People are trying to build 2014/2015 consoles with 2011 tech and prices.
That's untrue. People have been speculating by extrapolating trends. Also bear in mind this thread has had a moving release schedule. We don't know when the next boxes might launch. There's even suggestion of a surprise appearance by the next XBox by 2013. If someone were to estimate XB3's specs based on 2015 tech and it launches in 2013, they'll be as off the mark as the other way round.
When people with PC hardware background come here, they assume correctly that since prices of computer components halve every 18 months, this reduction should be taken into account when talking about the 2014/2015 timeframe (that would be a 4x reduction by 2014 or a 8x reduction in 2015,5 compared to current prices).
Okay. So Googling, a £366 Graphics with 4GBs RAM now will lead to a £183 graphics card with 4 GBs VRAM in 2013 leading to £90 for a 4GBs VRAM in 2014/2015 with a 2011 GPU. Add all the other gubbins of a console like CPU, up-to-date GPU, motherboard, controllers, devices, and you have a 4GB console for £300, no?
Like I said, even 8GB of GDDR5 is not off the table by 2014 (this winter brings first 4GB GDDR5 graphics cards), when talking about what is technologically possible as well as monetarily feasible in 2014/2015.
And we've said 8GB isn't off the table for next-gen consoles.
The idea is not to take something away from the existing hardware. It is to add extra RAM and eat the initial moderate costs of maybe $15 extra per box on the first 2-5 million units in the knowledge that RAM prices come down very quickly, maybe even by the end of the first year on market, after which you'd have a well-specced box which no longer loses money on account of RAM.
Except that doesn't factor in the other aspects. And lets not forget the financial situation of the consoles. MS and Sony have lost how many billions on these boxes? An extra $15 (a very conservative pricing I think) for 10 million units (first year sales before the RAM price drops to an extra $7 overhead) would cost an extra $150 million. The next ten million units would lose another $70 million. Realisitically, it'll be way more than that. A quick Google shows 4 GBs VRAM costs a £60 premium over 2 GBs RAM. Using your estimation method, and taking £60 retail price difference to be of the order of $50 added cost, the difference between 4 GB and 8 GB of GDDR5 in 2014/15 will be around $25.
Now what does Sony or MS gain for that? If their box has more RAM, at added losses to themselves, but devs don't make use of it because they are creating cross-platform titles that'll sell to a box with less RAM and adding improved assets to the more-RAM console won't net them more sales on that console than sticking with the low-RAM assets, then it's loss for no purpose. You only need see previous generations to see RAM advantages rarely lead to significant gains.
I'd say quite contrary to PC users having added insight, they have a limited perception. In the PC space, specifications are everything. People buy a 4 GB laptop over a 2 GB laptop because it's 'twice as good' for £10 more, even if they'll never even hit the limit of that 2 GB machine. As the numbers are the only differentiating factor in the PC space, there's no point in not pursuing better numbers for your money when the economies are so good. I'd buy a £65 1TB HDD over a £60 500GB HDD even though I'll never fill it because it's way better value (actaully a false economy, because it'll cost me £5 more for no actual gain, but we human's like bigger numbers!
). Consoles are instead CE devices, and they are all about the experience. One machine with $50 more RAM can readily lose out to a rival with that same expense invested into services or marketing. Or pulling a Wii and flipping the specs on their head to offer the experience. And this is kinda happennig with computing. £400 will net you far more laptop for your money than a tablet PC, but people are choosing the functionality of tablets despite less RAM and processing power. Smaller numbers don't matter compared to the overall experience.
What seems so straightforward on paper - an extra $15 per unit BOM to double the RAM - is not at all such a straightforward choice. Every dollar spent on hardware is a dollar less to spend on the rest of the chain. A dollar towards a vaulable exclusive deal (Gears has done wonders for MS this gen). A dollar towards a slick marketing campaign (Wii wouldn't be doing as well as it is if not for the superb lifestyle happy-families marketing campaign that has accompanied it). A dollar towards securing a valuable content partnership such as Netflix to gain added-value to your system. Then there's also the consideration of what it costs to use added RAM, and to design a system that can load and work with 8GBs without being slow versus a 4 GB system. Or picking 4GBs of faster RAM, clocked higher with a more expensive and effective cooling system, over 8 GBs of slower RAM. Or investing in devtools so they can actually use your machine's hardware. Many, many choices to be made, with none able to be viewed in isolation. We can't just add only $5 more flash there, only $15 more on RAM, and only $7 more on IO ports, thinking they are small numbers that won't impact things. The only way to do it is set yourself a cost and design stringently to that, building a system to a strict budget carefully balanced out to give the best bang-per-buck.
