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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."
They wouldn't have had to spend over $1B on repairs and extend the warranty an extra 3 years for the XBox 360. Chances are, the 360 would be cutting a small profit by now. The moral of the story if the successor to the XBox 360 is to trounce Sony, is that they need to not cut corners if they want to exploit Sony's weakness. They'd better learn that because the PS3 is a very, very powerful system and when it hits $300 will be in the range that a lot of gamers will be willing to pay.
No. GPLDAN just used the word the wrong way. What he really meant was that while the absolute number of PS3s sold to customers are going up - more people buying than returning - the relative numbers (=market share) goes down, because the competitors keep outselling it.
What I'd like to know is the real install base of the three consoles. You know, not every Xbox360 sold is actually going to a new customer due to a so-called RROD phenomenon. Is there any good data to clear that up?