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Sony Readying for Larger HDD PS3 ?
Bloomberg reports that Sony may be considering a new SKU for the PS3 with a larger hard drive. This follows closely on the heels of the announcement of the Xbox 360 Elite and the 120 gig Xbox HD. No other details are provided, in a story primarily about news of increased profits as PS3 sales continue to rise. " Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer targets an operating profit margin of 5 percent by March 2008, about double the current margin. Tokyo-based Sony confirmed today that it will only sell a more expensive version of its PlayStation 3 game console in North America, a strategy it adopted for the European market to bolster margins. 'Profit margin will probably exceed 5 percent if Sony doesn't lower the price of PlayStation 3,' Hitoshi Kuriyama, an analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. wrote in a report dated yesterday. He rates the stock a buy. Shares of Sony gained 28 percent this year, compared with a 0.8 percent advance in the Nikkei 225 Stock Average."
What's with the need to refer to different models as SKU? Do people think it makes them sound hip and informed?
Even the original article doesn't refer to this new model as an SKU. I'm not in the industry, I don't do marketing, and I don't run a store so please stop using the damn term.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why Sony is wasting their time on this. The hardware on the PS3 has *never* been the problem. Every complaint about the PS3 has been related to the games themselves and how there isn't really a single "killer app" for the system.
What's left to pull?
We know that the PS3 over in Europe already lost its PS2 hardware in favor of a software emulator for PS2 game backwards compatibility. It's only a matter of time before that change shows up in PS3s elsewhere. However, I would think the next things to go would be the useless card reader (really now, does ANYONE plan on using their PS3 as a photo album?) and the WiFi addon. Sony could charge separately for those while still keeping the price of the PS3 the same.
Furthermore, I'm confused by the article's insinuation that Sony could actually *change* the PS3's core specs by removing memory or cache. This isn't a generic PC we're talking about here. Games developed for consoles are very tightly tied to the underlying hardware. This allows them to get better performance because you don't have a full blown OS doing hardware abstraction. At best, such a change to the hardware like this would result in an unacceptable loss of performance in a game, and at worst, might prevent the game from working at all
This isn't even addressing the issue that the PS3 is already arguably starved for RAM, AND has a slower media drive on top of that.
If you are baffled by this acronym, as i was just moments ago, take a second to read this fantastic post.
Can we cut this shit already?