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Microsoft Officially Slashes Japan Xbox Price
securitas writes "Reuters' Daisuke Wakabayashi reports that Microsoft will 'cut the price of its Xbox game console by a third in Japan, undercutting rival Sony Corp's recently reduced PlayStation 2 price ahead of the holiday shopping season.' The price cut takes effect on Nov. 20 when it will be reduced to 16,800 yen (US$155) from 24,800 yen (US$228). The cut comes a week after Sony's 20 percent cut in its PS2 price to 19,800 yen (US$182), which takes effect Nov. 13. (Gamespot brief) Does this hint at a holiday price cut for North America, too?" We mentioned price cut rumors for Xbox in Japan a couple of weeks back.
that "niche" is outselling microsoft AND sony right now. I think your information is deeply flawed...
How big is the hard drive in the X-Box? How much do hard drives of that size run for these days?
This is what is killing the XBOX. Manufacturers have a finite amount of space on their factories, and not one of them is willing to make a 8 gig hard-drive for Microsoft's XBOX when they could be making 120 gig hard-drives for DELL - UNLESSS Microsoft is willing to pay roughly the same price as a 120 gig drive.
If drives were sold by the Gig then the XBOX drive should cost $8 - (WD and Maxtor both sell a 250 Gig drive for $250 - that $1 a Gig) - but nobody will sell a drive, even at the smallest of sizes, for less that $50.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
The same thing goes with the other parts in the XBox.
Is Intel going to keep making 733MHz CPUs for anything less than a premium? Of course not, they probably aren't producing anything under 1GHz any more. Plus, if I remember correctly, there were some differences between the XBox CPU and a standard CPU, though not major, which would also increase the costs. The slowest Intel CPU you can buy at any given time is usually not much less expensive than the slowest current-generation CPU available.
Do you think nVidia's still producing a lot of GF3-era hardware when the GF4MX has taken over even the GF2MX's price points? They have GF4s and the GFFX to cover the mid- and high-end price points, with even some of the GF4 Tis slipping into the low-end.
This is also the major reason that ATI is probably a better choice for most consoles (as an off-the-shelf processor), because ATI has dealt with OEMs for most of their existence, and those people like to have chips available for a while (though not as long as consoles in most cases, still a lot longer than you might be able to find the same chips in cards on store shelves).
In the end, this is probably why Microsoft licensed technology from IBM rather than awarding a contract to produce the chips, since they could probably outsource chip production (or even do it themselves) over the long term for less than having IBM produce the chips indefinitely as all the rest of IBM's lines upgrade for new chips for Apple and others.
Just think, even if MS is buying single-platter drives, how many hard drives are being produced with 8GB platters? Not very many, since that would only produce 16 and 24GB drives, and it's unlikely you could buy a new 24GB drive for $24.
Of course, they're getting better prices than end-users normally see, but it still adds up to a loss (though smaller than the numbers most people throw around, even at launch the most detailed estimate I saw put it closer to $30-50 loss per console at $300 retail, which was, of course, at launch, rather than recently, so even with no cost reductions (and they have had some cost reductions in the manufacturing end) you're looking at $150-170 loss per console, max).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
And through all this, Sony will probably devise a single-chip version of the PS2 and everyone will buy the DVD player that happens to have a PS2 inside rather than buy the PS2 that happens to play DVDs.
As it stands they've already got the 2 primary chips down to 1 chip, and they announced in the last couple of months that they're starting production of that chip on a smaller fabrication (90 nanometer iirc). This would probably lead to use in the PS3 for backwards compatibility, though they'd have to maintain the I/O chip (or put that functionality into the main chip) for the PS1 compatability. As for a DVD player that happens to play PS2 games, it seems they're more focused on higher-end electronics for things like that, notably their Tivo-like unit with DVD recording capability that just happens to also play PS2 games (the PSX).
Why not even release a PDA based on a shrunk-down PS2 core? They've already got Linux on it.
Who knows, maybe it's a heat issue, or they simply feel that their existing line of PDAs is going in the right direction.
-PainKilleR-[CE]