They stop selling the fat ps3 here in Australia 1 or 2 weeks b4 the slim announcement and after the slim was announced they still didn't sell any fat ps3's all they do is take pre orders for the slim which released today.....

Shipments are defined as recorded sales as defined by Sony. So it can indeed include units in Sony's inventory.

how is 500,000 sitting on store shelves hard to believe? Last time I checked there are hundreds if not thousands of Best Buy stores, thousands of Target Stores, thousands of Wall Mart stores across the US and Cananada not to mention many many more electronic stores that sell the PS3.

Look, in the past we've seen stock levels at above 1 million... 500,000 looks on the low side, and makes sense considering there are some shortages.

Have you stopped to consider how many stores and distributors there are in the world? If each of them has even a few PS3s, the total easily goes to hundreds of thousands or millions of PS3s waiting to be sold at every moment.

So you're saying you can't walk into your local Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Target, ect and see non-slim PS3's sitting on the shelves?

Because I know I can.

Hell I can find a whole bunch of them in one store not in mountain like before but still find them. Also isn't the 80gb model the only one being discontinued.

You should collect that $1200 check from Jack,

No, it can't. Sony defines it as sold to retailers. Sony can't lie to investers on their financial fiscal reports.

I bet Sony stuffed the channel a while back knowing that they wont make any more 80 GB models and not being 100% sure when the slim will be ready.

Like the big HMV in downtown Toronto still has 40 GB models in stock... Ill take it off their hands when they lower them to 199 but 249 is still too much considering 80 gb is same price.

I'm taking the words straight out of Sony's supplemental:

Beginning with Q1 FY07, the method of reporting hardware and software unit sales changed from production shipments to recorded sales