| ChichiriMuyo said: $10 for a DVD player, fine. Makes sense. $10 for a controller (since the HDD is supposedly $30) sounds low to me. $40 for a mobo, gpu, memory (but no CPU, since there's really no way it's that cheap) sounds low but believable $20 for the case, wireless for the controllers, psu, cords, fans, etc also sounds way low. |
The dvd components are actually much less. You can get a chassied SATA drive with many more components for $10 today. If retail is $10 what did it actually cost?
Silicon is currently about 1/2 the price it was in '07. It was 1/3 of the price back in March/April '09. Wafers are even cheaper thanks to the recession and increase competition.
The controller is plastic with a little bit of silicon, some led's and a wireless chip. The chip can be had from ADI for about $2-3 in bulk. TI, Linear and now MCHP also sells similar chips so tons of competition. Its even cheaper if you go to chinese manufaturers. The integration is done in a facory line designed specifically for the controller. Your only huge cost is set up and changes therein. Controllers never really change design so they progressively get cheaper over time. Chances are, controller now cost less than $10 to make not counting werehousing, and labor.
Mobo is a little more complex because it changes in design more often. Again your biggest cost is line setup and testing. Wafers are now extremely cheap and so are electronic components so once you nail it, the price declines rapidly over time.
GPU is going to be very cheap. So is memory. All you are buying is the chip that you are soldering onto your mobo above. At most, the GPU is probably $10 and memory is probably less than $3 for the raw 512 chip/s. The price doesnt go up because the manufacturing line is never shut down and your only fluctuation is the price of materials and labor. Prices only change if they are buying from the open market but console makers generally stick to one or two long term fab contracts.
I will give you the CPU argument but again, the price should be consistently decreasing. I cant imagine the CPU being more than $20 today.
