News Microsoft again makes losses with the new Xbox

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/11/28/microsoft_xbox_losses/

 

Slight mistake with the figures. $471 should be $470 and $470 should be $399! A little typo or summat!

Links Working for me!

 

and the links broken....

 

edit: stupid specofdust putting another post in the one thread and neglecting to put the correct post in the correct thread

 

sony have announced that the ps3 will cost no more than the xbox launch price, they announced this on the day of the xbox just to make anyone who bought one instead of a ps3 for price reasons regret their decision. they might make a bigger loss, but think of all the money that blu-ray will make them, along with the fact that it is basically pushing out hd dvd, the extra loss there will be made up by some1 buying mayb 4 blu-rays, or from a programming company using the blu-rays for their games. my money is on sony winning in all courts of play and are being very clever about this imo.

 

As many ppl have already said before, its VHS v Betamax all over again.

Betamax such a better media form, got pushed out by VHS as it was cheaper and more accessible.

Blu-ray IMO is a lot better than HD-DVD but is more expensive.

We'll see what happens, lets just hope it does go the same way as re-writeable DVDs have gone, RAM/R+W/R+-W/R-W its barmy!

Regards
GiGo

PS Xbox vs Playstation << dont give a crap! PCs will always be the way for me!

 

I'm curious as to where all the figures for the components come from. How can you be sure that an Xbox360 actually costs whatever they say it does?

Anyway as anyone knows, consoles are always sold at a loss... they're like printers, so the news that Microsoft is losing money on every Xbox sold is hardly surprising. The money has always been in the games (or the consumables).

 

Well, in comparing the production cost of the various units, we should keep in mind Sony's secret weapon for their PS3; they OWN the patents on Blu-Ray, so them incorporating it into their own machines would cost a lot less than it would for another company to use it. It's similar reasons why Nintendo isn't including DVD playback in the Revolution by default; players have a significant royalty that Nintendo apparently wishes to avoid. (it seems that there will be some form of "dongle" attachment for the machine you could buy seperately to enable DVD playback, at a cost of perhaps $30-50US)

At any rate, I'm not sure where they're getting their information. Those figures certainly seem to be a lot lower than they should. I'm not too certain on the costs of that hard drive, ($53US for a mobile hard drive using a SATA interface? Seems a bit low) and particularly for the memory. ($50US seems to be the difference between the 256MB and 512MB Radeon X1800XT, and yes, Samsung makes the GDDR3 for that, too, though it runs a bit faster) Lastly, I'm not sure if the price tag on that CPU is correct, let alone for the GPU. Such prices would suggest that IBM and ATi are getting unusually good yields from their fabs at the very least. One must remember that they don't do this work as charity; they're going to be making a profit off of the chips they sell Microsoft, even if MS doens't make one on the console itself.

 

Microsoft will be getting pretty hefty discounts from their suppliers and partners.

 

I think MS is just trying to push someone out of a market, but this time their usual tactics dont work, quite frankly I dont want a consol that is so powerful that I only have to wait 12 seconds for it to crash. Will MS have domination? I dont think they could discount it as much a SONY as sony will rake it in as it holds the patents. Losses? MS couldnt sell the XBox360 at the same profit margin a their software has, and so has to sell at a loss, would anyone be willing to pay $1000 for the newest console? Only if you could afford it. Consoles have to be affordable.
Just my 2cents

 

Indeed, but they won't be recieving discounts that will be putting ATi and IBM into the red; no way around it, they will demand an immediate profit on their chips. And in many ways, I suspect that Samsung, given their complete dominance in the specialty DRAM arena, really can't be convinced to lower their prices anymore; after all, the exact same chips (1.6ns GDDR3) that go into the Xbox 360 also goes into a great deal of modern video cards; buy, say, any video card that comes with its memory speed ranging from 1000MHz to 1200MHz, and that's the RAM it will use. (though I think 2.0ns memory can be used for 1000MHz speeds, I've found I've got 1.6ns RAM on my 1000MHz X800XT)

In other words, Samsung can control the prices any way it wants; there's no other way to get a large supply of GDDR3. However, I just realized that I may have made a mistake on the RAM speed for the Xbox 360; if it's 1400MHz, ignore my comment on the 1.6ns RAM; it would use 1.4ns RAM instead, which IS actually less used; it's on the standard 7800GTX, and possibly a few other cards, such as the upcomming Radeon X1600XT.