That was a one time write off for the legacy component's

IE: no oled screen, no longer using the proprietary charging port  the new board and unit is lighter and smaller nm scale Soc. Price reductions on entire unit/ unit build for Now 4 year old Arm Holding Design Cortex A9 component's is very cheap to produce now.

The new vita components are far cheaper and with lower production numbers/month they are sure to be at profit. Due to their cost of Arm components inside the PS Vita platform that has far cheaper cheaper components inside for one the cost in scale would not be as much because A)/arm cortex A9 SOC is still ordered in mass volumes but not by just Sony, no retooling needed for it, nor the design because the same Soc GPU is also still ordered in mass volume due to it being a SGX543MP4+ which again is not just Sony only chip ordered.

That one time write off does exclude the currency older unit no doubt but as for the new PSVita and PS TV  i would doubt it being built and sold @ a loss and excluding the units from being @profit now, its very likely they are @ a profit/sell per unit basis.

Now.

PS3 is also profitable. Its not sold at loss. But PS3 lost $3 billion in its lifetime. You cant use individual units price. R & D and many other facts needs to be added.

Which ones has Amiibos again? That one clearly won from a profits standpoint. And a big budget title release standpoint (even if most were entirely on its 1st parties shoulders). It's not even really a question of which one was more profitable. Wii U.

I reread it. Your right it seems to point to no losses on units sold.

I'm not sure which is more successful/profitable but I'm surprised no one has mentioned the proprietary vita memory cards

Vita is maybe less of a relative failure as it's coming off of the PSP, which did well enough but wasn't a DS or Wii. The Wii U is part of a long legacy of Nintendo home platforms - 3 of the 6 being the top-selling console of their generations. I wouldn't call either of them a success, but I lament how poorly the Wii U is doing in contrast to its excellent library of 1st party games.

true. but i don't think the Wii U lost $3 billion in its lifetime. 

pricecuts?

Vita hardware has never been sold at a loss to my knowledge. Sony were very stubborn in maintaining the launch price of the system through the early years prioritising incurring losses as opposed to grabbing extra sales. Even if the hardware itself launched being sold at a loss, the Memory cards will have helped eat that up.

Vita software has a very high attach rate per system and Sony haven't really invested too much in the software for the system, particularly after 2013, so it has sold more software and Sony haven't had to foot the development of much of that software. They are just taking their cut from all the third party software releasing on the system.

I suspect Sony have done far better out of the Vita than many will think. And if they can now keep it simmering on third party releases as it currently is, with no need to launch a successor, by the time the last software has been released for the console, I suspect it'll have been a slow burner, but certainly not been a huge financial black hole in Sony's figures.

Sony have also had a very low key marketing strategy with Vita. I'd be surprised if the entire marketing spend for the system and software came to much more than individual marketing campaigns Nintendo has been doing for it's big titles like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon.

Objectively : 

WiiU more profitable on first party

Vita more profitable on third party and more successful obviously