Cost of UHD Blu Ray - Is MS subsidizing Xbone S, or is Sony just milking it?

[Qwark]

mjk45 said:

JRPGfan said:

^ this.

The chip inside the normal PS4 is bigger than the one in the Xbox One.

So MS probably save abit of $ on the cpu+gpu, and choose to include a 4k blu-ray drive as insentive for people to get the weaker console (xbox one slim instead of a stronger PS4).

Sony's new PS4 Pro chip (cpu+gpu) is probably alot more expensive than the normal PS4s, so in order to keep it at 399$, they couldnt afford to include the 4k Blu-ray drive as well if they wanted to hit that price point.

What confuses me is the fact that some people have stated that the PS4 bluray, (not sure about the Xbox One) is one that can be upgraded to UHD by way of a firmware upgrade , is this true ? , because if it is it opens up a whole new can of worms. 

No it can't be updated via a firmware update. UHD uses 33gb per layer, while regular blu ray only uses 25gb per layer. The drives themselves are different, the best a PS4 could do is upscaling rregular blu ray discs to 4k. Like many players of €200- do.