Playstation 3 Soon Into Production 220
Roy van Rijn writes "According to Forbes, the Commercial Times reported that Taiwanese ASUSTeK Computer Inc. will be delivering PlayStation 3 consoles to Sony starting this month. The news comes amid concerns that Sony may not have enough Cell and RSX chips to meet production goals of 2 million units for launch. The report also states that, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd, also a Taiwanese company, will soon begin making the PlayStation 3 consoles for Sony too. Total monthly shipments from manufacturers are expected to be 200,000 units per month."
What? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this mean they're going to ramp up from 200k per month to 2m per month in the space of about two months? That sounds just a bit unbelievable to me.
-Erwos
Re:Don't do the math (Score:5, Interesting)
It was explained to me how yields are always pretty bad during the ramping up phase but once things get going the number of defects decrease dramatically. I don't recall the specific details or how long this phase lasts, but I'm not surprised that there would be problems leading up to actual production. That's kind of the point of this process, to identify as many problems as possible beforehand.
They may have problems early into the production run, but given the complexity of the PS3 I expect Sony will have numerous other issues to contend with beyond defective chips. I expect problems as bad, if not worse than the Xbox360's overheating power supply.
Two consoles providers? (Score:1, Interesting)
Assembly ramping (Score:1, Interesting)
Remember also that Asus is only one of the assemblers. Sony themselves is assembling, and Foxconn may be pulled in later. If Asus is assembling 200k in the month between June and July, Sony themselves could be doing the same number i.e. 400k. Which would make 1m/month total between all assemblers actually quite possible by Sept, assuming all goes to plan.
So much could happen to bottleneck the supply, and their rather ambitious targets, but this does sound like a great start. It's also much earlier than I expected (for comparison, MS started assembling 360s in September before its November launch).
Re:Don't do the math (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure there are die-hard, rabid, Playstation fanatics who would still buy one if the price was your first born. But if you look at the fact that Sony has always had lame launch titles, the PSP's consumer excitement around it's launch could be described as "apathetic" with the die hard fans camping out for a product that didn't even sell out.... Root kit lost a lot of fans... as did Sony's double talk arrogance and bad mouthing of their competition, and lets not forget the clear rip-offs of Nintendo's Wii-mote and Microsoft's Guide button, and perhaps most importantly THE PRICE. Heck the reason for the high price was because of the Blu-Ray drive, and reviews thus far have shown that HD-DVD is stomping all over Blu-Ray. HD-DVD has 2 layer discs (15gig per layer/30gig total) and uses the awesome VC-1 codec. Blu-Ray can't get good yields on dual layer discs and even single layer discs have yield problems forcing them to only be able to use 80% of it... ~20gig. Not to mention they're using the woefully outdated MPEG2 codec and most reviews have said that some of the movies DVD counterparts look better then the Blu-Ray versions.. Even early Blu-Ray players can only read single layer discs, so will the PS3 be stuck to only reading single layer discs as well? NOT GOOD FOR PS3 SALES particularly if Sony was banking on people buying it as a cheap Blu-Ray player. nobody wants another UMD movie format.
I think low yield might be the least of their problems. Every day I see more and more of the die-hard Playstation fans going from "of course I'm getting one" too "I'll wait and see" or in some cases "I decided to get an 360/Wii instead".
Heck you can tell how much the fan base has soured from the dramatically decreasing number of ignorant and belligerent fanboy comments to PS3 news.
Should be plenty (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That somewhat vacant hollow sound... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sony seems to forget that what made their past consoles so popular was because it appealed to the "casual gamer". People who were looking to get in at a reasonable price point and people who only bought one because it's what their friends had. A lot of people bought the PS2 because at the time it was a cheap DVD player. and while the PS3 might be a cheap Blu-Ray player it's still more expensive then the (now proven to be) superior HD-DVD players, not to mention neither next gen movie formats have met much excitement.
Aside from the Playstation name Sony is ignoring just about everything that made their past consoles so popular.
Re:Logic redundancy? (Score:2, Interesting)
The other issue that I am less informed of and have just heard traces of across the net is that there are too few blu diodes for the blu ray drive, any even if enough for the PS3, what about the players that need to be release on that ever further away date. No use releasing a new format with only a game mechine capable of playing the format. Yes the PS3 is cheaper than Sony's blu ray players (or any other from my knowledge) but the average consumer will certainly not see it in this way, it's a branding issue. Many people don't understand gaming and will dismiss it as a toy.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
Especially seeing that Sony could not remotely sell through 2 million units a month from just ONE of their suppliers.
Re:Logic redundancy? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Don't do the math (Score:2, Interesting)
Software sales are a lot better for the DS than the PSP and the system clearly trounces the PSP in Japan (other territories don't have as much consistent sales data tracking). Overall they're equal in the US, the DS wins by a few million units in Japan (gap widening) and noone knows what it's like in Europe. The software sales are the strangest bit, the DS is getting overproportionally more software sales than the PSP (or at least it gets titles into the top ten much more frequently).