Well, they probably make a profit on the 160gb units.  Consumers pay $100 extra on what amounts to a negligible cost difference.  The game they toss in probably costs uner $4 to make, and the HDD is at most $10 more. They're probably making close to $30 per 160gb unit sold.

Of course, there's no reason to buy the 160gb unit unless you were planning to buy Uncharted for full price anyway, and decided to go for the larger HDD as well.  We haven't sold a 160gb unit at my store since the holidays.

It's a rather ambiguous answer from Sony. A pricecut somewhere down the line, with no exact number. I find it very hard to believe that Sony would sacrifice (a big part or all of) their moneysavings, just to expand their installbase by a couple million. That souns like a bad buisness practice. And one they can't really afford. The SCE needs to make back some money. At best i would expect a pricecut of 25$ - 50$.

Pressure from publishers makes it so that they can't afford not to.

At least the loss is a managable loss now. That's only 1 game and they start making money again. I still think they'll drop the price this fall but it probably won't be $100 unless they manage to drastically reduce the cost of the hardware. As someone else pointed out, the 45nm Cell isn't going to cover THAT much.

It'll probably be at about break-even price soon though, so they'll enjoy a bit of extra money for the rest of the year.

EDIT: @stephan (this was directed at you, but I think you just ignored it for some reason.)

it sounds like bad business practice because you don't know the numbers.

In statistics relating to business, you constantly take surveys on how much a person is willing to pay for a product and then you factor in price and costs and several other factors to determine the price which will make you the most money.

Right now, what makes them the most money is attachment. ie: software sales; Peoplecan't buy software without the hardware.

The price, in history, that consistently sells the most units is around 150-250$

At the moment, one of the biggest factors in their equation is cost. But when costs come down they can adapt the equation and find a new price point that makes the most money. This will invariably be a price cut.

EDIT: i do agree it will probably be a 50$ cut sometime next year, after ffxiii is released because they can make an awesome ps3 bundle and custom case and make some cash with that, then drop price 2-3 months later for christmas.

EDIT2: What some people are forgetting is that sony is losing 10-20% (too lazy to look it up) of the sales because of currency rates. So really, they are still losing close to 100$ per console.

@Staude

Maybe it's better to have (some) angry publishers, than lose to much money. There is no doubt that Sony will have to make tough decisions. Most likely they wll throw the publishers a bone of a 40$ a 50$ pricecut and recupe as many profits. That's the overall best solution.

Except there are a few problems with your posts.

If they go to 45nm much of the savings will be kept by IBM as they don't hold many of the patents and they sold the manufacturing facilities for the Cell. Also they don't use ceramic for chips, they use purified silicon.

As for a shrink, I don't think we'll see the PS3 slim, I think the PS3 was originally intended to be produced on the 65nm process and because they had to use the 90nm the extra heat caused them to need a new chassi design 45nm isn't far enough from the original design specifications. I suspect if they do a change, it will be to the original design specifications and probably make the chassi about the same size as the Xbox 360. Also smaller PSUs, heatsinks etc do not make for a smaller motherboard, but the main thing is actually the number of PCB layers they need to use rather than the physical size so switching to doubled up XD ram would be more of a saving here.

Lastly, much of their cost probably comes from licencing fees. They have to pay for the use of the RSX (Nvidia financial report claimed lower revenue due to fewer than expected PS3 sales) They have to pay $15 per player for Blu Ray, probably $5 or so for DVD and they have to pay for the memory controller and extra for the XD ram itself on top of paying another company for the Cell.

Any price cut that is supposed to help boost sales to 13 millions $ this year is going to have to be 100$.
300$ is a huge psychological number for consumers and keeping the price higher than that will most likely prevent Sony to reach its targets...

As for how much it will cost Sony, it is going to depend how much the move to 45mm is going to save them.

If they currently loose 40$/console I'm guessing at best they could introduce the new model with smaller chips, drop price by 100$ and end up still loosing 40-50$/unit after the cut......

Two things are clear from this. 

1. Price cut between now and end of March 31, 2010.

2. Price is expected to bring an extra 3 - 4 million new sales. (PS3 is tracking below last yr.. and in no way it can make 10 million this yr with the same price)

SO if they price cut between 1 Jan 2010 to 31 - Jan 2010 they will never make an extra 3 - 4 million. So the price cut is going to be this yr..

Secondly SCE definitely needs to make money but last interview i heard of Sir Howard Stringer, he said something along the lines that people are there to pick the price for each item. These days manufacturers can not dictate terms.. And with low sales they know people are not going to buy it.. So SCE have two option either keep loosing money on PS3 and also keep losing sales, games and customers or try to gain some extra customer more software sales and offset PS3 hardware loses through this way. I think they are going to take the second route.