Playstation 3 Price Drop soon?

No, from a materials and labor standpoint, they were losing money on the original machine. This has been confirmed by several independant sources that estimate such things.

TBH, I expect that if they are making money on consoles now, it's not much. The EE+GS removal can't save more than $100, since the PlayStation 2 only costs about that much; there could be glue components involved that inflated that price, but I don't remember reading about any when I looked at a teardown. You can get a nice card reader for about $30. The USB connectors cost less than $10. So for them to be making money on consoles, Cell and blue laser cost reduction and volume increases would need to reduce the cost by almost $200.

Well, if they were losing money on just parts/labor, then I guess the R&D had to be priced into the parts. If not then they were getting pummeled bad. I don't know what their cost allocation technique is, but cost allocation is why the government reports "200 dollar toilet seats" or whatever. They've allocated R&D and other indirect expenses down to each part, and inflated the cost associated to it much beyond the actual cost of that toilet seat or what have you.

You're not hearing me. Independent firms estimated the cost due only to parts and labor; they made a list of all the components and determined the price to assemble it at the current market rates. Surely the cost of developing the system is applied to game royalties.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/23/p...s-300-cheaper/

A good chunk of the R&D costs were from Intel's Cell processor and the blu-ray. I thought they'd developed their hardware, hence the talk about the R&D costs. The R&D is priced into the cell processor and the blu-ray drive I'm sure . I wonder if their "market rate" is with the discount sony would inevitably get from buying in such large quantities.

With all that being said, I'd assume that blu-ray drives and the cell processors have gotten quite a bit cheaper now. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to hit that $200 reduction in price between the blu-ray and the cell processor by now.

http://shopper.cnet.com/1770-5_9-0.h...q5628240023473

You can buy blu-ray players for close to 200 dollars now retail. That's $150 less than what it was at launch. I can guarantee that Sony's getting a material discount on even these prices. Although I guess the one in the ps3 could be higher quality? I can't seem to find any prices for the cell processor now though.

Actually, the price of the cell processor used in the original PS3 is $60 (and intel had nothing to do with its development). If you read the article from the link, the current BOM price of the PS3 is $447, as of December (and this is the model currently on the market).

I'm about due to get a PS3...

I was actually on track when my parents bought me a PS1 waaaay back in 1998. I had it for like 7 years and it finally broke down. By the time I got a PS2, it was 2 years shy of being updated to a PS3.

Ahh the good ol' days with games like Spyro and Frogger...