It's funny how sony defenders are saying that this is a real price cut, and then someone from Sony says it isn't. The Portuguese (also English?) saying "More papist than the pope" applies.

Well, I'm afraid of getting killed by Sony fanboys saying I'm manipulating the truth. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, you know?

And now Sony admits it... AFTER everyone gets falsely hyped up. 

Well, I guess you can only blame the people for being stupid and easily misinformed.

So you're expecting Sony to admit that in a few months time you will be able to buy the 80 gb at 500 dollars when they are selling you a 60 gb for 500 dollars now?

They would never come out in the open and say that until it's just about to happen.

Also, supposedly the PS3 is getting close to breaking even at this new 80 gb SKU with the throwing out of the emotion engine and the lowering of blu ray costs.

Anyone wanna bet that there will be a 500 dollar PS3 for the holidays? and it will likely be the 80 gb version lowered to that price...

I'm with ckmlb on his first sentence. Who knows what Sony is actually going to do.

Agreed, it's not surprising to me if that happens. But as Sony just confirmed, for now we'll have a stock clearance instead of a price cut.

Didn't they say 5.5 million shipped last time I checked??? Doesn't that mean there are nearly 2 MILLION(ok maybe 1.25-1.5mln in the US) available at $499? What do you want? Maybe Ken's blood, or first born that would do......

If it wasn't this you'd just b!tch about something else Sony related.

Also, don't you realize they CANNOT offer the 80gb at the same price as the 60gb right now(it would be even more confusing), AND when there are no more 60gb who'll bet me that the 80gb will assume that price? Considering the 80gb is "most likely" making money at $599 and in a few months it should be able to at $499 as well. Can anything Sony be positive anymore?

it's gonna be a long time before those 60 gig systems sell, especially when the 80 gig systems are also on the shelves. PS3 is only selling just over 200k a month WW the way it is, and about 80k a month in the US. Sales will increase, but the 80 gig system is gonna take a large chunk of the sales starting in august. It's gonna be quite a while at that rate.

What I expect to happen:

On August 1, 80 gb 600$ PS3 with Motorstorm comes out as a limted edition.

60 gb takes a few months to sell out, by like October it's gone.

This is followed by the end of the limited edition, and the 80 gb machine becomes the new 'low priced' 500 dollar sku.

Sony introduces a new special edition with more gb and another pack in game and probably a rumble controller at 600 dollars.

So for the holidays, Sony has one limited edition and one normal SKU again at 500 and 600 dollars.

They are going the way of the iPod with continually introducing a new PS3 at the high price and dropping the price of the older versions and getting them out there.

This allows them to improve manufacturing costs over and over and telling people there is a new PS3 version and also telling people there is now a price cut on the former version.

I'm going to take the "What do you want?" question as the main point of your post, and try to reply here:

What we want is a bit of coherency from Sony. Notice that it's possible to be a liar and coherent at the same time, but I think that at the moment, simply being coherent would be an improvement.

More specifically, I think that they should have either admitted that this was a stock clearance of the 60 GB model when announcing the price cut, or just shut up about it until they run out of stock (by which time they'll probably be ready to announce another "price drop" of the 80 GB to $499). The way they're running things, they're achieving four things:

1- Looking completely desperate 

2- Confusing their prospective customers

3- Helping their competitors burn them for this kind of decisions 

4- Helping the media make a stronger point about the misfortunes of the PS3 history