It would be a good ballpark for the upperbound though (as long as the specs are similar), but you have to find a few different sources. The large volume, OEM price cannot be more than the retail price.
Depends on the drive doesn't it and when sony made the contracts. I doubt sony orders them one at a time or even a thousand at a time. I'm sure they had delievery for qtr 4 production (slim production) before august and the prices they paid for the drives would have been settled back in june .
Also once again they are diffrent drives.
First of all, no one is using closeout pricing. Second, of course you can pick any drive off the internet and compare. Drives are commodities and the vast majority of parts used in different drives are identical.
Pricing old out dated models isn't closed out pricing ? No one has any clue why the drive is $50 as quoted . Or even why other 4x drives are going for 60-70.
I bet I could take apart a CD drive from 10 years ago and it will have an almost identical tray loading mechanism as a 16x DVD burner you can buy today. I'm sure a slot loading BD drive has a very similar if not identical mechanism to all the other slot loaders out there.
Perhaps but if you take apart a tray loading bluray player it wont be identical to a slot loading bluray player. As I've stated the avaliblity of them is extremely low. I've only seen one posted. Of course even in the oem ballpark they will comand a premium because they arne't widely used and may simply not be popular on the pc market.
As shifty said, the retail pricing is determined by supply and demand, and not by manufacturing cost, although nobody would sell drives for less than what they're costing to make obviously. There are many companies making tray drives for PC's, but very few slot drives in very few numbers, so they're naturally more expensive. This has nothing to do with the cost of the slot mechanism, but only market dynamics.
This is simply not true and you may wish to correct it . If a store is sitting on a bunch of older drives that are not selling they have only 1 course of action. Slash prices. If product still doesn't move they will continue to drop the price adn try to recoup as much of the value as possible. In pc world the 4x drives are old and out dated. You can now buy 6 and 8x drives . So of course the drives will be at rock bottom prices. You can't price a 4x drive at $80, $90 when a 8x drive is selling for $110.
LiteOn would love to sell 10 million BD-ROM drives a year, since PC drives aren't selling anywhere close to the number of PS3's. The fact that the PS3 drive is custom sized and slot loading isn't driving the manufacturing cost up, because when your custom drive is produced in higher quantities than all the standard drives, you realize economies of scale and make them cheaper.
The ps3 and ps3 slim use diffrent drives with diffrent dimensions yes ? So let me ask you when the supplier of drives got their first orders on the drives how many drives were already sold ? I will give you your answer ... none.
A new custom drive size , rated at a longer life cycle (because you can bet sony pays for more than a 30-90 day warrenty that an oem drive would come with at retail) will cost more than the oem drive on a standard line which most likely is producing bluray , dvd and cd drives.
Surely in the long run ps3 slim drives will be cheaper for sony than bulk oem drives, but that doesn't mean it will happen at launch. Which is what many of you are forgeting. This is the launch of a new system with new drives in these ps3 slims
I agree. Slot loading Bluray drives probably call for a premium because its a much smaller market for slot loading versus tray loading drives. A smaller market means a smaller supply and higher sales prices. I don't think the PS3 is affected by this because I doubt if any manufacturers has one line of BR drives slot or traying loading that are moving ~6-8 millon units in the latter half of 09.
If no one was producing the slot loaded drive at the dimensions sony wanted then someone would have to change their lines for it. I doubt most of these drives were made in the later half of 09. The things went on sale in the first week of sept. Which means the units were most li,kely made over the summer. The drives had to be done even before that . So your looking at drives that were made or at the very least pricing was set for the order back in qtr 1 of 2009. I know back in june a 4x bluray player was about $80 bucks at the low end(bought one for my sisters pc at college)
You guys are jumping on isupply but man considering people pay for their reports on this stuff I don't see why your all up in arms fighting them.
Pricing that was finalized earlier this year with non standard dimensons and a non standard interface (slot loading) and more durable than an oem (30 day warrenty) drive could easily have cost sony $60+ when they sat down with a supply and hashed it out Remember sony needed delievery of over 5 million of these drives.
