mornelithe on 09 July 2014
| thismeintiel said: If a long time is 2-3 years, sure, it'll be a long time. And in reality, Sony cost of manufacturing is probably going to go down quicker than MS. While they will both benefit from AMD reducing the prices on their chip manufacturing, since MS needs far fewer chips because of lower sales, they will always have to pay a higher price per chip than Sony, even though MS is already using a cheaper GPU as their base. DDR3 probably isn't going to get much cheaper than it is, now. I've even heard some theorize that it may actually go up in price as more move towards GDDR5 and DDR4. Their largest savings will be if the ESRAM they are using drops in price. Of course, with so few using that design, I don't know how fast that will happen. Sony, on the other hand, gambled on GDDR5 and it's paid off. As more graphics cards switch to that type of RAM, the prices will begin to plummet. Also, the reverse of MS's situation, because of much higher sales, and therefore more units needed, Sony will pay a much lower price per unit. In the end, one will switch to $349 next year. Either Sony because manufacturing costs have dropped, and want to bring even more heat to MS. Or MS to try and stay competitive. In 2016/17, we will 100% see both consoles at $299. And once the PS4 reaches $299, look out. |
It's not a theory, it's how the market behaves everytime there's wide adoption of new memory technology, as demand shrinks, so does supply which makes prices go back up.
