All SONY needs to do is reduce the manufacturing costs so they can do a drop the price to $249 / $299-$349. That would would be plenty to this year and it would help maintain current sales / keep PS3 relatively flat YoY. 

Cut wifi, cut bluetooth, cut USB, cut the HDD and remove the movie playback option of the bluray cause of the licenses..

I even save them money on their marketing:

One letter really makes that big of a difference? Those damn price per letter being so high.

While there are a lot of us who would love to see a cheaper version of the PS3 release - it just can't happen with offering 4-8gb of storage capacity.

At this point the only way we'll see a cheaper PS3 is when the 160gbs go down to $249 and the 320gbs go down to $299 etc. I'm not much of an analyst when it comes to things like this, but I imagine Sony will continue this trend.

i thnk sony should continue selling it at $299 for this year just to get healthy profit. Just look at the charts. all of the consoles are pretty much neck and neck. besides a $100 price cut would cause a bigger explosion than a $50 one. I expect a price cut in 2012.

Its too late now, they could have done that at launch.

So adopt Microsoft's bullshit strategy? To sell a useless console? The cheap 360 can't even hold Mass Effect 2, you're required to upgrade your HDD.

its not going to happen there are better chances of a new PS3 HW revision its the only way they can combat the hacking and i dont think any of those things you have mentioned would really drop the consoles manufacturing cost, blu ray drive has already been changed to a lower cost version with sonys cech 2001 sku

sonys strategy this gen has been to offer more than the comp blu ray, free online, no external power supply, and built in rechargeable batteries on all there controllers, doubt they'll change up now and use MSs strategy of a lower level console w/o a HDD ect.

sony will gain tons of market share this yr with exclusive SW releases like KZ3, socom, infamous2, resistance 3, the last guardian, twisted metal, motorstorm, uncharted 3 and at the very least a $50 cut to its already bang for the buck $299 160gb sku

the only thing i see em doing is changes to the current 160gb reduce sized cpu and gpu chip set and other miscellaneous things to get the cost down further or possibly a big change as we had from ps3 phat to slim with severe changes to its HW to combat hacking

Or play Halo: reach online.

Sony would have a big loss selling PS3 at $200.....initially.

If Sony can convince the consumers  to buy a overpriced HDD, there is a chance of even being able to profit.

Also the faster BD drive probably will not add to costs that much. I think that Sony only manufactures the slow ones to maintain all SKUs equal.

Games would be patched to not require HDD install.

Also giving the Plus! for 1 or 2 months would be a incentive to buy the HDD. 4GB is almost nothing.

Those HDDs would cost like $30 to make and they could sell for $100 or more.

But yeah, making patches could be impractical. Maybe it's too late.