ITWeek has an article about iSuppli, an electronics industry reasearch company, who recently acquired a new PS3 and took it apart so you don’t have to. The component cost for the $599 60GB PS3 according to iSuppli is around $840, which is going to lead to some serious losses for Sony until they can get their manufacturing costs down. Of course over time they will be able to recoup this cost through games sales, but it’s still rather eye opening that you are buying a piece of hardware $200 below the cost of the parts inside the box.
Andrew Rassweiler, a services manager and senior analyst at iSuppli described the PS3 as ‘an engineering masterpiece’, offering ‘the performance of a supercomputer at the price of an entry-level PC’.