All this talk about console hardware not changing at all, during its 5-10 year lifetime as it has been all this time ...
I'm not so certain that it's set to stone to a similar degree this time around. It's just a guess, but:
- They will soon have competitors, like SteamBox, that will have iterative updates
- Consoles are much more similar to PCs in hardware now. They even share the low-end graphics API with AMD cards. Which in turn is used to optimize run on vastly different hardware, APUs to SLI rigs.
- More and more auto-optimizing software, like Geforce Experience and the AMD equivalent, are cropping up. These will make optimizing for multiple performance targets substantially easier.
- They are even now doing the unheard of: Releasing the majority of new games on both current and next generation. And according to Michael Pachter for quite some time to come.
I can't stress the last point enough. Xbox 360 and PS3 are
tablet-level performance targets with ridiculously different software stacks compared to current gen (let alone each-other). Therefore
if they are supporting these for years to come, an incremental update would be easy-peasy in comparison. Basically, the cost of designing and maintaining multiple performance versions of your Console in its traditional life-cycle might not be as difficult now, as it was in the past.
Now let's consider a hypothetical scenario:
Right alongside the EOL-ing of Xbox 360 in 2-3 years, Microsoft releases "Xbox One S" which bests PS4 in performance by a considerable degree, catching the traditionally thinking Sony completely off-guard. They would of course still continue to support the old one (no biggie compared to Xbox 360) but would also regain the "hardware crown" and make some fans rebuy their console in a most "appleish" way
I'm not saying doing that is actually the best thing to do. It's just that the Console market is not doing too well, the vendors
should actively be considering such ideas rather than dismissing them outright. After all, history books are full of companies failing to redesign their failing business models and being outmaneuvered by their more agile compeditors ... Along with a considerable amount of sour grapes and heartbroken fanboys