So, it seems like Nintendo is trying to put as much new hardware in the Wii U as it can. But to cut down prices they are cutting corners on memory. Nintendo has said no hard drive will come with the Wii U, and that could change, but why not just have 2 versions like the Xbox has. They can include one with a harddrive and one without.

Nintendo always wants to be the affordable console with just as good games. What you're suggesting is what they should have started two generations ago!

They will sell the HD separately. This way, they can keep the console cheaper and please those like me who likes the convenience of download titles and quicker loading times.

Hmmmmmm lets wait and see. I hope it's only one version, but I also have a feeling there will be choices.

I don't think Nintendo are huge fans of bolt-ons that potentially separate their user base.There will have to be a hard drive or a large amount of expandable flash memory in the Wii U. I think the Wii comes with 512MB and it's also got the SD card slot. Perhaps we'll see 4 or 8 GB built into the Wii U and then if we want more we can buy a SDXC card at like 64GB.

I don't care. I'm not going to download full games anyway, and uShop will probably not require 774388979188973188398 MB for a couple of downloads every month or so.

This, they've already confirmed that it'll support Hard-drives through the USB ports.

What about separate hard drives? Like the basic one with 16 GB of memory and you can buy hard drives you insert into the Wii U for extra memory. But this could be solved with having a free cloud service.

No it has to be fair for everybody, only one version of Wii U should be made. In Nintendo We Trust

If this is true it better burn longer, be bigger, and the flames better be in HD.

tbh, as long as there's a fair bit of flash in the wii u i'm happy.
plus knowing that the wii u can use any usb hard drive, you're only limited to what's currently available to buy, not what nintendo say you must have. that along with sd card suppprt, there should be no excuses for running out of memory.

They wouldn't need a hard drive. Just buy one for cheap (like I did). You can find 1TB for $90 if you look around. They had that on sale at Target like 2 years ago. More bang for your buck than proprietary crap Microsoft (and Sony with their Vita) impose. On the E3 page, it even said the WiiU will be able to use external HDDs and SD cards (in other words, 3rd party accessories). Take advantage of it folks.

They will release one version of the WiiU.

You will be supprised by what is coming.

They confirmed that with the Wii also but never let us use it. I expect the same thing to happen with the Wii U. At least they aren't as bad as Apple and their iPads, Nintendo at least lets us use SD...

I must've missed when the Wii's specs officially included support for external harddrives as storage soulution. Sure, Iwata pondered about this in some interviews when he was questioned about it iirc, but never did they outright confirm it, like they did for the WiiU last E3:

And no, I don't think that's a detail, which will be subject to change.

Yeah, I don't remember them confirming Wii using HDD's at all. Just mentioning that they could support it in a firmware update. Never happened, though.

Nothing currently on this Earth could ever come close to needing a minimal fraction of that.

Also, you'd be surprised how much downloadable games with the estimated specs of the Wii U can take. I ran down my 60 GB HDD on my XBOX within about a year. I now have to delete things whenever I see something I want, and I really don't have much DLC on it. About twenty downloaded games at the most, and probably 15-20 expansions for games.

EDIT: For your convenience, I've also converted your value into several other common forms of measurement:

GB (Gigabytes): 756239237489231629.295
TB (Terabytes): 738514880360577.763
PB (Petabytes): 721205937852.127
EB (Exabytes): 704302673.684

To put things into perspective, Google Chrome didn't even recognize EB as an abbreviation. The first experimental one-exabyte storage device was made just over a year ago. There you have it.

They said at E3 that the Wii has USB ports that will work with any mass storage device. They didn't specifically say they would sell a hard drive or that you can hook up a hard drive but they led me to believe that it would happen. So don't believe that the Wii U will have hard dirves either. Just because they say it can support them doesn't mean they will release them.

There is a zero percent chance of a non HD version of the Wii U... they Wii U may be sold without the HD cable but no matter what cable you use it will not affect performance, the load times will be identical. If they sell without an HD cable they could change $50 for a $5 cable like Microsoft does. I hope that doesn't happen, there are still people with Xbox 360s hooked up to their HD TVs with composite cables, lol, some people just don't know any better...

The console itself will be affordable though... $250-$300

By HD he meant harddrive.