Good point. The prices might actually be going up because MS and Sony are hoarding all the 'cheap' chips for the same period launches.

LOL, yeah i hope everything will be fine . I rather have console war rather than epidemi war or virus war LOL. 

Obviously. And no shop I'm aware of sells stuff without a minimum margin (which depends on the kind of stuff being sold).

In short, not going into the intrinsic parts of the process, every good produced requires a certain markup to be profitable, all things considered. The markup heavily depends on the question "What does it take to sell the product?". That question includes about 1234 things people tend to overlook. Some examples: For Haute Couture, this markup is way above 1000%. For high end electronics and special equipment, it is several hundred %, for good clothes, it is around 80% (actually higher for cheap clothes), for bread and butter electronics, like toasters for example, it rarely reaches 30-50%. So the question is: where do consoles fall? As a rough guess, I'd say it is somewhere between 30% and 60%.

So if the bill of material alone is around $450 (I certainly doubt that Bloomberg article for reasons given before), a console would require a sales price in the $600-$700 region. That would be the fair price if the console had to stand on its own.

So if that $450 components only bill were true, even at $599 at your retailer's cashier, a console would sell at a loss to the manufacturer. There is a reason the regular price of a PS4 still is over $300 over here (outside of promotions),, that tells us mf costs still are around $200 (and Sony doesn't want to lose money on it).

The problem for Sony and MS is the question on just how much money they are willing to lose on their hardwares. The question is not whether they take a loss, the question is how much. From a corporate standpoint, both want to sell in the $600-$650 region, but both know the customers would not buy (even if that is a fair price). So they are both waiting for the other company to show its willingness for taking losses.

Often buyers will have written in to the contract that any cost savings made over the time of the contract are passed on, Sony and MS made sure of this after Nvidia continued to charge the same contract price making it hard for MS to use cost saving to cut the price, memory contracts I assume work a bit differently but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a contracted price that allows them to take advantage of any  price drops with the contract price being a ceiling.

You really need to fact check your information while PS is making great bank for Sony it's around 25% not half, its last few years have seen better results than when it was valued at 200+ billion in the late 1980's, the reason its market cap at 70 odd billion hasn't moved back toward that 200 billion range despite its turnaround is according to most experts because of its conglomerate structure it is seen to have too many moving parts so share price isunderperforming compared to its profitability.

Impossible, they cant sell you a console where you couldn't even install the game, basically they would never sell you a console where you couldn't play games on, the backlash would be too much and would hurt the brand name.

Sony has said before they wouldn't sell consoles at a loss anymore, I remember that from the beginning of current generation, so that wont happen.

They wont do it, I know Sony, they will rather lower the build quality than to take a loss.

They are not worried, people will move quicker from ps4 to ps5 than last time, this is a certainty, 100% sure it will happen. So they are not worried at all, the key thing this generation is backwards compatibility which will improve visuals and performance of current gen games.

The other key thing is, Microsoft did much worse this generation, so many will move to playstation this time around.

I will bet with anyone any kind of bet that sony will outsell the xbox series X, I am 100% sure.

They will rather lower build quality because they know for a fact that the general public doesn't care, how many of your friends have complained that the xbox X has a better cooling system and materials than the pro? Not many, that's why they know its wiser to just give us the cheapest materials possible, while maintaining profits. Bear in mind, materials are not just the plastic, for example the wiiU and xbox X have a better disc drive, by far, when you insert and remove a disc on those consoles its quiet and smooth, in the case of wiiU it even has a light when theres a disc inside, also pick up a wiiU and youll see the plastic is strong and firm, very unlike the playstation. The only time sony invested in quality materials was original ps3 and public complained because of the price, so they know for a fact that people prefer cheap rather than quality.

How many people complained that the original ps4 sounded like a jet taking off? Not many, so there you go, they will do it again.

There is no question at all here, Microsoft has shown they are willing to take a bit hit on hardware, just look at the xbox X for example. And Microsoft can actually afford to take a loss, Microsoft is worth over 1 trillion dollars, that's more than 15x the value of sony. If there is any gaming company capable of taking a huge loss is only Microsoft.

Microsoft will be smart, they will release a top of the range console for most likely 550 dollars, and other console for around 400-450 dollars.

The cheaper model will be close to the xbox X in power, the higher end console will be more powerful than the ps5. If they do not include the vapor cooling from the xbox X, it would mean they could easily give as the cheaper console at 400dollars, 500gb SSD, slightly weaker than ps5 but still enough for all games to look amazing, in fact the xbox X already has the power to make games look amazing if they were build from the ground up to those specs.

Lol, then you obviously don't know Sony.  They have taken a loss on every single console at launch.  Also, the PS4 feels like a quality built machine.  Not sure what machine you have been touching.  The noise is a problem for some users.  However, according to this article, Sony is putting in a high quality cooling method, so that shouldn't be a problem this time around.

As for your above comment on Xbox, if anything, this gen has proven that MS isn't looking to take a loss on HW.  If they wanted to, they could have launched the XBO for $399, too, even with Kinect.  Instead they didn't.  It also took them almost 7 months to lower it to match the PS4's price. This is around the time PS4's BOM dropped to the point Sony was making a profit on each console sold.  My guess is MS got the XBO's price to where they were at least breaking even at $399. Likewise, they could have easily launched the XSX at $399 to take on the Pro.  Instead, they didn't want to lose any money on it, so, again, released it for $499.

Remember, MS's $ =/= Xbox's money.  MS is not going to throw money down a hole to push HW.  Especially not when they are focusing on services.

My only reply would be that it doesn’t really matter how much a corporation is worth, that budgets do matter. Because a successful corporation Gets to where it is by not giving their money away. 

If the Series X matches PS5 at $499, they can make the pitch that for the same price you get more power. And then the $399 Lockhart console to undercut it.