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Breaking Down the Dropping Parts Cost for Sony's PS3
will_die writes "The people at iSuppli have taken apart an October 2008 version of the PlayStation 3 to create a bill of materials, along with providing a comparison to original PS3. The article provides information about the changes Sony has made. One of the big ones was that the hardware has gone from costing $690.23 to the current price of $448.73. This was done using a combination of removing parts (currently 2,820 vs. the original 4,048), cutting the cost of the CPU ($46.46 vs. $64.40), and cutting the cost of the graphics processor to $58.01 from $83.17."
Because the summary probably won't be fixed.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Here's an article from earlier this year that explains a lot of the problems. The article interviews a tester who worked at Microsoft and had some good first hand knowledge of what went wrong.
Hope that helps.
>Actually I just bought a brand new PS3 from Sony for $250.
I did the same exact thing last year for $299, got the 40GB model. I bought the PS3 mainly for the BluRay player.
I did not WANT a credit card out of the deal (even if it is a Chase card), but I read the fine print:
$100 off a PS3,
NO INTEREST 12 months..
AND no yearly card fee?
I paid off the PS3 early at 10 months, the card is blank, and soon to be canceled. I told others, but no one believed the terms and I know 3 people who paid full price anyways. Wacky..
I'm 31 and have been gaming since I was about 4 years old and got a knockoff Atari. I later transitioned to the NES and then SNES. I remember the Neo-Geo being all the rage because of the awesome 24 bit graphics (along with an insane price tag and games that cost as an entire SNES). I happily kept playing along on my consoles anyway, even still digging out the Atari for some good games despite the blocky graphics. Eventually, I switched from console gaming to PC gaming mostly due to the old AD&D CRPGs. By the time Doom 2 came out, I was gaming exclusively on the PC. I dual booted for a while until Loki came around and I got to play commercial games in Linux. To this day, I'm still content playing the games that run in Linux and I've watched a hundred games get hyped for months leading up to their release by Windows users and then forgotten a month later. It seems a lot of games are made to be consumed and most hardcore gamers need to get their fix by going from the current hyped game to the next hyped game as soon as the studios can rush them out.
I bought a Wii the week they came out and I've got 14 game sitting on my shelf. I play what I find fun, not what gets all the buzz. After all, I'm the only one that can truly determine my happiness because if I let others determine it for me, well, they're living my life, I'm not living my own. So yeah, I see the commercials for "HypedGame 7 only on PS360!" and yawn. Big deal. Remember how cool Assassin's Creed was going to be? Or the hype of Heavenly Sword and how that was going to launch the PS3 into the lead for this generation? When was the last time either of those games were even mentioned? I haven't played either and, you know what, I didn't miss them. They were hyped, summarily beaten in hours, and forgotten by the hardcores.
It kinda reminds me of my EverCrack days, where the hardcore guilds would do everything they could to conquer the content as fast as possible, meaning devs were always working on new content to keep the hardcores happy, bugs went unfixed and the less hardcore raiders (not to mention the purely casual gamers) were completely ignored. It got to the point where most of the people playing the game never got to see even half the content in the game all to keep the hardcore junkies hooked and needing a fix.
Taking that back to the broader video game subject, the hardcore gamers are just moving from one big budget game to the next with very few really good games out there... and I think that's exactly the opposite of where we need to be. Yes, contemporary graphics are a good thing, but should as much effort go into rendering a rippled water reflection in a fountain that you're going to spend a half second running by as developers put into making the game actually fun, memorable and replayable? If I want perfect reality, I'll look out my window. I play games to have fun. And that... is what Nintendo is trying to tap into, making gmaes that are fun for a lot of people rather than a 30 second "gee whiz, look at that!" for a few people. And you know what? That's fine by me... which is why I'll stick with my Wii instead of getting caught up in the hype of the next XBox3 game.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I don't think Microsoft wanted either format to gain critical mass - wide and early adoption is a threat to Microsoft's goal of 'services', including pay per view and digital downloads. Microsoft set HD video back by a year, that's all they got and that's all they wanted.
I worked on the HD DVD team back then, and we manifestly wanted HD DVD to win, and we invested quite a lot in it. However, we didn't bet the Xbox 360 on it the way Sony bet the PS3 on BD (which appears to have been a good choice from the console business perspective). In the end, Sony was willing pay to whatever cost it took for BD to win.
Our interest was much more in delivering great video experiences than in which particular substrate thickness of polycarbonate imaged with a blue-violet laser won in the end.
This is a sample of what I've been working on these days:
http://smoothhd.com/
Still pre-beta, but I don't think that optical media will be the hard or the interesting part of HD video delivery much longer.
My video compression blog