$15 is a lot when discussing a non essential component for a systems which profit margins are probably less than $50. It could literally eat into half of all their hardware profits this holiday.

Anyway I'm glad for the consumer that Microsoft included a 4k Blu-ray drive for those in the market for one. Buying a standalone disk player in 2016 for hundreds of dollars is really bizzare lol

I just find it hard to imagine Netflix being concerned about Blu-ray. Physical media is not a threat to them any more. I mean this will kill 4k Bluray quicker but still...

Very true I just found it odd it's considered ok for him to create a thread to call out a member for something the OP can't even provide.  

Very likely the major part of those $15 is royalties for new encoders. The hardware itself only differs in the lens system (higher NA) and faster electronics which probably is a few $.

Standalone uhd players cost so much because there is no competition. I paid $300 for the first cheap China-built cd-player - then other Chinese joined the race.... The Slim reveal already dropped the price of uhd players by $100 over here

You need to differentiate between MB and mbit, the speeds you're referring to are mbit.

First: PS4 has a 6x blu-Ray drive, three times faster than the PS3, so it actually exceeds your 128mbit criteria, reaching theoretical peaks of 216mbit/s or 27MB of data throughput per second. 

Also, the standards for BdXL were established a year or two before the Ps4 came out. I would be incredibly surprised if Sony didn't include one of the newer BdXL capable drives in the Og ps4 as I'm sure they assumed that their first party titles would eventually max out the 50gb storage of the 'first gen' blu Ray discs.

Commonly if the b isn't capitalised, it refer to bits, although the M ususally is.

The only thing that makes me think that all ps4 don't have BDXL is The Nathan Drake Collection is 40.6GB. Would they have gone to all that effort if they could have just put it on a bigger disk?

Bdxl is more expensive than regular blu ray it is simple as that. I have never seen Sony using a disc bigger than 50gb and they have tried to get as close to the limit as possible. MS doesn't use them either and especially the halo games have huge first day patches for the SP. Even if the PS4 would be able to read those discs which also means the player needs to be able to read 128mbit as you please per second. On each layer and usually the third layer is slower than the first. But Sony mainly didn't include one because of the costs, but a regular blu ray player can't get a firmware update for UHD movies as they did for 3d blu ray.

Because the hardware is apparently to different, otherwise companies like LG, Philips and possibly Sony who earn a few royalties with every UHD blu ray sold would have done so already. I very much doubt Sony is plotting against a media format that they partly own although they are not releasing a player anytime soon.

To be fair these first players and especially the panasonic are not regular players. The UB900 has better blu ray playback quality then the panasonic bdt700 which launched 2 years before it with a price tag of €500. But it focuses on areas a console or pc doesn't care about.

For instance the sound quality, which is as clear as can be, while a console stuffs it trough the motherboard as fast as possible. A dedicated player upconverts chroma using awfully complex algorithms as for removal of unwanted noise jaggies etc. Surely UHD players are expensive but they are top of the line players that don't differ much from the top BD players out there from Sony, Samsung, Panny etc. I would even claim that brands as Marantz and Denon would have a hard time competing with the ub900. They are not making a 200 dollar player into a 700 one by changing it's drive and hdmi output. At worst a 600 one into a 700 one for the extra features.

If you don't own a good sound system (€1000 or preferably more) and an expensive TV (which is 4K, 10 bit and supports HDR 10) would wait for a cheaper player. But these players offer more value than most give them credit for.

But they aren't plotting against the blu Ray association, obviously. It would be more logical to assume that they wouldn't patch in UHD because it would bare the question, "then why the hell are we being charged a premium for UHD players when newer legacy drives are just patchable"? That's not a plot, that's a conflict of interest and one that would piss off the rest of the major tech giants involved in the creation of Blu Ray.

Anyway, there is extremely strong and compelling evidence that the PS4 can be UHD compatible. In fact the more I've looked into it the past few days the more I've come to see that this is not a hardware barrier for Sony, and that everyone's about to feel really dumb for jumping on this UHD bandwagon. I highly suggest you read these and hope that you stop asserting your opinions as fact, because you have done nothing to prove your argument. These links are from summer 2015. Please. Take a look. 

http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=1086342

http://m.neogaf.com/showpost.php?p=196028687&postcount=487

4K UHD is an ace in Sonys sleeve. They're waiting to play it. 

edit: also, the hardware is actually barely different at all d: same laser diode, main difference being codecs and read speed, the latter of which we now know the ps4 is fast enough to read 4K video. It boils down to a software solution needed for codecs (emulating h.265) applied via firmware. 

Sure they do. Last quarter they posted a 33% loss in hardware and gaming revenue dropped $152 million. They may hide the shipped and sold numbers, but they still mention the earnings.