People here should be smart enough to understand why they only shipped 500k so I wont address that.
Now as for 360 hardware losses, it's really hard to tell, yet last 3Q they shipped 1.7m 360's and lost 402m, this time it was 500k/315m. I'm not sure what to make of that, but the fact they shipped less than 33% as many yet only narrowed their loss ~100m says to me 360 hardware is NOT the major contributor to their losses.
What is, I dunno, but I suspect a lot of crap like marketing expense for Zune and 360, a bunch of warranty costs, stuff like that.
I've been hearing stuff the last few months such as that MS is demanding 10% component cost reductions from their 360 suppliers every quarter (which adds up very quickly, 40% in a year), and so on. So there's no doubt in my mind they're pushing 360 cost reduction aggressively.
Plus I dont see what is so expensive about 360. I know the die sizes and what they cost on the PC front, it shouldn't be that much. There's nothing that expensive in 360 anymore, it's chips are not state of the art by PC standards at this time. Oh well, this makes me question when they will do a price cut, and also makes me think Sony is probably losing even more on PS3 than we know.
