PS3 Cost Breakdown, Aug issue Electronic Product.

[Sqrl]

wangfoo said:

Sqrl said:

That definitely helps, but it still seems a bit high to me ....

Maybe I just have completely unrealistic expectations but I would expect them to pay 10-15 for normal drives and 20-25 for laptop drives.

Bah whatever, not like there is any way to know for sure, it just stood out as a little wierd to me. Maybe sony is making a bit of cash and just doesn't want to tell us, nothing we can do about it either way...

You have unreasonable expecations. Lower prices happen because of two reasons - huge orders and lowered costs due to supply chain. That accounts for usually around 10-20 dollars at the most when you are very close to the general market selling cost, such as the market is for lower capacity hard drives.

 I was not saying their production cost should have come down on it by now, I am saying that it was never that high for them to begin with.  Small HD's like 20-80GB's have been down around these costs for a very very long time (even for laptops).  What you have to keep in mind is that if there isn't at least some margin for profit on these items, sites like newegg stop carrying the parts. And as you say, Sony's big orders coupled with cutting out the retail margin should be a sizeable break in price. 

In either case unless someone has numbers from reliable sources as to what sony pays for these HD's we won't have any facts to know what their costs really are. Its not a big deal in the scheme of things anyways, at the absolute most its like a $20-30 difference.