They can't be beholden to a fixed price-point forever. Sooner or later they'll have to pay more for storage, and they've shown willingness in the past (how expensive was PS3's BRD drive!). If another $15 makes the difference, it'll be worth doing. SSD versus HDD is transformative, especially in a closed system designed around an SSD. If you only support SSDs as optional extras, you'll get a marginal improvement in performance as all the data will be structured and used assuming a slow HDD.
This and what if there was an option to remove the optical and have SSD moving the saving to upgrade to SSD (with a bit on top of course).
I don't understand this reasoning. What's the point of an SSD if not in every console? We've seen the improvements in performance are only marginal with an SSD in a console designed for an HDD, both in PS3 and this gen. In such a case, devs can't use storage knowing there'll be super-low-latency storage on demand so the technical advantages of SSD are mostly lost.
Yeah, I was just thinking out loud... having an SSD and HHD would require more power hence my suggestion, but like you say probably better alternatives with similar results.
If it's not possible, a hybrid would be needed. Or you have a pretty awkward entry level system, like the 20 GB consoles of last gen. However, gimping the SSD by making it optional is the worst move IMO. Having a small SSD/flash in every machine that can be user upgraded is far better than a base console without.
How many would pay $30 extra for a system that's actually designed for fast storage, and not only offers 20% faster load speeds but super rich worlds streaming resources from storage with super low latency?
Well if you're suggesting the vanilla base unit coming without any flash storage is an option, we aren't asking for the same thing.
A faster GPU may be 20% more compute for the money, with ever diminishing returns on GPU power? Versus storage that is more like 10x more bandwidth and maybe 100x faster access times. Those figures highly variable of course depending on type of storage. But in a console, I think the difference in experience will be far more noticeable in a console with flash than the same console with no flash but a bit more GPU. I'd rather have a machine that boots from cold to playing a game in under twenty seconds than a machine with a bit better shadow quality and higher average dynamic resolution that takes two to three minutes to get to play. And in terms of graphics, things like pop-in can be better dealt with through low-latency storage so even in graphics, less GPU doesn't necessarily mean lesser graphics overall.
Well if you're suggesting the vanilla base unit coming without any flash storage is an option, we aren't asking for the same thing.
As much as they can!
I can only make a qualitative prediction that there will (should!) be a significant amount of fast flash storage; not a quantitative prediction because the variables are so many. What price, and what other compromises to the system? More cost, or less GPU, or slower, more flash, or faster, less flash, or no optical, etc.