| MikeRox said: It only costs about $40-50 to put that memory on. If you can buy a 128gb SD card for £40 at retail (inc 20% tax, retailer cut, wholesale cut and shipping), there's no way it adds $100s to the cost of manufacturing |
You can't compare the prices of the cheapest SD-Cards to onboard memory. If a SD-card-manufacturer cuts corners and that model has a high failure rate, it doesn't hurt him much. Many cards will not be sent back, even if the failure is in the warranty... the rest he replaces (and the production costs will have sunk meanwhile).
Onboard memory has to be much more reliable, since the whole device has to be replaced, if it fails. And the customers expect higher transfer rates and less latency from onboard flash memory than from memory cards. Sure, these costs are way less than the the upcharges the private end-users have to pay. The last estimate of iSuppli is $30 for 64 GB and $60 for $128 GB onboard NAND flash memory:
But these are only the material costs, some others costs will add such as licensing costs (for used patents) and special taxes. For example, in Germany manufacturers have to pay a fee of €16 for every sold mobile device with a touchscreen and less than 8 GB memory. Mobile devices with a touchscreen and 8 GB or more are taxed with €36... so €20 more additional to the increase in manufacturing costs: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe
So Sony would have to price a 64GB-model at least $60 higher than the model with 0 or 1 GB internal memory, a 128-GB-model at least $90 higher than the model to not increasing their loss for every sold Vita. And even then, they would hurt their accessory sales. A 64-GB-model would probably be sold for $100 more than the 1GB-model, a 128-GB-model for at least $150 more than the 1GB-model... anything less could even hurt their smartphone and tablet prices:
"Why is the price difference between 1GB-Vita and 64GB-Vita only $60, but $200 between 16GB-Xperia Z2 and 64GB-Xperia Z2? It is the same NAND flash memory!" many customers would ask.
