Breaking news from teh intertubes! the hardware analist iSupply (known for their estimates on Macs manufacturing costs) have taken appart the PS3 and made a shocking statement: Dont bitch about the price. Aparently the premium model costs sony $840.35 while the base model is $805.85. So while we're paying only $600, so for every 60GB PS3 sony is loosing $240.35, almost the price of a Wii. But the biggest loss is for the $499 model: $306.85 for every 20GB unit. Here's a chart with the cost of every part in both PS3 models: According to iSupply you're getting a supercomputer for the price of a low-end PC, which is very reminiscent of what we could hear back in the day about the PS2... The reason why the PlayStation 3 is so costly to produce is because it has incredible processing power. If someone had shown me the PlayStation 3 motherboard from afar without telling me what it was, I would have assumed it was for a network switch or an enterprise server. In contrast, the HDD-equipped Xbox 360 has a manufacturing and materials total of $323.30, based on an updated estimate using costs in the fourth quarter of 2006. This total is $75.70 less than the $399 suggested retail price of the Xbox 360. Here's another chart, this time for a comparison between PS3 and X360: To give an example of how cutting-edge the design is, in the entire history of the iSuppli Teardown Analysis team, we have seen only three semiconductors with 1,200 or more pins. The PlayStation 3 has three such semiconductors all by itself. There is nothing cheap about the PlayStation 3 design. This is not an adapted PC design. Even beyond the major chips in the PlayStation 3, the other components seem to also be expensive and somewhat exotic. The PlayStation 3’s inclusion of a power supply that packs a whopping 400-watts—yet uses a very compact, low-profile design. At $37.50, this power supply costs about twice as much as an average unit found in a PC. While many fret over the high cost and price of the PlayStation 3 compared to the competition, iSuppli believes the console provides more processing power and capability than any consumer electronics device in history. Because of this, the PlayStation 3 is a great bargain, well worth its $599 price and $840.35 cost, iSuppli believes. Since the system allows you to install a OS I imagine there's going to be some pretty cool apps and utilities in no time, like a powerful server/firewall:dance: Source
If I had the resources, I would buy up all of the units I could find and just sit on them...... At that kind of loss it would be fun to know that your hording directly contributed to Sony's demise.
Yeah, but instead of sitting on them I would use those PS3 units to build a massive bittorrent server full of PS3 and PSP .ISOs. That would make sony go bankrupt for sure...
I don't know jack abut technical things, but I saw the blu-ray optical drive is $125. What is it that makes the cheapest blu-ray player on the market $1000? What else goes into it?
I had a list of component for bluray, official list by SONY for licesing to companies that want to make players. The cost came around 500-600 for a player.
I dont believe their estimates that much. I've heard internal word the cpu alone is far above the $150 mark (they say $89).
No one doubts what it has for the price, but for strictly playing games its not worth it. Also the only os compatible is linux, will see how open it is once emus start showing up.
Volume sales knock these components down considerably. Just from looking at some of these prices you can see the wholesale price would be way lower (SATA 20GB drive for $43?).
That doesn't seem expensive at all concidering it is not a full size drive but rather one of the smaller ones. That is the same kind used in laptops.
As the consumer, you can bitch about the price all you want. The fact is as the consumer you hold all the power. You choose wether you buy their product or not. I for one don't give a shit what Sony spends making a PS3. The important part to the user is what they pay. I'm really surprised that people want the 60GB model so much though. If I wanted a PS3 I'd grab a 20GB and save a hundred bucks. It's a much better deal than the core Xbox 360 is to the premium 360. With the Xbox you can live without most of the extras, but not without the damn hard disk. Anyways, I'll be happy when the PS3 madness is gone and hopefully replaced with Wii related news.
