also that both the xbox 360 and the ps3 have gpus that have year 2005 tech.

Fast Blue-ray player that supports 400-1TB blue-ray disks (it's a fast evolving medium), 500gb-1TB HDD

Natal like camera, Motion controller improved over the Wii (people are joking if they believe that they will be able to play games with relative ease with nothing to hold on to. Expect player input to be a hybrid between natal, wii like controller, and DS4).

Expect its graphics to boast a hybrid approach between raytracing and rasterization, with real-time and ingame physics like nothing shown before (fully malleable and natural environment).

Launch price: 499 USD (keep in mind of inflation). They need to differentiate themselves from the Wii 2, which will probably be launched by mid-end 2012, and whose tech will still be impressive (consider how the gamecube was launched in 2001 for 299usd and was slightly more powerful than the PS2 - expect the Wii 2 to be much more powerful than the PS3, whose tech is of the year 2005), and whose cost will be 299usd.

Sony boasts First party developers that Microsoft and Nintendo do not have. Nintendo is unfortunately sleeping on its own success and relies too much on Shigeru Miyamoto - they are cash-flow rich and should have focused on the side on creating new first party studios at Kyoto, yet they are not doing that. I am not saying that Nintendo is going to go downhill, but I am worried that they are not as proactive as one should expect them to be. 

For example, why is it that a producer of Fumito Ueda's calibre had to work for Sony? Why is it that Nintendo has not focused on gathering talent like him? Nintendo is composed of extremely talented people - they would not have much of a problem in gathering talent such as him, and yet they are not doing that. They are so cash (7bln dollars in the bank) and cash-flow rich that they would have no problem in funding 300mln usd worth of projects a year of talented studios such that of Ueda (what is important to keep in mind is that the success of a game does not depend on the amount of money invested - studios such as that of Ueda do well on a 10-15 mln dollar budget, working at a moderate pace of one game that cost 10-15mln usd to produce every 4 years). Nintendo would be able to produce a substantial profit from funding talented studios such as these, consdering too that they have no royalty fee to pay for, and can thus derive a profit of 20-30usd per copy of game sold at 50-60usd.

Microsoft to me is not faring that well. I don't have time to go indepth, but consider the fact that they do not really have valuable first party studios (even though what is important to note is that even the God of War studio was not considered that valuable before they released GoW 1 - this is especially noteworthy given that Micrososft acquired Rare studios for almost 300mln dollars and so far they have not produced anything noteworthy for the xbox 360, which is again why I was saying that money does not buy talent, only talent can gather talent, and this is why Nintendo is in a much better position than both Sony and M$, given the quality of the the talent that work at nintendo). Natal is not based on tech unique to microsoft - Nintendo and Sony are going to easily replicate it (there are many companies that are stating that will be able to provide tech / hardware similar to that of natal at a good price point in one or two years). Indeed, last I heard, Natal was based on tech not only derived from that company that M$ acquired, but also from other similar companies (can't remember their names) who are able to provide the same tech to competing companies such as nintendo and sony.