| FishyJoe said: 80gb drives are made in higher volume, so they could very well be priced lower at the OEM level. |
For a consumer ordering one or two disks at a time this may be true. But if you're ordering 3 million at a time, it is not.
If I had to guess -- and this would be pure speculation -- I would say that the manufacturing costs for 40GB and 80GB drives (laptop or desktop) would be approximately the same. There literally may be another platter involved with the 80GB production of a laptop drive, or perhaps a different process (perpendicular vs parrallel). If they can fit 80GB, or more, on a single laptop platter, then a 40GB version would have half, or less, of a usable platter when measured by area.
Either way, disks are very cheap to manufacture and would cost approximately the same. The biggest reason they'd go with a smaller disk is to denote an inferior product -- ie: the 80GB model > the 40GB model.
We can't judge a move like this until it actually happens. Financially, perhaps it may be a very high risk move for Sony. But Sony has been liquidating to make capital available to produce these bastards and sell them by the holiday. If they don't make the 40GB version available by the holiday, they may be giving the holiday to Microsoft which would be a significant event in this stage of the console war. If they release it and sales go through the roof during the holidays, it will have been successful regardless of how much money Sony loses in the short term.
