Slimebeast said:
Do you mean Kinect 2 costs $150 or that each Xbone is initially sold at a $150 loss? If it's the latter I am shocked to learn of this. |
My initial guess (weeks ago) was that the tof chip in the Kinect2 costs around $250-$350. I have not been able to find out the exact technology they are using to manufacture the chips (which is not commercially available, it must be an in-house MS product). A tof size 500*400 was completely out of possibilities to manufacture even 2-3 years ago for the "usual suspects" (chip way, way, way too big). However, I assume that as more and more older lines have become obsolete and manufacturing migrated to 28/32/40/45/55nm even for "common" stuff, MS was able to buy an old line in the 65-130nm range to manufacture the 500*400 tof chip. Still tof chips are extremely complex dies and we don't know the pixel fault threshold MS allows for the chips (usually when you bought a tof chip in the past, you had to accept a certain (low) number of pixel defects, just as in the heydays of the first lcd-monitors).
If we apply worst case scenario, then it is $300 (XBox) + >=$300 Kinecct2 = >=$600 XBox One manufacturing costs for the initial runs.
