First, I felt I needed to address this separately. What's inside is the
BOM! In your statement, you
explicitly excluded everything but the systems specs, thereby excluding the value proposition of the software stack (or lack there of) . If you're only talking about hardware and claiming expensive, you have to be talking about hardware cost and its expense.
You make a claim that what's inside is not expensive. Fine. Now back your claim up with actual numbers. Otherwise, someone can just as well say they think the Wii U is under-priced based on what's inside. Why, because it has a whole bunch of custom parts, that aren't common, and other unsupported, unsubstantiated, claims. Better still, the PS4 would be vastly overpriced at $300. Why? Because its using a CPU designed for ultra low power mobile devices, and a middling GPU in a non-mobile desktop (tabletop) device. Its quite easy to make these claims and "back them up" with nothing but unsupported supposition and "gut feeling".
Case in point, you said, and I quote, "They are selling you Durango for $299 which is the price it should carry with the leaked specs". Now what I'm asking is for you is to back up your claim in regards to cost (or even value of the hardware based on other available hardware) with actual data. Based on your reply above, you don't have any real numbers or data to the back that up, and are just doing some gut feeling wild guessing. If that's case, that's fine, but please clarify that you're basing your statements off of no verifiable data. That will make the followup discussions must simpler.
And just by looking at the components inside you can get and estimate of how expensive is it,there is no complex process to this is simple you use cheap components your bom is low period there is no way around this..
MS can claim that the bom is $450 dollars,isupply will basically kill it in an instant,is like wanting to believe that Crysis 3 can run max out on 720 at 1080p 60FPS with those specs,if they claim people from this site will basically kill that rumor in an instant,because you know what the leak spec are and what they can do more or less.
Is the same with the bom.
Denying that the spec right now are down right low is a joke,the 360 on 2005 boosted tech comparable to would be a 680GTX or even higher on time frame this days,and was $300 and $400.
What you want are number from links which is a joke the 720 is 1.2TF by spec is a 77XX either 70 or 90 which in worst case is $139 for average joe on PC,for MS that GPU should not be more than $30,is impossible that with all the knowledge on hardware you people have you want to actually believe that some how the bom is high for the 720 with those low end spec,DDR3,77XX GPU come on those are the most expensive component alone side the CPU which by the way is also a jaguar which is cheap as well.
Not one of you can deny that the 720 spec are basically low for not saying down right pathetic,compare to what the xbox 360 carry on 2005,the PS4 ones are not that much better either.
But let end with the wii U the Wii U has a tablet for controller,you may argue that the CPU and GPU are crap,but a 360 controller is $50 dollars,the PS3 controller $55,the wii u controller replacement is $150 from what i read,now even if the build materials are just worth $100 or even $70,how can any one complain about its price,sony and MS controller cost $50 or more and don't have the kind of complexity,size or material the Wii U controller has,so while we may argue the spec are crap and the system is over priced (which i believe is) they have an expensive controller which eat greatly from that bom.
I bet all i have that the Wii U controller actually has higher bom than Kinect 2.
I know some give MS the benefit of the doubt,but my argument is simple if they had a 680GTX inside,and wanted me to to byte a subsidize 720 for $300 or $350 with $10 a month xbox live fee for 2 years i would byte,but come on a 77XX GPU for $299 with 2 years of xbox live for $10 a month is a joke,there is nothing great about the 720 hardware,sorry i owned a 360 since day 1,it was a powerful machine,the 720 s just average at best hardware wise.