Consoles have historically always had low amounts of RAM & GDDR6 is expensive, honestly i think people have gone a little overboard recently, people are expecting PS5 be a Super 2080 Ti with over 20 gigs of RAM with a 20GB per second SSD, all for 500 bucks, cmon.
The leaked Console even at $399 is gonna take over a $100 loss per console for Sony i bet, it's still stupidly good for $399, $100 cheaper than the X currently is for a massive upgrade.
Don't even entertain the idea of a next-gen 4K console having only 12GB of RAM. That's just ridiculous. Made even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that on GDDR6 12GB will peak at having only a 192-bit bus which will mean an even smaller bus with than the OG PS4 had back in 2013.
Worst case scenario is we see 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus with a bandwidth ranging from 448GB/s - 576GB/s of which like 1GB - 2GB is reserved for the OS. The faster SSD means that you don't have to have too much of the OS sitting in RAM all the time. A more exotic implementation of this would be to increase the DDR4 ram pool typically associated with an NVMe SSD from like 1Gb to say 4GB and have the OS sits in half that RAM instead making all 16GB of RAM available for games and allowing the OS to borrow around 2GB-4GB of RAM from the "application RAM" when it needs it.
This is what having the kinda SSD performance the PS5 is rumored to have can allow. And Sony has also dabbled with offloading some OS stuff to a slower RAM in the PS4.
At that leak price it would lose more than 360 did .
We talking about PS3 type lost if you say PS5 going to lose $100 by that leak.
I expect them to take a lost but the days of MS and Sony taking big hit on hardware are gone.
You do know Sony was losing over $200 for every PS3 sold right? And that was at a time when their online service was even free.
And I think you will be shocked to find out what sony/MS could do if they were targetting a $399 MSRP but making a $500 console. $500 will go a very very very very long way in a console.... I think this is something a lot of people don't seem to get. If you find yourself adding up console costs by what the equivalent cost of their components n the PC? then you are already wrong. And that kinda calculation is the only way you end up with things costing as much as you seem to think they may.
Take this as an example, a1TB SSD in 2020 (especially if Sony is doing what they are rumored to be doing) will cost them less or about the same as a 500GB HDD cost them in 2013. A 312mm2-325mm2 APU in 2020 is smaller than the APU size used in making the OG PS4 back in 2013. Smaller APU means more chips from each wafer, which means cheaper. But let add in new fab costs and say the chips are smaller but will cost about the same or a little more than it cost them to buy an APU in 2013........ I could go on.