| shikamaru317 said: $37 was from the IHS cost breakdowns for PS4 and XB1 in 2013. It is an estimate, but likely a pretty accurate one, IHS tends to know their stuff when doing their technology cost breakdowns. IHS were the ones who determined that PS3 was selling for about a $200 loss in 2006. |
HD estimate - false
Ram estimate - false (again, if people only had looked at the spot market and drawn the correct conclusions...)
Kinect2 estimate - absolutely, laughably, unbelievably, moronically, stupenduously false. This line alone disqualified this company's entire guessing at that time. The least thing they could have done is to dissect a Kinect2 and ask semiconductor people what this and that chip likely costs, guesstimate R&D, and sum it all up - they apparently did none of that and simply used a "Oh it's prettier than Kinect1" line of pricing thought. Hint: Kinect2 was VERY expensive (this was actually confrmed by an MS engineer - I really should have saved that quote for eternity).
The reason for the huge loss on the PS3 is entirely due to recouping the investment in BR development (and building factories, paying out the inventor of the diode, bringing the experimental diodes that worked in the lab to mass manufacturing, etc, etc). The entire BR bill was offloaded to the console business (which was one of the very few divisions that made profit at the time, and actually required also the br diode - hence good excuse to do it). Recouping within a relatively short time (i.e. few years, not decade) frame drove the division into the deep red (there was something else happening in the PC/Laptop group that was offloaded into the console division which drove it even deeper into the red).
This is all history and this discussion had been beaten to death then, but apparently still nothing has changed since. Maybe some day someone onsite will write a good book about it..
Now your next question will be "If you are such a smartass and know it better, why don't you tell us the real numbers?". I can't because I have no idea how the cost of manufacturing a console translates into how much it costs to PRODUCE a console.
All I see is a flow of posters stating "If the BoM of material is $400, then they can sell it at $399 with a small loss". Complete nonsense, the BoM of a PS5/SX is just a piece of the cake called "The Product PS5/XS". And particularly at the start of a new cycle, there usually is a big gap between manufacturing something and producing something.
