"That’s quite a different picture than the firm painted after Sony came out with the PlayStation 3 in 2006, which then carried a list price of $599. A TechInsights teardown report at the time estimated the cost to Sony to build the console totaled more than $688, indicating it was losing about $88 per console shipped."


TechInsights with it's teardown of the the PS3 was an outlier with a much lower BoM than other analysts.


iSuppli and other analysts put the BoM cost of the PS3 at (~$840 for 60GB /$805 for 20GB) from November 2006, which means Sony is losing as much as $240 on each unit.

( http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/2237/playstation-3-initial-release-hardware-analysis-60gb20gb-teardown?from_rss=1 )

Different teardown firms do give different costs but TechInsights in the case of the PS3 was vastly different to others.

iSuppli has a PS4 teardown due mid December so we can compare then.

They never gave a number. They just said they expect a small loss and that purchasing a game would make up for that.  

Does the teardown include
Dualshock cost
Packaging
Shipping

I also note that the 100$ gross appears dependent on the Retail price not the wholesale price.

Possibly breaking even but more likely modest loss per console

Considering that it's on the record that the PS3s initial production costs were over $800, I'm going to call shenanigans on this articles figures. If they can't get numbers from 7 years ago correct, why should I believe they got Day 1 numbers correct?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Sales_and_production_costs

I've read plenty of articles that said 60$ loss

Poor Sony. If they lost $240 on my PS3 60GB console, they've never ever made a profit off of me this entire generation. I don't have enough 1st party games to cover that amount of money, no PS+, just one extra controller and no other accessoiries whatsoever. I also never replaced it with a Slim (because it never broke). Puts things into perspective, how on Earth they could've greenlit this is beyond me.

Good for Sony. Wonder when the manufacturing costs drop to a level that will allow them to cut the price. Can you imagine PS4 at 299 in 2 years or less?

Doubtful. A small loss is a decent start though. In two years it will be a small profit and with the attraction of Ps+ they'll make a solid profit this time around.

Can you link? I'm interested in reading as I never heard of this number.

Wrong news.

They forgot to count Dualshock 4 and taxes.