My bad, camera is officially not bundled. IGN was either wrong or out of context.

The APU in the XBox1 is significantly bigger its 3 Billion Transistors vs 5 Billion. But half of that 5 Billion is 32 MB Esram that is used to help the poor bandwith of the DDR3. PS4 went GDDR5 and was able to use more of their Transistor budget for Graphics computing ressources than XBone. But the Xbox1 Chip is HUGE and probably very expensive. Its a chip almost the size of a Titan GPU. So its not that surprising that the Xbox 1 is more expensive (also Kinect is really advanced technology and isnt cheap either).

Sony got very lucky that the GDDR5 Ram chips doubled their density in time for the PS4 to take advantage of that. In an alternate reality PS4 would have had just 4GB GDDR5 and still cost 399. MS wanted 8gb Ram very early and hat to chose DDR3 so they designed the APU around it. Microsoft was just unlucky.

Yes, the link earlier to Sony Japan is official as it comes.  Not included in this section:

Included PlayStation®4 system × 1
Wireless Controller (DUALSHOCK®4) × 1 
Mono headset × 1 
AC power cord × 1 
HDMI cable × 1 
USB cable × 1

And a price is given for each region.

<PlayStation®Camera > 
Product name PlayStation®Camera 
Color Jet Black 
Product code CUH-ZEY1 
Recommended retail price US$ 59, Canada$ 59, € 49, and £ 44 

Probably a difference in making up for R&D and future marketing budget. I'm sure the rumored production problems and higher tech camera (I'm assuming) also bring things a little closer than you'd expect.

I'm thinking now...

Can Sony do a bundle with Vita priced at $499? Or $549?

I hope so.

The ESRAM & Kinect offset any expensive components in PS4. Also, chip in XbOne is more custom and therefore more expensive.

Kinect is probably quite pricy plus the rumours suggested MS was having yield problems with the manufacturing of their APU due to the size of the ESRAM.

Sony one the other hand had a more conventional APU design that was cheaper to produce even though it had more powerful hardware.

I blame Kinect. As with Nintendo and the tablet, it's a high cost piece which is high-risk.

It's brilliant engineering by Sony and the PS4 is perfectly balanced to get most possible bang for your buck.

It's really mindblowing that they were able to design a system that is cheaper yet more powerful.

Standard console. >50% marketshare.

Kaz magic


... How come I'm the first to say it?