coldfoot said:

But devkits are produced in the few thousand range and sold for thousands of dollars apiece.

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I doubt devs are paying so much for the hardware itself as they are for the software kit, support, and licenses.

The 360 devkit was basically identical to the retail aside from the HDD attachment.

Doesn't make financial sense to not cost reduce the consumer model because you don't want to keep a different design for the devkits.

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Why bother with a completely separate HW line when it's just a matter of not using as many chips?

As I already noted,there isn't much savings in complexity as you still need 256-bit I/O. The lanes exist as they are, and they just make use of the full 32 lanes on one side instead of having half of those hooked up to chips on the underside of the motherboard. The whole purpose of clamshell was to make it trivial to double capacity with existing I/O.

DieH@rd said:

Can this possibly lead to the situation in which all launch PS4 games will not be able to use all avaiable RAM for games? If devkits have 8GB max, ~1-2 gigs would be carved out for PS4 OS, ~1 for dev tools and rest for games. Interesting situation.

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Possibly, though I doubt it'll matter in the short term.

Now that the hardware is out, will it get updated with the final costing analysis in the near future?