Slashdot Mirror
How the PS3 Hit $600
Joystiq has up an interesting article today, gathering together information from a couple of places to discuss why the PlayStation 3 is so expensive. From the article: "Kutaragi was demoted after being passed over for the role of CEO and, when former Sony Pictures head Howard Stringer assumed the position, the relationship between the content and technology divisions of Sony became even more intimate. Stringer "quickly dubbed the PlayStation 3 as one of the company's 'champion' products." Kutaragi's desire to stratify the console market with Cell technology in effect wed Sony to the unpalatable prospect of charging an unprecedented price. Coupled with Sony's desire to not only push their own content on HD discs, but to control that medium with their proprietary Blu-ray format, the final price was escalated by two very advanced (and very expensive) pieces of Sony technology."
BluRay IS NOT PROPRIETARY.
t ion
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc_Associa
Its board of directors consists of:
* Apple Computer
* Dell
* Hewlett Packard
* Hitachi
* LG Electronics
* Mitsubishi Electric
* Panasonic (Matsushita Electric)
* Pioneer Corporation
* Royal Philips Electronics
* Samsung Electronics
* Sharp Corporation
* Sony Corporation
* TDK Corporation
* Thomson
* Twentieth Century Fox
* Walt Disney Pictures
* Warner Home Video Inc.
Not so proprietary now, is it?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The game (and music and movie) industry is bizarre, deal with it. If the PS3 is fun and gets a sexy reputation, then people will buy it. If people think it's lame, then they won't buy it. I don't think the price has very much influence.
For me, the fact that they added "motion sensing" at the last minute sounds much more worrying for Sony. It sounds like they realized the Wii was going to beat the PS3 and they had to copy it. I think I will get a Wii, not because it's cheap, but because the controller has great potential for fun gameplay.
I have inside information from US Government (posting anonymously for obvious reasons) that the president is a moron. Oops, did I just reveal something I shouldn't have?
Can you moderate me up - informative - please?
Sorry, but you don't know what "proprietary" means. Proprietary means that the format is owned by someone, which it is. The fact that a bunch of big companies got together and formed an association doesn't change that fact.
proprietary
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend's house.
2. Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3. Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.
It all depends on which definition you're using. You are assuming definition #3. But it seems clear from the context that the article itself (written by Joystiq?) is using definition #2.
The point is Blu-Ray is no more proprietary than HD-DVD or even regular DVD. The fact that Joystiq used the word at all is implying that Blu-Ray is somehow proprietary in a way that those other formats are not. Otherwise, there'd be no reason to describe it in that manner - I mean the Xbox 360 is using the "proprietary" DVD format and it only costs $300-$400. So this is not a differential between these two systems, and implying that it is is at best biased reporting and at worst just plain incorrect.
It is almost definitely true that the BD drive is one reason why the PS3 is so expensive, but that's just because it's new technology. It's got nothing to do with it being proprietary or not.
I have inside information from Sony Electronic Entertainment (posting anonymously for obvious reasons) that Sony eats babies & kicks puppies. The PS3 will connect to just about all your devices in your house(HDTV, PC, fridge, toilet, etc) and deny you acess until you feed it $666.00 in quarters. It has also been revealed that Sony will force you at gun point to buy a PS3, and that the DRM fiasco was Sony's failed attempt to take over the world. I also know that slashbots will mod up any negitive anonymous shit as long as it fits the current agenda. Oops, did I just reveal something I shouldn't have? ;)
Yields this low would be a disaster. At this point we'd be reevaluating our wafer supply, going over our equipment for defects that would ruin the wafers, and going over our tests to make sure THEY actually worked.
Nobody really talks about it, but it appears that roughly 2/3 of processors actually work when the whole thing is done (counting wafer defects, test failures, assembly botches, and "DOA" burnin failures). This number varies with process size (60nm process would fit more processors onto a wafer than 90nm, thus increasing yield after wafer defects, increasing complexity and thus test failures and assembly errors (especially since pin count always goes up, always), and decreasing power requirements giving fewer burnouts at the lower power.)
A new video format that only allows for greater picture quality (with the max resolution of the best res HDTV 1080p) and movie length on a single disc. Thats no reason to upgrade from DVD's 480P, for life yo! What more do you want a new format to do? A dual layer blu-ray disc holds 50gigs and they've already gotten 8 layers working on the lab. Plus blu-ray has this new highly scratch resistant coating that appears to work really well.
I don't know about everyone else but I've been holding out on HDTV's simply because there wasn't much I could do with one. HD gaming and cinema changes all of that. Half the reason most HDTV's don't look so good in stores is that a good portion are playing on dvd's with 480 lines of resolution. About 40% of the HDTV's in sam's are getting an actual hdtv feed.
In summary a blu-ray drive will give you the following:
1) Longer Movie Runtime
2) Maxed out HDTV Resolution
3) Scratch resistant coating that will alleviate one of the biggest longevity issues with dvd's.
I'm not sure what more I could want with a new format.
Hmmm... Pie...
It's illegal now to play DVDs on a linux PC in the United States (except with distributions that pay licensing fees) because doing so requires a CSS crack. Blue Ray will be no different. Linux users will have to violate the US DMCA by using encryption cracking techniques to view the Blue Ray videos as they have always done. THIS, my dear sir, is the danger of proprietary software :-)
I came, I saw, She conquered.
Anyways, if the yields still suck on the graphics processor, one can easily imagine heads rolling at TSMC. I'm guessing the chipsets are Sony's own issue.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
The price of $600 is repeated endlessly, yet iit is false - the base PS3 is $500. The $600 model really only gets you HDMI, which you don't need to play games at 1080p and watch movies at 1080i. Why would you pay more to get less?
The price of $500 is already expensive enough that you can have good discussions around buy-in at that price, all without over-inflating figures and thus making the rest of what you say suspect. After all, if they can't even get the price right what are we supposed to think about other facts they are presenting? The article mentions the $500 prine in passing as watered-down, but does not explain how - given that lack of completeness I have to assume the rest of the research they have done is similarily half-assed as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Xbox 360 didn't sell on Ebay for $1000+ for more than ~2 weeks. The reason it was $1000 was that on the eve of the launch, people suddenly realized just how much demand exceeded supply, and people who just had to have one near launch would pay quite a bit. Yes, console manufacturers could increase the price for a while, but only while demand exceeds supply. But they don't raise prices while supply is still low, possibly because they don't want to upset potential buyers. Companies spend a lot on advertising just to get people to have a somewhat positive view of their product.
Can you think of a SINGLE technical reason to back HD-DVD over Blu-ray if you were Microsoft making that decision, BEYOND considering Sony to be competition?
I can think of a few off the top of my head:
1) HD-DVD drives are less expensive
2) HD-DVD has a mandatory managed copy requirement
3) HD-DVD doesn't have region coding
4) HD-DVD discs are less expensive to produce
5) HD-DVD discs can be produced with DVD9 content on one side and HD-DVD content on the other (ie: good upgrade story)
6) HD-DVD discs are more fault tolerant than blu-ray
7) Hi-def Movies don't need more than 25 of storage space with modern codecs
because doing so requires a CSS crack.
It requires a CSS license, but nobody wants to pay for one or release a binary-only player (which would go against the community's philosophies).
"Sufferin' succotash."
Another thing this article left out - the ballooning price of PS3 is also the result of ballooned R&D costs due to design incompetence and failure.
The original PS3 design called for 3 Cell processors and no GPU. Each Cell CPU was to have 1 logic unit and 8 SPE's, and graphics would be done in software mode. Sony ended up with egg on their face and had to run to nVidia to bail them out.
Originally nVidia was called in for "consultation" purposes, and both parties denied a GPU was in the works. But inevitably, Sony's lakluster design forced them to purchase nVidia's PC GPU to overcome the Cells graphical inability. Turning to nVidia costed Sony much more than they planned to spend, and buying the PC GPU's costed them even more.
To add insult to injury, low yields forced Sony to cut the SPE's down to 7 operational SPE's per Cell, and costs forced them to cut 2 Cell processors away completely. Now we have an over-engineered, overpriced, and underwheliming architecture. Don't let Soy's infalted numbers fool you, the X360 was brilliantly designed, PS3 was botched, so for all the hype and price, you pay 2x the money for the same quality system, and Sony loses assloads of money. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone (except nVidia, who will walk away from this with a really fat bank account.)
Let's not forget that Microsoft plans to bundle Halo III with 360 consoles, and launch competitively
launch them on the same day the PS3 launches.
If the $600 pricetag doesn't kill the PS3 all by itself, the competition will.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
They do now.http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526
Initially VHS moves were EXPENSIVE. 50-80 bucks in 1980-1984 dollars (Double that for now roughly). That's why rentals took off the way they did. Which is amusing because the only other format that used this window of opportunity to any degree was RCA's videodisc which - while about the same quality of VHS - was cheap to buy (20 bucks) and our household rented them for less than half the price people were renting VHS tapes.
They also took up less shelf space (depthwise - LP record bin style displaywise) that the selection was greater for a time. The players were also about a third or less the price of VHS and Beta rigs.
Once the price came down - and of course the ability to record also being a driving force - RCA's CED video disc crashed fast. It was pretty neat at the time. No "failure to rewind" fees was an amusing upsell at the time.
No, because the human ear doesn't have all that sensibility at 20 kHz. It needs to go down to -96 dB at around 1 kHz, which is the most sensitive range of the human ear.
Besides, that's not the way it's done. Digital audio today uses the "sigma-delta" (some people call it the "delta-sigma") technique, which oversamples the signal at several MHz. The system is designed so that the final filtering to eliminate aliasing, the only one that must be done in analog filters, is no more than 3 dB / octave, a simple RC filter will do. The conversion from the 44.1 kHz recorded on the CD to the final output sampling rate includes digital filtering to eliminate aliasing in that direction.