| drkohler said: You should be a little more careful about freely issuing such highly libeluous statements. Now granted, nobody at Sony takes your fanboy statements for anything else than lunatic rants so you are reasonably safe from a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer. However, that doesn't make them better in any way. Now here is some food for thought for you: 1. Current manufacturing costs for an XBox Arcade: around $240 2. Current manufacturing costs for other XBox models: around $270 3. Current manufacturing costs for a PS3: around $350 (All estimates +/- 5-10%. Any no and no again, I'm not going to tell you or any kid why I know these estimates are reasomanly close to the truth). In forums like these, there seems to be the general consensus that manufacturing costs go greatly down in time and particularly, people seem to be fond of the argument that a die shrink is the deus ex machina, the ultimate cost saviour that drives down costs in the hundreds of $. Now you should consider the following points before you pray these mantras: Manufacturing costs always increase on many levels - wages go up, raw material costs go up, taxes go up, transportation costs go up (shipping a container from continent A to B once was around $4000, now it is around $7000 just as an example), environment protection costs go up. A die shrink eventually reduces your costs typically by 30% in the end, but only AFTER the manufacturer has recouped the costs for exchanging the necessary machines. Also keep in mind that all consoles were designed with mass manufacturing processes right from the drawing board, so there are no magical cost saving changes involved at any time in the life of the consoles. Also it might be good to remind people of the difference between manufacturing costs and production costs, which even professional companies occationally seem to forget (there is this infamous table floating around that gives manufacturing costs of $850 for a PS3 - let me assure you that manufacturing a PS3 never cost more than $550 - ithey probably knew the production costs of around $850 for a PS3 and made a faulty manufacturing price breakdown table to get to this value).
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Unless you're privvy to some information im not, I do have to doubt your estimated costs, especially for the PS3. The PS3 has three large unknowables which make estimating its total cost difficult. As far as I am aware, there has been no statement that the RSX GPU I.P is owned by Sony, so at this point it is safe to presume that they pay a royalty of some sort to Nvidia. They also pay IBM to manufacture the Cell processor, as this isn't using a commodity type fabricator such as TSMC it makes it difficult/impossible to know how much they are charged for it. Lastly, they use XD-ram which is less important but one cannot simply look up a spot price for that particular technology.
Recently commodity prices have been falling rapidly. Transportation, plastic, metals, components, silicon prices are all coming down (Well at least once the contracts terminate). Over time as silicon manufacturing moves onto newer processes and yields improve the total cost of the silicon components do drop quite considerably. Take the less "fun" chips such as the scaler and south-bridges. IIRC Intel uses the 130nm process to make their chipsets, its cheaper to use an older process than to build newer capacity at the more expensive process nodes. So as say the GPU manufacturers transition onto TSMCs 55nm and 40nm nodes, I would expect Microsoft to pay less as the demand eases on the processes they use. So in effect the total cost does come down, but often not for the reasons people expect.
Tease.
