PlayStation 3 deemed a pricey bargain

November 17, 2006 The researchers at iSuppli have provided an extensive teardown analysis of Sony's new PlayStation 3, and they seem to be thoroughly impressed: "iSuppli Corp.'s dissection reveals the PlayStation 3 is an engineering masterpiece that sets a new high mark for computing price/performance--even when considering it is more expensive than its nearest rival, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft Corp." All of this performance comes at a great cost to Sony, however. iSuppli's analysis indicates that the Blu-ray drive, Cell processor and other components yield a total production cost of $805.85 for the 20 GB model and $840.35 for the 60GB model.  While it's quite common for hardware makers to lose money on gaming consoles, iSuppli still found Sony's loss per to be "remarkable, even for the video-game console business."

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