I'll put in my reasons again why it's not unrealistic to think the NX could be $199.
Yes, it could cost more but I don't expect more than $250, I could even see $229 being chosen.
Going by the rumours and speculation so far, when the NX is compared to the 3DS and the Wii U there are a few things that affected costs for them:
The 3DS had a parallax screen to do 3D, the original 3DS also had a difficult design to manufacture: The layer cake model. (As read in Iwata Asks.) It also had hardware backwards compatibility with the DS so that affected costs. It was a dual screen clamshell set up.
Compare that to how cheap the 2DS is, it is cheaper because of the shape of its design, no clamshell or hinges to deal with, no 3D screen, and also the 2DS has only one screen attached to it.
The Wii U had a complex design as well, it had a MCM (Multi Chip Module) which contained chips to do hardware BC with the Wii, it had chips that had to be manufactured at different plants.
https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Iwata-As...elevision/1-Changes-in-Television-653911.html
Takeda: This time we fully embraced the idea of using an MCM for our gaming console. An MCM is where the aforementioned multi-core CPU chip and the GPU are built into a component. The GPU itself also has quite a lot of memory. Due to this MCM, the cost of the chip package fell and we could speed up data exchange between LSIs while lowering power consumption. And the division of labour made the cost cheaper.
Iwata:
A big challenge this time was putting silicon chips made at different semiconductor plants into one package. Shiota-san, as the person who actually had to make that happen, what hurdles did you encounter?
Shiota:
The LSI chips were made at different companies, so when a defect arose, it was difficult to isolate the cause. In defect analysis, it was inside the MCM, so figuring out the problem was incredibly difficult.
Iwata:
When its actually running, its all inside a single box, so you cant easily observe what is happening.
Shiota:
Right. We really drew on the wisdom of Renesas, IBM and AMD, who co-operated with us. To isolate the problem we devised a way to have a minimum amount of signal travel outside of the MCM, so we could verify the signals with the minimum amount of overhead.
The Wii U is a home console, it is much larger in design compared to the NX, it has more components inside the box you would take it out of: Wii U Gamepad, sensor bar, console, power adapter for console, power adapter for Gamepad, charging cradle, gamepad stand, HDMI cable. These things affect manufacturing and shipping costs, the size of each box affects inventory of retailers for how much units they can order for each shipment.
The NX is currently rumoured to be a hybrid, it's SoC is rumoured to be an ARM CPU with an Nvidia Pascal-based Tegra GPU (Most likely customised from Parker). It doesn't have to use a MCM since ARM license out their CPUs. The CPU and GPU for NX don't need to be manufactured at different places like it was for Wii U's IBM CPU and AMD GPU. (Otherwise, we would have heard something about that for the 3DS since it uses an ARM CPU and a DMP GPU.)
One of the staff from IGN claims he heard the detachable controllers use IR to function like a Circle Pad Pro. This is relevant to the IR patent Nintendo has which could cut manufacturing costs down by a lot for these detachable controllers. (The IGN staff are most likely not aware of that patent because they didn't reference it nor did they understand how an IR-powered controller would work.)
The NX is rumoured to be as big as the Wii U Gamepad but with a thinness of 14mm.
The device itself is shaped like a tablet, while the detachable controllers attach to its sides. It uses cartridges and does not have a disc drive or Hardware BC.
The dock is rumoured to have an HDMI port and 3 USB ports. The NX will most likely have a power adapter for the device itself. It seems there may need to be a power adapter for the dock however, if its components require very little energy, then its power supply could be fit inside the dock instead of having another bulky power adapter.
The NX retail box would most likely be bigger than a 3DS box but it is unlikely for it to be as big as the Wii U retail box.
That means it's smaller which affects how many units you can send per shipment and how much units retailers can take in inventory.
The only problem is the rumour about the new Wii Remote rumour for NX, that has already been explained pages ago so I'm not going to bother again. The question is whether that is real, whether it is a separate controller from the detachable ones and, if it will be packed in with the NX or sold as a multiplayer controllers separately or packed in with a game like Wii Play.
Edit: I can't see Nintendo selling the dock separately from the NX, you need to give value to the product you are selling. It's not a good idea to sell it separately.
Edit 2: I almost forgot about memory. The Wii U used a lot of embedded RAM for its GPU and CPU. It is rumoured from the benefits of using Nvidia's rasterizer tech that the GPU could end up using 4MB of embedded RAM compared to 32MB. I'd have to dig up that speculation from Thraktor.
