Sony PlayStation3 Deadlines… Never Mind – You’ve Heard This Before
Talk about not shooting straight. After cutting prices to spur demand, already tight supplies of Sony’s (SNE - Annual Report) PlayStation 3 are getting even tighter. Can’t wait to hear their spin on this one.
Sony may not meet lowered PlayStation 3 targets after all (ArsTechnica)
Launch supplies of the PlayStation 3 may be even tighter than expected, as Sony again warns that production issues may keep it from hitting its revised target of 2 million PS3 shipments by the end of this calendar year. Last month, Sony cut its original 2006 calendar target of 4 million PS3s in half, while pledging to meet its original 6 million target by the end of March 2007.Sony’s revised plans included having 100,000 consoles available for the November 11 launch in Japan and another 400,000 for the North American launch six days later, but with production problems continuing, those targets are likely going to be difficult to meet.
Those pesky blue laser diodes used in the Blu-ray were the cause of last month’s announcement. At the time, Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi said that the issues had set PS3 production back by a month. “Clearly, we’ve had production issues,” Jack Tretton, co-chairman of SCE America, told Bloomberg yesterday, indicating that the problems continue.
And since gamers are much more… shall we say… vehement than the typical home theater buyer, High-Def Digest reports that the set-top DVD player has been delayed – presumably so those pesky lasers can be put into the PS3 rather than into stand-alone DVD players.
In what is fast becoming a regular occurrence, Sony has once again delayed the arrival of their first-gen BDP-S1 Blu-ray player, this time until the end of the 2006.
Originally expected to launch as far back as May, Sony has already postponed the arrival of the highly-anticipated deck numerous times.
As of last week, the Sony Style site had listed a mid- to late-October shipping date for the BDP-S1. The site now promises delivery by early December.
Can anyone say Betamax?
Disclosure: Author is long IShares MSCI Japan Index (EWJ) at time of publication.
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[...] Sony Says They Made the PS3 Too Expensive We have commented before on how Sony’s (SNE - Annual Report) tried to bite off more than they could chew with the PS3 gaming system. Now, a bizarre statement from one of their executives leads us to wonder what, exactly, they are thinking. According to ArsTechnica: In an interview with MTV, Sony executive Phil Harrison talked about the PlayStation 3 and where his company was planning on taking their latest game console.Harrison saved his most interesting comment for last. In discussing the future of the PS3, he stressed that developers are not currently using the machine to its full capacity. In fact, he stated that the current crop of games are using “less than half” of the machine’s power, and that “nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability.” Of course, it is common at the beginning of a new console’s life for games to not make full use of the power of the hardware: it takes some time for developers to learn the best tricks and techniques for squeezing every last bit of calculating power from any new platform. But to claim that nobody could ever make full use of the system’s power, ever, seems a bit hyperbolic. Some developers, at least, will be wanting to tap the full power of the Cell, such as IBM’s high-end customers in the HPC market. Some of this knowledge is bound to leak over to the game development world. [...]