| bonzobanana said: Tear down's have to be some of the most stupid things on the internet when they try to price components. It's so unbelievably moronic. We have no idea what contracts have been struck with Microsoft and Sony with their suppliers of components and assembly (foxconn). We do not know their R&D or marketing costs. We do not have info on the tax they are paying etc. We don't know the margins they are allowing. We do not have their transportation and shipping costs etc. |
Only if you interpret them wrong. They are purely a BOM estimate and don't attempt to cover things like R&D, transport, retailer margins. People seeing a BOM estimate of $388 for the ps4 and saying it's profitable for Sony are misunderstanding it, but that doesn't make the BOM wrong, just that is not what they think it is. things like processor cost are worked out based on the going rate for tsmc 28nm wafers (a known cost) and the die area of the gpu/cpu (a known size). Things like ram costs, hdd and blu-ray drives are also known (yes we don't know the contract details, but these parts are super low margin anyway and no matter what Sony or ms buying power is, they aren't going to sell them below cost). So the BOM cost is a reasonable measure of how expensive the materials alone are.
What is apparent is that the ddr3 vs gddr5 tradeoff hasn't saved them a lot of money. $18 all up, which is removed due to the higher other costs, most likely due to the physically larger mobo, casing and higher small component count. They will probably benefit more from die shrinks than Sony however, though with ddr4 coming soon, ddr3 costs may start to rise in the future (they've gone up ~25% this year). Will be interesting to see what happens.
