microsoft will respond.

it's a price war. 

I have a 360, and the Wii is the only other console with the games both present and in the immediate future to deserve a purchase from me. The PS3 could hit $299 tomorrow and i would still purchase a Wii instead. Of course this time next year, a $350 PS3 may start to look attractive.

How many here work at Sony and know exactly how much the PS3 costs to make? With a motherboard revision, the 40gb could save even more money for sony in the long term. Rumor is the 40gb drives they bought were literally dirt cheap because of the quantity they purchased them in. And as time goes on, it will continue to drop in manufacturing cost, that is the nature of high tech electronics and they can afford and sustain larger price drops immediately. Remember, Sony didn't really want to release the PS3 this early, but were pretty much forced to since they couldn't be 1 year after the Wii or 2 years after the 360 as they'd have had a huge mountain to climb to get into the console race.

I don't see a drop to $399 as a "jumping off the ship" or desperation move. I'm sure it's calculated and planned to happen like this. With the great games coming out in the coming months, Sony will be poised in a position to surge with sales and make an impact this holiday season.

If it is 399. Thats the part I really don't belive. The 60 gigs will be soon gone. Why not a 499 bundle? Besides look what I found:

Well less current means they save some power, maybe that costs range. It is some time since I had transmision hardware in my university, but doesn't mean higher noise that the signal is getting "worse"? That sounds to me like they have replaced in that new model the bluetooth and WiFi hardware with cheaper parts. If they just replace the 80 gig with one with cheaper hardware, well that would be quite bad.

So all this rumor about 40gig being $399, so the 80gig with spiderman 3 will be $499? What about the 60gig and 80gig w/motorstorm stock?

Maybe it'll be $20gig if any left over at $349.99, 40gig at $399.99, leftover 60gig at $449.99, 80gig w/ spidey 3 $499.99, 80gig (limited edition as they call it w/ motorstorm) $549.99.

That would be a lot of choices there. I doubt they will drop 80gig w/ motorstorm to $499.99 with an added Spidey 3 movie since they can't recall all the current ones.

60giga ==> disapear progressively, become 449$

80giga ==> 499$ alone

40 giga ==> 399$ (IF THIS IS TRUE !)

well the 40 gig might make sense to replace the 60 gig at the $500 price point, and it will be cheaper to produce than the 60 gig because of no EE. I just don't see them dropping the price already...again. Obviously once the 60 gig is gone they don't have a $500 system anymore, so they would either have to wait until basically every system is gone and lower the 80 gig to $500, or they could come out with a new SKU to replace the 60 gig.

Overall it's just terrible design though, they should never have had EE in the PS3 in the first place. I'm pretty sure that's the only reason why this 80 gig SKU is happening, and why this new SKU is neccessary.

Yea. Probably they will come out with 40gig at $399 first and wait till ALL the 60gigs are gone. the 80gig JUST came out in august, which is less than 2 months ago. If they release $499 80gig, a lot of people will be pissed. Unless they take out the Motorstorm and claim that it was "limited edition release" therefore the 80gig @ $499 will just be the system all by itself. Why wait till the 12th to announce. They should announce it today since it's start of the month.

One thing to consider (with all consoles) is the exchange rates ...

The US dollar is losing value as compared to most currencies around the world and has lost (in the past year) nearly 7% as compared to the Chineese Yuan; over the next couple of months it could continue losing at a similar rate (assuming the Chineese don't stop manipulating the exchange rate which would accelerate the US dollars losses). Being that many (most) of the components are being manufactured in China, the cost to manufacture a PS3 in American dollars is increasing ...

Completely eliminating the backwards compatibility with the PS2 means taking out the GS (Graphics Synthesizer, PS2's graphical chip), not the EE (PS2's CPU). The EE only exists in the 20 and 60 GB versions (except in Europe where it doesn't exist at all).

As far as I know, Sony has software for emulating the EE but not the GS, which is why totally removing backwards compatibility with the PS2 can save them some money. Last year, iSuppli estimated that the EE+GS combo cost them $27, so they can't be saving much money by eliminating the GS... It just shows how desperate they are to reduce costs.

So if this rumour is true, there'll exist:

- 20 and 60 GB American/Japanese PS3 with almost perfect PS2 backwards compatibility

- 80 GB American/Korean PS3 with software emulation for the PS2 EE CPU (same as above), but with the GS

- 40 GB American (and maybe more) PS3 with no EE nor GS (no PS2 backwards compatibility)


Yes, it's getting confusing ;)