i think sony need a plan really as they lost a lot of customers since the hacking so they started to lose a lot of money and havnt been the same since
According to Sony 94% of account holders came back and 3 million new ones have signed up since the hack and revenues are actually up from where they were before. By them giving out free games to everyone regardless of how much they used PSN before the hack it made everyone look at the store and see what was on offer. Maybe something some people hadn't done for months.
On the subject of the PS4. I would be a little surprised if they didn't go down the expanded Cell route simply because of how much they spent on its development in the first place. That and all of their internal devs know how to abuse it properly now and can carry the same techniques over to the next iteration.
I'd expect them to still use Blu Ray again because of the money the sunk in to it and also because it can store more than enough data. I'd also expect to see a faster drive speed (PS3 drives are 2x I think) and possibly the capability for it to take 4 layer 100gb disks. The Blu Ray fabrication process has come a long way since the PS3 launched so producing higher density disks shouldn't be an issue should they need them. However most games that fill the current 50gb disks are doing so because of 1080 FMVs that are compressed less than on the 360. I'd expect to see less FMVs in the next generation simple because the hardware will be more capable of rendering more on the fly.
As for the GPU I have no idea, it is the weak link on the PS3 along with the quantity of memory. The 1st party devs have learned how to make the CPU do GPU processes but everyone else hasn't. That has hurt Sony a little with Multiplat games where more is still being done by the GPU. I'm hoping for 4xAA as a standard though just to take the edge off and vsync on all titles. Triple buffering would be nice but I know the hardcore won't like that for FPS games.
Historically ram multiplies by 8 every generation so it would see 4gb, but I don't realistically see that happening. People have been dropping 4gb into PCs for over 5 years and there are still few games that need it or perform better with more. With a low memory footprint OS sucking up less as well I think we might see 2gb of fast ram being the norm. Don't forget, the kind of ram they are likely to use is going to be much faster than DDR3 and as a result more expensive too.
As for output resolution they'll stick to supporting 3D of course but I don't think we are anywhere near enough 4k becoming mainstream for them to aim to render at it most of the time though it may support it later in its lifecycle.
The final factors are launch price, games and date. I think they'd like to be out at around the same time at the NextBox but if they don't have the games, or the price down far enough they won't rush it.
The PS3 launched a year later at a much higher price point but is still at 49% against the 360s 51% of the HD Console pie. Something which I expect to shift into the PS3s favour before the new machines arrive.
Sony won't want to make the same mistakes that it made with the PS3, the two core technologies in the PS3 that were costing so much at the launch were Blu Ray diodes and the Cell, both of which are now much much cheaper.
I think all of that will see the PS4 launch at around $399-$450, £350-£400 depending on how strong the Yen is at the time.
But if they don't have the games for launch then it'll hurt them.