Scrythe said:
DrOswald said:
Scrythe said:
A Smooth Criminal said:
Scrythe said:
"You should probably invest in external memory, because we can't be arsed to include it ourselves."
Cheap for them, but not for you!
Actually it is cheap for you.
A hard drive will cost you about $50 if you just get a mediocre one, giving you about 500gb of storage. If they made it so you could buy a 32gb model or 64gb model, then you would be paying $100 for about 1/10th of the storage.
And all of this would cost me absolutely nothing on the side if it was internal!
Parts used for consoles, including the hard drive, are special made for the console. They are not mass produced in the same way as other parts. Because of this they are much more expensive to produce. That cost is passed on to the consumer in one form or another. If they included larger more expensive hard drives the price would be that much higher. By including cheap to produce parts and allowing you to use standard mass produced parts in conjunction with their hardware they keep their costs and our costs lower. We get more for our money this way.
I read this, walked over to my old PS3 (fat 40GB model) and yanked out it's HDD just to take a look at it. I then did the same thing to my newer PS3 (slim 120GB model).
Upon analysis, I can confirm what you say is correct in that they are specially made and not in any way mass produced from any major company. The 40GB was made by some obscure brand called "Hitachi", and I have yet to find out any information on the people who made the 120GB. Perhaps you'd have better luck than I did finding out who this "Toshiba" is?
I should have been clearer. I should have said "generally". So you are right, the PS3 uses mass produced hard drives. It is perhaps the most visible exception to the rule. But my overall point still stands. That was a design decision that came at significant cost to the end user.
There are 2 main points you need to understand: How a console is designed and how a hard drive is chosen when designing a console. Here is a quick vastly under simplified overview of both:
Consoles are precision built machines. They have only a fraction of the power of a standard PC but can run similar programs. This is because the console is specifically designed for a certain job. All its parts are designed specifically to work together and with the software the machine will be running. There are exceptions to the rule, such as the PS3 hard drive.
There are three main considerations when choosing internal storage: Performance, cost, and storage size. Any gain in one area must come as a cost in another area. You want a cheap solution? The you either need to take a hit in storage size, performance, or both. You want size? Then be prepared to either have a slow or expensive drive.
The PS3 uses a standard hard drive. Cheap, mass produced storage. However, the drive is not precision made for use with the PS3. This means we have cheap storage at the cost of performance. I personally think this was the correct choice and the PS3 is better for it.
The Wii U, on the other hand, uses a custom flash drive specifically designed to work with the Wii U hardware in place of a traditional hard drive. Nintendo went with performance and price at the cost of size. As Nintendo has made explicitly clear, it is not meant to be the primary storage solution for the Wii. The cost to the consumer in this case is that we will need to provide our own storage solution when we want to start using the full potential of the Wii.
If Nintendo went with a larger internal drive that cost would be passed on to us in one way or another. Perhaps the Wii U would have worse performance if they changed the technology, perhaps it would cost an extra hundred. I don't know. Only time will tell if this was a good call on Nintendo's part.
In summary, there's no such thing as a free lunch. There is a cost to every design decision that goes into a console and we will pay that cost in one way or another.
Anyway, if you want to ***** about something, ***** about the lack of USB 3.0. That is the real problem here and currently my biggest reservation about the Wii U. Will the practically required external storage option be prohibitively slow in coming years because it runs on USB 2.0?
